Incubator PMC report for June 2026

The Apache Incubator is the entry path into the ASF for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the Foundation's efforts.

There are currently 28 podlings under incubation. In May, the Incubator made five releases, and some release votes are currently underway. There were one addition and no removals to IPMC membership.

Mailing list discussion focused primarily on release voting activity and two graduation discussions: an active discussion on graduating Apache Fluss, and the graduation discussion and vote for Apache Livy, which passed.

There was also substantial mentor and release-policy discussion during the month, covering a potential issue with GitHub releases, use of Docker Hub images, PyPI packages, and whether a dependencies file is required for non-bundled dependencies in source releases, and Incubator graduation requirements.

There was also continued discussion of MCP-based tooling for Incubator insights and ASF policy questions and a new Trademark MCP has been created. There was a discussion on using these tools to generate podling reports.

Baremaps was retired by IPMC vote in March 2026. Some post-retirement cleanup is still outstanding.

OpenServerless has been incubating for about two years and has not yet made an ASF release. The podling has responded to the IPMC's concerns. It reports continuous development across its subrepositories, has started adding committers who contributed useful work, and has begun moving toward a release. Separately, much of the podling's discussion has taken place on Discord rather than on the public dev list, and the podling has been asked to move project and technical discussion to the public list.

OzHera has not made an ASF release in over a year despite ongoing development. The project has been asked to outline the current status of release preparation, what is blocking the next release, and to address low mentor engagement across recent reporting periods. They were slow to respond, but are working on a new release.

Caldera engagement has improved since the concerns raised last cycle. The project is now active on its dev list with healthy development activity.

Casbin discussion has begun moving onto the dev list.

PouchDB has yet to correct the redirection of the legacy pouchdb.com site.

Toree has been incubating since December 2015. The project is on a new release candidate, but the going is slow.

The IPMC continues to monitor long-running podlings and will follow up on any community concerns as needed.

When submitted, Otava lacked a mentor sign-off, they have been reminded to sign off the report

Community

New IPMC members:

• Russell Spitzer

People who left the IPMC:

• none

New Podlings

• none

Podlings that failed to report, expected next month

• Pony Mail

Graduations

• Livy

The board has motions for the following:

• None

Releases

The following releases entered distribution during the month of May:

• Burr 0.42.0
• Fesod 2.0.2
• Fluss 0.9.1
• Otava 0.8.0
• Texera 1.1.0

IP Clearance

• Apache Arrow Erlang library
• Apache Arrow pyarrow-stubs

Legal / Trademarks

-N/A

Infrastructure

• N/A

Table of Contents

Auron
BifroMQ
Caldera
Casbin
Iggy
KIE
OpenServerless
Otava
OzHera
PouchDB

Auron

Auron accelerates Apache Spark SQL by providing an alternative vectorized execution layer implemented in Rust, enabling native performance while maintaining full Spark compatibility.

Auron has been incubating since 2025-08-05.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Increase public communication on dev@ and ensure all project decisions and planning are captured on the mailing list.
2. Grow the community and attract more contributors and users.
3. Enhance community diversity and sustainability.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No

How has the community developed since the last report?

Two new committers added: Shilun Fan and Shreyesh Arangath.

How has the project developed since the last report?

140 commits since the last report, including Flink integration with Kafka source and Calc operator conversion, native scan support for Iceberg and Hudi tables, the first native ORC write via InsertIntoHiveTable, new native functions and window functions, critical stability fixes for panics and NPEs, Spark 4.0/4.1 build compatibility, JNI-layer Spark decoupling, and a multi-version correctness testing framework.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2026-03-04

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2026-03-31

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, all the mentors are helpful and responsive on the community growth and project development.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes. The podling name "Auron" has been reviewed by the VP, Brand. We are not aware of any misuse by third parties.

Signed-off-by:

•  (auron) Becket Qin
  Comments: I agree that we can start to discuss the graduation of the project.
•  (auron) Calvin Kirs
  Comments: I think this podling is ready to graduate.
•  (auron) Hao Ding
  Comments:
•  (auron) Nicholas Jiang
  Comments: Current status is worth discussion of gradutation.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

BifroMQ

BifroMQ is a Java-based, high-performance, distributed MQTT broker with native multi-tenancy support, designed for large-scale connections and message delivery.

BifroMQ has been incubating since 2025-04-22.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Continue growing the contributor base outside the original team.

2. Encourage more user questions, feedback, and technical discussions to happen on the public dev mailing list.

3. Continue regular Apache releases and share release management work across more contributors.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Community activity continued on GitHub and the dev mailing list.

We are in the process of adding liaodongnian (GitHub: @liaodn) as a committer and PPMC member. He has been using BifroMQ in real deployments and has contributed issues, proposals, and patches.

The community also started public design discussions for Tenon, a BifroMQ satellite project intended to provide data flow and data integration capabilities around BifroMQ.

How has the project developed since the last report?

Development continued steadily on the main repository. A new satellite repository, incubator-bifromq-tenon, has been added.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2026-01-28

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

None so far. The vote to add liaodongnian (GitHub: @liaodn) as a committer and PPMC member has passed. The follow-up invitation and onboarding work is still in progress.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Our mentors have been helpful and responsive.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

BifroMQ trademark has been transferred to ASF. We are not aware of any third-party misuse of the BifroMQ name or brand.

Signed-off-by:

•  (bifromq) Christofer Dutz
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Xiangdong Huang
  Comments:
•  (bifromq) Calvin Kirs
  Comments: Great to see new PPMC member!
•  (bifromq) Penghui Li
  Comments: Great to see the project keep moving forward
•  (bifromq) Sheng Wu
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Caldera

Caldera provides a modular platform for modeling, scripting, and executing adversary behavior. It allows users to construct emulation plans, provides agents for communicating with the command and control server, and enables users to evaluate security detections in a structured, scalable, and repeatable way. With the use of plug- ins and community-contributed features, Caldera supports a range of use cases including adversary emulation, purple teaming, detection engineering, and continuous security validation. Using Caldera, defenders can emulate known threat actor behavior and perform other red team activity to evaluate their organization’s defensive capabilities, test analytics, and find detection gaps. As a modular tool based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Caldera is designed to be extensible, intelligence-driven, and automation-friendly.

Caldera has been incubating since 2025-12-19.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Community growth
2. Grow PPMC

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No.

How has the community developed since the last report?

Petitioned for new PPMC members and in process of vetting and voting on these folks

Github Stars has now crossed the 7,000 star mark.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The github repo has transferred and is available under /apache/caldera. The website is stood up and found at caldera.apache.org. 5 Pull Requests have been merged since last report.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

At Founding/Incubation

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

yes

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Working to update third-party references and branding references. Including documentation and website references as well as plugin repository mentions and references.

Signed-off-by:

•  (caldera) Kevin Ratnasekera
  Comments:
•  (caldera) Francis Chuang
  Comments: The team has made good progress with moving their git repository and website to the ASF.
•  (caldera) PJ Fanning
  Comments: Initial setup is not complete.
•  (caldera) Gordon King
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Casbin

Casbin is a powerful, efficient open-source access control framework that provides a unified, model-driven approach to authorization. Built on the PERM (Policy, Effect, Request, Matchers) metamodel and its domain-specific language (DSL), Casbin brings ACL, RBAC, and ABAC together under one model so that policies can be expressed flexibly and enforced at a fine-grained level. It offers high-performance enforcement and a broad multi-language ecosystem spanning Go, Java, Node.js, Python, .NET, C++, and Rust. Incubation at the Apache Software Foundation aims to make Casbin a community-driven, standardized authorization solution.

Casbin has been incubating since 2026-02-07.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Define an ASF-aligned release process and cut Casbin's first official Apache release.
2. Broaden the contributor base across organizations and keep moving day-to-day discussion onto the Apache mailing lists.
3. Finalize the transfer of domains and trademarks to the ASF.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• The Apache dev list (dev@casbin.apache.org) is now the project's primary channel: it carried 17 messages in May (29 in March, 20 in April), covering the incubation report cycle, dependency updates, and ASF infrastructure changes. Traffic has been lighter than the first weeks of incubation, reflecting a shift from setup work toward steady-state maintenance.
• GitHub stars on the main repository continued their slow, steady climb, reaching roughly 20.15k.
• Automated dependency maintenance (Dependabot) stayed active across several of the Node.js and core SDK repositories, keeping the ecosystem's dependencies current.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Prepared and circulated the project's first Apache Incubator monthly report for community review, establishing a regular reporting rhythm with the mentors and IPMC.
• Worked with ASF INFRA to roll out default branch protection rulesets across the project's repositories — a governance step that brings the repos in line with foundation practice.
• Carried out routine maintenance across the multi-language repositories. May was a deliberately quiet, housekeeping-focused month: 1 PR was merged and 2 issues were closed across the project, with the remaining activity being bot-driven dependency and infrastructure changes.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

No Apache release yet.

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2026-02-07

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, very helpful and responsive.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Name is approved: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/PODLINGNAMESEARCH-251

Signed-off-by:

•  (casbin) Hao Ding
  Comments:
•  (casbin) Huajie Wang
  Comments:
•  (casbin) Hulk Lin
  Comments:
•  (casbin) Jerry Shao
  Comments:
•  (casbin) Zili Chen
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

None

Iggy

Iggy is a high-performance, ultra-low latency and large-scale persistent message streaming platform written in Rust.

Iggy has been incubating since 2025-02-04.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Continue expanding the community
2. Increase the use of GitHub Discussions/Issues integrated with mailing lists

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

Lately, a lot of GitHub CI/CD issues. Hope ASF is actively looking into it.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• Discord members count ~700, new contributors writing proposals (discussions), submitting PRs for fixing issues, docs, enhancements.
• Github stars reached 4.3K+
• Crates downloads reached ~220K+
• 2 new committers have been added
• Presented at [Rust India 2026 conference](https://hasgeek.com/rustbangalore/rust-india-conference-2026/sub /building-apache-iggy-how-rust-powers-ultra-low-tai-Nh82Mb2cvJXmgH39Yaez8x)

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Released 0.8.0, a major release focused on architecture, clustering readiness, security, SDK maturity, connectors, and infrastructure.
• More than 300 commits since the last report (Mar 2026)
• Completed a wire protocol unification, removing redundant serialization paths and simplifying the protocol foundation.
• Added new zero-copy message primitives, improving the internal data path and preparing the project for higher-performance messaging workloads.
• Introduced iggy-server-ng, a new server binary that serves as the foundation for future cluster-ready Iggy deployments.
• Advanced VSR-based clustering, including shard routing, plane abstractions, WAL-backed client tracking, namespaced commit pipelines, deterministic simulator improvements, and persistent WAL journal support.
• Improved security and credential handling with user-header encryption, random JWT secret generation, SecretString usage, consensus header validation, and regression tests to prevent plaintext secret persistence.
• Fixed multiple reliability and correctness issues, including consumer offset handling, segment deletion behavior, hostname handling, CLI behavior, and connector runtime behavior.
• Expanded the SDK ecosystem with major improvements across Rust, C++, Java, C#, Go, Python, and Node.js clients, including better transport, TLS, async APIs, testing, and usability.
• Added new connectors for InfluxDB, MongoDB, and generic HTTP sinks, along with connector hot-reload support.
• Improved developer and operator experience through benchmark dashboard updates, Web UI enhancements, Helm chart improvements, and CLI usability fixes.
• Strengthened CI/CD and release quality, including parallel Rust testing, dependency-DAG-scoped test selection, broader Codecov coverage, hardened publish pipelines, Helm chart validation, binary artifact detection, typo checks, version bump tooling, and ASF GitHub Actions allowlist compliance.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other: Expanding Ecosystem

Date of last release:

2026-04-22

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

• 2026-05-11 [Krishna Vishal]
• 2026-05-22 [Atharva Lade]

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, very helpful and responsive.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

There are no known brand and naming issues as reported here. VP, Brand approved the project name.

Signed-off-by:

•  (iggy) Hao Ding
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Yonik Seeley
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Zili Chen
  Comments:
•  (iggy) Hulk Lin
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

JM - Sent an email to the project about CI/CD issues.

KIE

KIE (Knowledge is Everything) is a community of solutions and supporting tooling for knowledge engineering and process automation, focusing on events, rules, and workflows.

KIE has been incubating since 2023-01-13.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Finish the remaining Category X dependencies removal (progress made in 10.2)
2. Community building
3. More frequent releases

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

Not at the moment.

How has the community developed since the last report?

The community has agreed on a restructuring plan to simplify its codebase and contributions models in an attempt to attract new contributors and expedite releasing new versions more frequently to its existing user base.

How has the project developed since the last report?

10.2 was released on late April'26. That's the 3rd release since inception in Apache's incubation in 2023.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation (we believe we can seriously start looking into graduation efforts before EOY 2026)
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2026-04-29 (10.2.0)

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

2025-11-26

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors have been good so far. No issues.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

Yes

Signed-off-by:

•  (kie) Brian Proffitt
  Comments:
•  (kie) Claus Ibsen
  Comments:
•  (kie) Andrea Cosentino
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

OpenServerless

OpenServerless is an open source, cloud-agnostic, serverless platform. It offers a complete environment for serverless applications development, based on Kubernetes. With Apache OpenWhisk as its FaaS engine, it provides an unified developer experience with a plethora of services (SQL or noSQL databases, key-value stores, object storage, LLMs services, function schedulers) managed by the platform's core: the operator, along with tooling (the CLI) to simplify (and interact with) deployments, integrated ide and starter application and optimized runtimes integrated with the staters.

OpenServerless has been incubating since 2024-06-17.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Making releases
2. Growth of the community

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

How has the community developed since the last report?

How has the project developed since the last report?

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

XXXX-XX-XX

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

• Michele Manzani as a new committer (2026-05-14)

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

no answer

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

no answer

Signed-off-by:

•  (openserverless) Bertrand Delacrétaz
  Comments:
•  (openserverless) Enrico Olivelli
  Comments:
•  (openserverless) François Papon
  Comments: Making progress on the release process.
•  (openserverless) Jean-Baptiste Onofré
  Comments: I think we (the mentors) should be more involved in the podling to provide good practice and guideline (mailing list, community building, etc).
•  (openserverless) PJ Fanning
  Comments: Not enough use of the mailing lists still.

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

Otava

Otava, a command-line tool, written in Python, that detects statistically significant changes in time-series data stored either in databases or CSV files.

A typical use-case of Otava is as follows:

A set of performance tests is scheduled repeatedly, such as after each commit is pushed. The resulting metrics of the test runs are stored in a time series database (Graphite) or appended to CSV files. Otava is launched by a Jenkins/Cron job (or an operator) to analyze the recorded metrics regularly. Otava notifies about significant changes in recorded metrics by outputting text reports or sending Slack notifications. Otava is capable of finding even small, but persistent shifts in metric values, despite noise in data. It adapts automatically to the level of noise in data and tries to notify only about persistent, statistically significant changes, be it in the system under test or in the environment.

Otava has been incubating since 2024-11-27. Otava entered Incubation as Hunter

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Establish frequent releases as a routine, repeatable process
2. Improve documentation to lower the entry barrier for users and contributors.
3. Define and document the desired long-term architecture. The goals of the long-term architecture are: a. Modularity: Keep the core library lightweight while making external dependencies (data sources and notification channels) pluggable. b. API stabilization: Clearly define and stabilize public interfaces prior to a 1.0.0 release.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

No.

How has the community developed since the last report?

• Denis Shchepakin was elected as a PPMC member (announced on dev@ in March 2026).
• 6 new external contributors opened PRs in the project.
• We started a new helper project: https://github.com/apache/otava-playground. This project contains test data generators and visualization that can be used to compare Otava EDivisive against several other formulas and heuristics often used for change detection. We are also using it to compare different variants of Otava itself.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• The project made the most significant release since the incubation started - 0.8.0-incubating. In this release, Apache Otava supports Python versions 3.10-3.14. Starting with this release, Otava aims to support all actively supported Python versions. That was possible thanks to a core algorithm rewrite.
• Release process documentation has been improved based on feedback from 0.8.0-incubating.
• There are active discussions between PPMCs and external contributors about further core algorithm improvements.
• There is an ongoing refactoring work for internal data structures. This is a prerequisite to officially supporting public Python API.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Same slow positive trend in community building, but not yet nearing graduation.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2026-05-08

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

Denis Shchepakin was elected as a PPMC member in March 2026.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

no answer

Signed-off-by:

•  (otava) Dave Fisher
  Comments:
•  (otava) Enrico Olivelli
  Comments:
•  (otava) Lari Hotari
  Comments:
•  (otava) Mick Semb Wever
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

OzHera

OzHera is an application observation platform (APM) in the era of cloud native, with the application as its core, integrating capabilities such as metric monitoring, trace tracking, logging, and alerting

OzHera has been incubating since 2024-07-11.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Complete the next Apache release and improve the release process.
2. Grow the contributor base and elect more committers/PPMC members.
3. Move more design, release, and community discussions to the public dev mailing list.

