And new opportunities for the Drupal community?

Effective today, I (Andrea) have become an officer of the Apache Software Foundation, in my new role as Vice President for the Apache OpenOffice (commonly known as "OpenOffice") project.

This doesn't change much in my daily activity as director of Nuvole. I have been involved in the OpenOffice project for several years, starting much earlier than Drupal became a mainstream project. It has been and it will continue to be a volunteer activity, even though it will definitely happen that I attend more Apache events in the near future.

That said, this might be an occasion for the Drupal community to take a closer look at the Apache Software Foundation and its projects.

Even though there are still many people who identify Apache with its ubiquitous Apache HTTP server, the Apache Software Foundation is much larger than that: it is a huge, not-for-profit organization developing around 150 free and open source projects for the public good.

There are interesting opportunities for cooperation between Drupal and Apache projects: Apache Solr, for example, has already become a standard topic at Drupal events; Apache POI, Apache Tika and Apache PDFBox can extract text and metadata from Office or PDF documents and make them search-friendly, with initial work towards Drupal integration; Apache Traffic Server is a caching server with Drupal support. The incubating Apache OpenMeetings project has a module for Drupal integration too.

The Apache OpenOffice project itself maintains two old but functional Drupal sites for hosting its Extensions and Templates, that were recently relocated to SourceForge with technical advice from Nuvole; and sooner or later it will have to consider a deeper integration with Web technologies...

We at Nuvole are looking forward to exploring opportunities for cross-project collaboration, and the ApacheCon 2012 in Germany next month might be a nice occasion for brainstorming. If you have ideas to share, please do so in the comments below.

Tags: Apache, Drupal PlanetImage: