Description

It is with great pleasure that I outline my personal contributions to the Python community. Additionally I will provide an overview of the merits that I believe I could bring to the PSF as 2017 member of the Board of Directors.

I began using Python as a staffer at Obama for America and continued to use Python as a political analyst. With over 9 years experience using Python, namely in the space of supporting a data science team and historically in civic tech, Python has been a constant tool in my professional tool belt.

As a Python organizer my career began when I founded the PyLadies Chicago chapter over two years ago. Since then I’ve acted as the lead organizer helping:

• grow the PyLadies Chicago community to over 700 MeetUp members on MeetUp
• organize over 50 events since our start
• average 3 events every 2 months

PyLadies Chicago has been a rich and rewarding experience as the continued recruitment for women in technical communities, such as Python, is one of my top priorities. As a Latina and a woman I believe it is instrumental we continue to advance this cause but more importantly to continue to advance it on a global scale.

2016/2017 PSF Community Contributions

• Attended 16 of 17 meetings (3 by proxy)
• Represented PSF and Spoke at Python Jamaica (November 2016)
• Co-delivered PSF Update at EuroPython 2016 with Naomi Ceder
• PSF Communications Co-Chair, Overseeing Blog
• Assisted in the hiring of 2 new PSF Bloggers
• Authored 2 PSF Blog Articles
• Interviewed about the PSF in several capacities, for example: ZimboPy April 2017 Interview, Podcast Interviews (e.g. Python.__init__)
• Spearheaded the start of the PyCon Organizers Manual
• Participate in the creation of the PSF Code of Conduct Working Group Charter (ongoing)

One major way I've attempted to support the PSF has been through active outreach explaining who the PSF is and what the PSF does. When possible I attempt to be present in person, if not, then remotely. For example when I represented the PSF at Python Jamaica many of the conversations with attendees I had led to the start of the PyCon Organizers Manual. I continue to dedicate myself to on-site support with Python Day Mexico in June 2017, where I will be speaking as well as offering an update on the PSF in Spanish. Other regional communities I have been working with remotely include Zimbabwe with ZimboPy and Cuba with their upcoming Latin America Scientific Python Conference in September 2017.

Python Community Contributions

• Speak about Python in several capacities, see my website under Speaking and Press contributions. Examples include: Language Track - Python GOTO Conference Chicago May 2017 and Open SourceCraft Podcast .
• Organize PyLadies speakers at ChiPy (Chicago Python User Group) April 2017 meeting.
• PyLadies PyCon Booth Volunteer (2016, 2017)
• PyLadies Auctioneer at PyCon (2017)
• Young Coders: IO PyCon Teaching Assistant (2017)
• Python Day Mexico City Speaker June 2017 including a lightning talk on PSF in Spanish
• O'Reilly's published adaptation of 'Hitchhiker's Guide to Python', Technical Editor
• Django Girls Chicago, Lead Organizer (2015, 2016)
• Django Girls Mentor at Django Girls Budapest at DjangoCon Europe (March 2015), Django Girls Bilbao at EuroPython (July 2016), Django Girls Chicago (December 2016)
• Participated in PyCon USA Sprints 2017 for PyVideo

2017/2018 Goals as a Board Member

My goals for 2017/2018 as a board member can be largely defined through the lens of organizational building, continued and better informed outreach, and promoting diversity:

• Promote diversity: Reviving PyLadies Conference & Growing PSF Blog: Something that hasn’t come to fruition has been the inaugural PyLadies Conference. Regrettably organizing hiccups prevented the PyLadies Conference from happening in 2016, it is my intent to help spearhead this conference (I'll be proposing my name as a chair) and see that it becomes a reality in late 2017/early 2018. Additionally I want to include new voices on the blogging team, notably targeting Pythonistas from outside the United States, more than the number we added in 2016. I want to work with the PyLadies blog ensuring new content is added to it frequently and investigate the opportunities of highlighting PyLadies content in the PSF blog.
• Establish Python Organizers GitHub group and develop organizing documentation for Python organizers: This will primarily mean the continued work on the PyCon Organizers Manual, adding this as one project for a proposed Python Organizer GitHub working group. Developing a standalone Python Organizers GitHub group will help the PSF consider what sub-projects the organizing community may want, providing initial support to get those off the ground. In regards the PyCon Organizer Manual, my goal is to have flushed out content with names represented in each regional chapter of organizers that are willing to work on the document and speak with others about their work. It may be beneficial to consider translation opportunities for this document as well so targeting individuals who can support that initiative will be important as well.
• Oversee and contribute to onboarding/transition strategies for the PSF Board: Former PSF Director Carol Willing began centralizing this documentation with additional support from other PSF members. As the 2016/2017 board had a large number of novices to the board, I recognize a need for continued work on these documents. Onboarding is important and I want to act as a lead in helping onboard new members and create more documentation and resources as needed.
• Support the Code of Conduct Working Group: The PSF has started to investigate the idea of a Code of Conduct working group. At this time there hasn’t been a well defined policy put into place. I am passionate about investigating what a Code of Conduct Working Group may mean for the PSF, both in defining what the role of the PSF should be in such issues, as well as building a working group that includes the relevant voices to make this working group successful.

In summary, I would like to thank you for your time and consideration for my 2017 PSF Board of Director nomination. Serving as a board member for 2016/2017 has been an honor and I hope to continue to serve on in this capacity for the next coming term. There is much work to be done, considerably in the areas of continued geographic outreach and building better transition policies for the PSF in the future. However it is my hope to prioritize these areas as a 2017 PSF Director.

Affiliations:

• PyLadies Chicago , Founder and Organizer
• Write/Speak/Code , Conference Organizer
• Django Girls Chicago, Organizer
• Chi Tech Diversity , Founding Member
• Systers, Google Summer of Code Mentor
• Sprout Social , Software Engineer in Data Science
• Tech Ladies, Chicago City Organizer
• Girl Develop It Chicago, Teacher (Python classes)

In solidarity,

Lorena Mesa

My goals for the PSF

Hi, I'm Eric, and I'm a co-founder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs. The Python community has grown over the past few years, and I believe the PSF should grow with it. My goal is to increase PSF's impact on the world and the Python community, mainly through my focus on these goals:

• Increase Sustainability: The fact that we don't have full-time paid staff working on PyPI is a travesty. I believe there is a way to make this happen, but it will be a battle, and will require making some compromises along the way. If people wear a pager, they should be paid. There are some perverse incentives with paying people to develop software, but paying people for operations and support should be obvious.
• Increase Inclusion: I'm in awe of the work that the Pyladies, Django Girls, and others do every day. We should do as much as possible to support them, along with telling their stories, and inspiring others to create similar efforts for other under represented groups. I think that we've done a reasonably good job bringing people into the community, but we still need to work on Inclusion to get them integrated once they're here. What does the month after a Django Girls workshop look like for the attendees?
• Improve Documentation: This one is probably obvious given my background, but I believe that documentation is a fundamental part of inclusion, which is a fundamental part of diversity. It's also the primary way that a majority of our users interact with the Python language. We should improve our documentation theme so that it works on mobile, we should improve the structure of our docs to include more guides and tutorials, not just examples. We should also translate our documentation (PEP 545), so that people all around the world can learn Python without having to learn English. There's a lot of work to do here, but I hope to provide vision in this space.
• Improve Communication: What on earth does the PSF do? How much money does it spend each year? What outcomes does it have? I think that I can help people understand what the PSF does, and how it operates, in a more transparent fashion. I think that this is the first step towards raising awareness for it in the community, and allowing it to become more sustainable and support more community projects.
• Increase Python 3 Adoption: The time is now. Python 3 is ready -- let's make it happen. The latest projects that I've created are on Python 3, but much to my shame Read the Docs is still Python 2, and defaults projects to Python 2. I will personally move forward in this regard, and think the rest of the community should as well. It's time.

Experience

I've been working on Read the Docs, an open source project, and now almost sustainable open source business for the last 6 years. Along the way, we've also built a global community around documentation with Write the Docs. Both of these projects have had global impact on the software industry:

• https://blog.readthedocs.com/read-the-docs-2016-stats/
• https://www.writethedocs.org/blog/write-the-docs-2016-year-in-review/

I believe I'm uniquely suited to this job:

• I have a background in building (and sometimes failing to build) open source communities with Read the Docs
• I have helped build a unique world-wide community around Software Documentation with Write the Docs
• I have helped run conferences in 4 difference countries, and attended Python conferences on 4 continents

I've also been fighting day in and day out to turn both of these organizations into sustainable businesses, without compromising their missions. I believe this experience is valuable for the PSF:

• The PSF is tasked with building and supporting the Python community. I have experience with this both in Open Source, as well as the software industry in general.
• The PSF primarily makes money from conferences (PyCon) and tries to support the community with these funds. Write the Docs is fundamentally the same concept, and I have experience with the benefits and downsides of this "business model".

My Commitment to the Python Community

I've attended every Pycon US since Chicago in 2009, and love the Python community. My goal with serving on the board is to give back, and help move it forward on a number of issues.

I've spoken at a lot of conferences, mostly around Python. You can see more info about it on my website -- you may have even met me at one of these events :)

Affiliations

• Co-founder of Read the Docs, also my primary source of income.
• Co-founder of Write the Docs, a global community around software documentation.

Goals as a PSF Board Member

Increase inclusion

I would be honored to represent the PSF as a Board Director and promote diversity and openness in the Python community. I want to work with the board on initiatives to help newcomers around the globe to begin their creative journey with code. Most importantly, I want to make sure everyone feels welcome in our community.

Often the barrier from writing a Python script to publishing a fully-fledged PyPI package can be intimidating–but it doesn't need to be. I would like to kick off or support existing efforts that address this problem. I hope to encourage new developers to publish their first package on PyPI and share their creations with the Python community.

I also want to support the important work of the brilliant minds behind Django Girls, PyLadies and other great projects that focus on integrating people from underrepresented groups.

Support maintainers

I believe that we as an industry and community need to do better at supporting maintainers of open source projects. These projects provide critical infrastructure and tools used by organizations and individuals globally.

Despite being volunteer run, they are expected to fulfill unfair demands by well-funded companies, which can lead to mental health issues and ultimately put the projects at risk. This is not OK! It is important to make our ecosystem sustainable so we can grow a larger community of new and more diverse members without burnout.

I don't have a definite solution to the problem of sustainability in open source, but I want to work with the other board directors on initiatives to combat this issue. I believe it needs to be a PSF effort to explore more possibilities around raising funding for critical projects in the Python ecosystem.

Improve Documentation

The Python language documentation at https://docs.python.domainunion.de has a few problems. Although the majority of prominent speakers at Python conferences actively advocate for the adoption of Python 3, it is not very well reflected in the official docs.

The fact that beginners on the Python subreddit regularly ask if they should be learning Python 2 or Python 3 is alarming. It could be an indicator for that the official documentation is not very explicit about this.

As a director on the board, I would like to work with the other members to better understand what is causing the confusion within our community. By updating the documentation we can better communicate to aspiring Pythonistas that Python 3 is now widely supported and the recommended language version for newcomers to learn.

Represent the PSF

The Python community continues to grow, but I feel there is a lack of awareness about the PSF and its mission. The PSF meeting with Naomi Ceder and Lorena Mesa at EuroPython last year was a great way to give updates directly from the PSF board. Also the stickers for PSF members were awesome!

I would like to draw on this and represent the PSF in Europe. My hope is to get people at conferences in Europe and local user groups in Berlin interested in the workings of the PSF. It would be great to have more people register as PSF members and involve them in votes like this one.

Affiliations

• Software Engineer at moovel Group
• Core Contributor to cookiecutter and pytest

Summary

I have served the PSF in one way or another for a little over ten years now. My goals have always been to give back to the community that has helped me so much by using my professional abilities on behalf of the PSF. Most concretely, I have been a driver - or sometimes the driver - for most of the changes associated with professionalizing the PSF, expanding its scope and capabilities, and making it more effective.

My goal if elected would be to help finish the transformation to a standard executive director-led organization with an advisory board, as opposed to the executive board that we have had. I think that this will help us provide greater service to the community, greater continuity, and to take on greater challenges in the future while still not burning out our volunteers.

Note: If elected, I expect that I will be appointed to an "Officer Director" position.

Qualifications

• I am one of the most consistently active directors - not just attending, but actively contributing to the board
• I typically donate 100-200 hours a year of time to the PSF, a which a substantial amount is in a legal capacity
• I now the representative of the "institutional memory" party, keeping the knowledge of what decisions were made (and why they were made) over the past 10+ years (although I will never be as good a representative of the institutional memory party as Tim).
• I also bring to bear knowledge about corporate processes and law that help keep the PSF functioning correctly

Goals for 2017+

• Continue with the professionalization of the PSF; finish transition to a professionally managed organization
• Continue trademark prosecution
• Update PSF policies and procedures
• Generate new "onboarding" tasks and documentation to make it easier for new members of the community to get started contributing

Affiliations:

• Dykema (Law Firm)

2017/2018 Goals as a Board Member

• Offer My Support: In any role or capacity that I might be assigned, I intend to work to make it a success. I intend to give an accounting at the end of the day.
• Onboard More Volunteers: I intend to reach out to other people in this part of the world to come on board and help spread the wonderful things that Python has been achieving.
• Attend Events, Conferences, etc: If there be need to go and spread the Python message, I intend to be at the forefront of such.
• Grants Financials: As for the PSF Grants Working Group, helping them make the best decisions before grants are given out will be a major role that I intend to take up.

2017/2018 Goals as a Board Member

• Encourage and Support Diversity by growing the number of PyCons in Africa- the global Python community is growing rapidly and I have been excited to see groups that are underrepresented playing an active role in making this happen. I’m particularly passionate about the progress that we are seeing in Africa. To date only four African countries, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia and Nigeria have successfully held PyCons and with 50 other viable candidates I’m hoping to help make that number grow. Through my work with ZimboPy I’ve interacted with Pythonistas from Botswana. It would be fantastic to work with them towards launching the first PyCon Botswana! I also hope to reach out to the Python community in Nairobi, Kenya which meets up regularly and even has Python Expo’s to show off the work they’ve created using Python. I’d like to support the Pythonistas in these groups by actively seeking out and sharing their stories.
• Encourage and Support Diversity by supporting African Python and Django Girl workshops: Additionally, I’m looking forward to sharing advice with members wanting to host Django Girls workshops or Python related activities in economically disadvantaged areas, given my experience with this. For example as part of our ZimboPy mentorship week we had an online Q&A with international Pythonistas like Lorena Mesa (a member of the PSF Board of Directors) and Ashley McNamara (from Pivotal Labs.) Our girls got great advice from them on where to find support and resources for women in tech as well as tips on being the best candidate for potential jobs. I would like to introduce similar events to other African countries and believe they will help the international Python community feel more connected!
• Improving Documentation- I look forward to contributing to the PSF Translations Working Group to make documentation from the PSF and Python community readily available to non-English speaking Pythonistas. I also look forward to working on the PyCon Organizers Manual, as well as trying to popularize its use amongst new organizers globally.
• Outreach and education programs: I would like to help support programs that make learning programming accessible particularly outside of the USA. Resources like tutorials and easy to follow summaries for teachers should be accessible and have an option for use in spaces that do not have stable internet connections. Keeping our members from diverse backgrounds in mind should be a priority when making educational documentation.

Background

I am the co-Founder of ZimboPy an organic, on-the-ground effort by local Python developers in Harare. Our aim is to advance the cause of women in tech in Zimbabwe. We work in community centers, universities, high schools and tech hubs to make programming accessible to girls regardless of their socio-economic status or past experience with computers. ZimboPy also has a Mentorship Program that helps computer Science/ IT majors in Zimbabwe’s best universities use their skills to help their community. Mentors this year joined us either virtually or in person for a week long period and where from USA, Italy, Australia and Bulgaria. Students were able to work with experienced developers to start work on an open source project called ZimFarm, connecting small scale farmers to vendors.

I recently gave a talk at PyCon Italy and also work closely with the PyCon Zimbabwe organizers, Django Girls Chinoyi and was selected to give a poster presentation at PyCon USA2017. I believe my experience working with underrepresented communities, connecting and organizing Python developers from various parts of the world, and my passion to see the Python community grow makes me a great candidate for the board.

Affiliations

• Co-Founder and Programs Director at ZimboPy
• Code Purple Workshop Organizer

Values:

• Sustainability — open source is all about sustainability, and the PSF is in a great position to decisively empower projects and communities, while providing infrastructure for the entire Python community. The role that the PSF plays is a very multi-faceted one, and it has been eye-opening to travel to Python events all over the world and meet any subset of the massive number of people who have lives that are impacted by the PSF's decisions.
• https://kennethreitz.org/values

Background:

• Heroku, Inc — Python Language Owner
• Requests Project — BDFL, founder, and creator
• Certifi Project — founder and creator
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python — book author, project founder, and maintainer (royalties donated to Django Girls Foundation)
• pep8.org, httpbin.org, Maya, Records, OSX-GCC-Installer, Autoenv, Tablib, git-legit, and more
• The "Say Thanks" Project (saythanks.io)
• Import This Podcast

Affiliations

• Heroku

Thank you for your consideration!

(Updates) for goals from 2016-17:

• To help PSF to grow the community base outside USA: Started a completely new regional PyCon (PyCon Pune), and also helped to organize the Python track in FOSSASIA (in Singapore). Regular mentor in PyLadies Pune group, and helped local PyLadies team during PyCon India. I attended all the meetings of PSF board this year except the one happened a week before PyCon US (which I misunderstood due to timezone).
• Working to make sure the outreach and education efforts reach far away places: Helping with the grants working group and providing the regional input as required was part of my regular activity. I am also one of the org admin for GSoC for PSF.

Goals for 2017-18:

• Continuing working on building upstream community in the Python eco-space. I would prefer to help in the communication from the board and getting the rest the of the community more involved.
• Continue working with the rest of core developers to build mentoring the new contributors to the CPython and workflow/infrastructure itself. GSoC and Outreachy are two important parts to reach out to a bigger and diverse community and help people grow.
• Helping out in the regular activities of the PSF.

Affiliations

• Red Hat, PSF Fellow

Background

• PyCon KR/APAC organizer - I co-chaired PyCon KR/APAC since its inception in 2014 to 2016.
• Open Source Advocate at NIPA - NIPA is an affiliated organization of Korean Ministry of Science. As an Open Source Advocate at NIPA, I enjoy giving talks at conferences as well as contributing my code to several on-going open source projects.
• Technical Leader at Smart Study - The company has been using Python heavily since its early stages. I'm in charge of the company's backend infrastructure, technical decisions, and developer culture.
• Technical Translator - I translate technical articles, books into Korean. Most of my work is related to Python. Two past projects include "Python for Data Analysis" by Wes McKinney and "High Performance Python" by Ian Ozsvald and Micha Gorelik.
• University Lecturer- I'm teaching Python Programming to graduate students at Seoul’s School of Integrated Science and Technologies (aSSIST).
• Based in Seoul, Korea. However, I have various networks all around the world, especially Non-English speaking countries.

Goals for 2017-2018

• Introduce PyCon to as many countries as possible - Help them to become successful, sustainable, and most importantly, enjoyable events for the community.
• Encourage more people to contribute to open source project - I believe it is important to encourage more people to "experience contributing" with their beloved Open Source Project. With a little care, we can get engage many new contributors in the community, and a few of them may be the next core contributors to the project.
• Discover neglected areas of the community - I still see neglected areas of the community out there. Some of them want to organize their own PyCon but don't know how. Or even worse, it is not sustainable. While they want to, they should be able to. Because of the language, region, and/or income, some people have no way to gain access to Python.

I assure you that my passion for our community has never been more enthusiastic. I will capitalize on my local advantage to outreach within our community. Thank you.

Affiliations: PyCon KR/APAC, Open Source Advocate at NIPA, Smart Study

My priorities

1. Charter the Code of Conduct working group. We started this effort last year and I am hopeful that we will have a CoC working group and with CoC enforcement policies adopted by the end of 2017. I plan to push for policies similar to the well-documented Django Software Foundation's Code of Conduct policies.
2. Increase community involvement in the PSF. There are working groups, mailing lists, and other resources for many different groups within the Python community but many community members don't know about them. We need to empower more community members interested in making a positive impact on the international Python community.
3. Foster an inclusive and diverse Python community. I would like to find ways to encourage more proactive community mentorship efforts within Python core development and related projects. I would also love to see grants policies link the amount of financial support to diversity/inclusivity efforts more directly: conferences with strong diversity-oriented policies should receive more funding.
4. Make it easier to hold an awesome regional Python event. I'd like to continue work on the Python conference organizers manual that we initiated last year. I have not yet organized a conference and I hope to ensure the manual addresses questions first-time conference organizers might have.
5. Improve the usability of PSF resources for volunteers, community members, and staff. Various PSF resources are very difficult to discover. For example, it is non-trivial to discover how to become a PSF voting member or how to ask the PSF to reimburse meetup fees. I would like to see the PSF make these pages and others considerably easier for community members to discover without needing to ask for help from someone in-the-know.

My involvement

I have been using Python since 2009 and I started my involvement in the greater Python community around 2013. I have acted as a consultant, teacher, mentor, community manager, and event organizer.

I am a full-time Python trainer and a volunteer mentor to new and aspiring Python programmers. I hold online Python chats every week and I mentor peers at my local San Diego Python Study Group every Saturday afternoon.

I have participated in multiple Python community workshops and conferences, both in and outside of my home city, San Diego:

• SD Django TDD workshop 2013 - co-author, co-organizer, teacher
• SD Intro to Python workshop 2014 - co-author, co-organizer, teacher
• Django Girls Ensenada 2015 - coach
• PyCon US 2015 - tutorial assistant teacher and meetup open space host
• DjangoCon US 2015 - lightning talk presenter
• Django Girls Austin 2015 - coach
• Django Girls Inland Empire 2015 - co-organizer
• PyTennessee 2016 - tutorial assistant teacher and lightning talk presenter
• PyCon 2016 - tutorial presenter
• DjangoCon US 2016 - speaker
• Django Girls San Diego Jul 2016 - co-organizer
• Django Girls San Diego Jan 2017 - co-organizer
• PyTennessee 2017 - tutorial teacher
• PyCaribbean 2017 - speaker
• PyCon 2017 - tutorial presenter and speaker

Affiliations

• Trainer and owner of Truthful Technology LLC
• Co-organizer of San Diego Django Girls

Background

I’m an Australian Python developer, speaker, and serial conference organiser. I’ve recently moved to the US.

I’ve been closely involved in PyCon Australia for many years, including as a lead organizer, and also as their lead for outreach and inclusion. During this time, PyCon Australia has grown from 240 attendees to upwards of 500, and the financial aid we’ve been able to offer has grown to $20,000 (or close to 10% of the total conference budget).

I’ve served as a Council Member for Linux Australia, an organisation that provides financial, legal, and technical support for open source-related conferences including PyCon Australia. In that role, I helped to develop and implement a policy for making sure our events are run in a sustainable fashion, and made sure that Linux Australia continued to be a healthy organisation.

Since 2015, I’ve served on the PSF’s Grants Working Group. We’ve helped substantially grow the PSF’s capacity to offer grants to important Python projects throughout the world.

I’ve also spoken and volunteered at numerous Python conferences throughout the world, and over the last year have been working with the PSF’s support to build Registrasion, an open source ticket sales package for conferences, which is currently used by PyCon Australia and linux.conf.au.

What I want to get done

Through my work on the Grants Working Group, I’ve seen that the PSF has a great capacity for supporting the global Python community by helping passionate people run events in their local communities.

I want to make it easier for Pythonistas to support their local Python communities.

Whilst the expansion of the grants program has grown the PSF’s financial support of events, the PSF has significant legal and technical resources that community projects can make use of. At the moment, it doesn’t seem clear to many regional PyCon organisers or meetups that the PSF can help them make their projects a success. We can fix that.

In my first year on the board, I want to: - Establish an events working group to help provide guidance and mentorship to organisers who want to create new events - Develop policy and processes that make it easy for events to run as projects of the PSF, particularly in the US - Seek out a small number of pilot events to run under this policy, and to evaluate it - Make it easy for PyCons to deploy technical infrastructure, including CFP and ticket sales

Affiliations

• PSF Grants working group
• North Bay Python Conference organising team
• PSF Fellow

Affiliations

• Google
• PSF Fellow
• CPython
• Bits of Freedom (Dutch digital rights organisation)