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Apache reference: http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#structure
Roles
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One of the major differences between Apache and Sakai is the need to produce a single distribution of Sakai, integrating across projects. It is important to realize that the two phases described above are often done by different organizations in many open source projects. In Sakai we do both activities in the same organization. In a way, Sakai is both the Linux project and Red Hat in the same organization.
This leads to several important Sakai Foundation roles in the Sakai project that have no direct analogues in the Apache project.
Sakai Project Coordinator
The primary goal of the Sakai Foundation Project Coordinator is to track community activity across projects and help different activities work best with each other and work best with the community. The PC is expected to be a single point of contact about "who is doing what" in the Sakai community.
The PC actively tracks and communicates community and foundation activity through all phases of software development. The PC is lightly involved in nearly every aspect of Sakai.
The project Coordinator is responsible for a regular report (preferably online and continuously updated) that all members of the community can review.
Sakai Release Manager
The primary purpose of the Sakai Foundation Release Manager is to produce a high quality distribution of Sakai in a timely manner. The Release Manager has very specific responsibilities when Sakai is preparing a release. Once integration week begins and the release process is underway, pretty much the Release Manager (and her release team) is in charge of the process and will make decisions as necessary to produce a quality release on time.
The release team looks at outstanding bugs and decides which bugs are important to be fixes for the release. The team works with the projects to get these bugs fixed in a timely manner. During this period the Release Manager is really making "demands" on project teams during the release process. If these demands are not met, then the respective project's software contribution will probably not be included in the current release. This is about as close as Sakai gets to "issuing orders".
However even in the release process, aspects are loosely coupled. The release manager cannot override the decisions of a project's PMC. The only recourse that the Release Manager has if the PMC does not respond to the Release Manager's request is to either drop that project from the release, include a previous version of that project, or include the product in the release in provisional form.
Once the release is completed, the project switches back to normal development mode and the Release Manager focuses on the maintenance branches for the release. The Release Manager continues to work with the projects identifying bugs, getting the fixes to the bugs, seeing that those fixes are aggregated into a maintenance release, and then properly tested and released.
The Release Manager will produce a report for each major release summarizing what was done for the release, any major issues with the release, and any outstanding problems identified during the release that we would need to address in the future.
QA Director
The primary responsibility of the Sakai Foundation QA Director is to insure the overall quality of the Sakai product over time. The QA Director manages and coordinates the volunteer QA efforts for each of the Sakai releases.
The QA Director also assesses Sakai's overall systems and approaches to delivering a quality product, makes changes to the QA process that she can, and provides recommendations to the community as to how processes can be improved which will result in overall quality being improved.
The QA director will produce a report for each major release summarizing the major QA activities for the release and identifying any outstanding issues that will need addressing going forward.
Roles Within Project
The Chief Architect, Project Coordinator, Release Manager, and QA director are the cross-project roles and as such there are no equivalent roles to be found in the Apache Foundation. Within a Sakai project, however, the structure and terminology is identical to the Apache Foundation.
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