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

The project is preparing the next Apache release in early June. The release has not been completed yet. The community is reviewing the remaining release blockers and will work with mentors to complete the release process.

How has the community developed since the last report?

The community continued development and code review on GitHub. Several contributors participated in recent pull requests, including work on log stream processing, Agent interfaces, permission checks, configuration delivery, and stability improvements.

One new committer was elected in April 2026.

The project will continue to encourage more technical discussions, release planning, and community decisions to happen on the public dev mailing list.

How has the project developed since the last report?

The project continued to improve observability features and stability. Recent development work includes:

1. Improved log stream processing, including OpenCLAW log path parsing, null pointer checks, trace application log retrieval, and handling of truncated log content.
2. Added and improved Agent-related interfaces, including new interfaces that the Agent can call and better request validation for valid JSON payloads.
3. Improved permission and configuration support, including space/store permission checks, configuration parameter support, and a sending frequency limit function.
4. Optimized Agent channel lookup by prioritizing IP-based lookup.
5. Improved log processing and configuration delivery logic.
6. Fixed smaller issues such as PromQL naming corrections, Redis import path fixes, and other stability improvements.

The last release was v2.2.5-incubating on 2025-03-26. The community is preparing the next Apache release in early June. The release has not been completed yet.dev mailing list

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

2025-03-26

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

One new committer was elected in April 2026.

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Yes, mentors have been helpful and responsive. The project will ask mentors to review the release plan and help with the next Apache release.

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

The PPMC is working on this and will continue to review the website, documentation, repository, and release materials for Apache branding and trademark requirements.

Signed-off-by:

•  (ozhera) Yu Xiao
  Comments:
•  (ozhera) Yu Li
  Comments: It's good to see a new committer join the project. However, the absence of a release for over two months is concerning. Look forward to a detailed and actionable plan for the next release.
•  (ozhera) Kevin Ratnasekera
  Comments:
•  (ozhera) Duo Zhang
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes:

PouchDB

PouchDB is an open-source JavaScript database inspired by Apache CouchDB that is designed to run well within the browser.

PouchDB has been incubating since 2025-04-15.

Three most important unfinished issues to address before graduating:

1. Making a release
2. Adding contributors
3. Finish infrastructure migration

Are there any issues that the IPMC or ASF Board need to be aware of?

There is no “issue” per-se, but we want to highlight that we have made slow progress on knocking down incubation progress in favour of advancing the project and its infrastructure a bit more before going after next steps.

See project development section for details.

How has the community developed since the last report?

We continue receiving non-committer contributions, albeit at a slightly slower pace than last quarter, as that had a boost due to STA funding. The current pace is more in line with pre-ASF project momentum. Candidates for committership are emerging and we’ll start those processes when appropriate.

How has the project developed since the last report?

• Added major features in preparation for a new feature release.

• Revamped the website onto a modern website toolkit and migrating towards ASF-policy-friendly hosting with additional major docs feature of versioning nearly ready for shipping.

• h/t to ASF infra for helping move this forward

• Started roadmap discussions for next few releases as we have to deprecate some legacy parts of PouchDB while making sure all users have a smooth migration path.

How would you assess the podling's maturity?

Please feel free to add your own commentary.

•  Initial setup
•  Working towards first release
•  Community building
•  Nearing graduation
•  Other:

Date of last release:

n/a

When were the last committers or PPMC members elected?

January 28th 2026

Have your mentors been helpful and responsive?

Mentors continue to be active and helpful

Is the PPMC managing the podling's brand / trademarks?

PPMC have not yet requested a Podling Suitable Names Search

Signed-off-by:

•  (pouchdb) JB Onofre
  Comments: Still ramping up but progress.
•  (pouchdb) PJ Fanning
  Comments:

IPMC/Shepherd notes: