The following people have been nominated as Directors of the Python Software Foundation for the term beginning in April 2014. Their self-written summaries follow.
There are currently 11 seats on the Board of Directors (last changed in the 2012 PSF Members vote).
Please note that the new bylaws require disclosing the affiliation of each candidate.
Lynn Root2013 Board Member.
Lynn has been a PSF board member since 2013, a member of the PSF Outreach and Education committee since 2012, and continues to lead the PyLadies of San Francisco since 2012. She currently leads the development and growth of the global organization of PyLadies, including helping other locations starting a local PyLadies, maintaining pyladies.com and github.com/pyladies/pyladies-kit. Lynn is also helping organizing PyCon 2014 by leading the lightning talks segment and PyLadies presence at the conference.
Lynn wishes to be a board member for the next year to accomplish the following things:
- PyLadies trademark on name & logo,
- Broadening the PSF's reach in diversity,
- Finding more PSF/PyCon sponsors that align with the PSF's diversity mission.
Affiliation: Lynn Root works for Spotify.
Jessica McKellarCurrent board member (2012, 2013)
It has been an honor and pleasure to serve on the PSF Board for the past two years. I love this community, and I hope to have the opportunity to continue to serve it as a Board member as it grows into new challenges and opportunities next year.
I bring several perspectives to the Board, as:
This past year, as part of my Foundation work I:
The language and community continue to grow, which is great, but with this growth have come some growing pains for the Foundation. I think the most important goal for the PSF for 2014 is to finish several important but lagging initiatives, and to do so in a way that is transparent and with sustainable volunteer obligations. In particular, 2014 will be the year we finish:
Additionally, I'd like to lead:
Affiliation: Jessica McKellar is a co-founder of Zulip.
Brian CurtinCurrent board member (2012, 2013)
My involvement with the Python community:
My plans for 2014:
Affiliation: Rackspace
Alex GaynorCurrent board member (2013)
It's been a privilege to serve the community on the board in this past year. I additionally serve on the Sprints and Outreach and Education committees. I've also served as the co-chair of the PyCon US Program Committee, and I've worked with the Infrastructure committee on various projects.
In the coming year I'm looking forward to working on implementing the new working group-centric organization for the PSF, and empowering more people to promote Python within their communities (whether geographic or shared-interest).
Affiliations: I'm employed by Rackspace.
Marc-Andre Lemburg2013 Board Member
I've been board member in the years 2002-2004 and then again since 2010.
PSF things I've been working on in 2013/2014:
in addition to the usual PSF board and trademark committee work.
Things I'd like to focus on for 2014/2015:
I'd like to continue my work as director and look forward to another year serving on the board.
Other Python community projects I'm involved in:
- EuroPython Society (EPS) - I'm a board member of the EPS, which is the organization behind the EuroPython conference series
- Python Meeting Düsseldorf (PyDDF) - Together with Charlie Clark, I started a local Python user meeting series in Düsseldorf in 2012
Affiliation: eGenix.com GmbH, Germany
Van LindbergCurrent board member (2012, 2013)
I love being part of the Python community. I am glad to have a chance to help out where I can. There are a lot of things that I've started over the past couple years that I want to help continue. Specifically:
I was recently interviewed by a consultant for the Wikimedia foundation, who remarked that we were way beyond them in the friendliness and the diversity of our community. They - and others - are looking to us to show the way toward a more community-focused approach to growth.
Affiliation: I work at Rackspace.
David MertzCurrent Board member (5 years)
(nomination by Kushal Das, accepted by David)
He has served on the PSF board for five years, would like to continue to do so.
He chaired the PSF Trademarks Committee, and have served on the committee for 6 years. We resolve legal matters in the committee, enter into relationships of fiscal sponsorship with relevant projects to further protect our IP, and generally improve the relationships with broader Python communities through friendly and productive conversations about trademark rights.
He chaired the Outreach and Education Committee, which was formed in 2011. The committee has funded numerous outreach efforts to user groups and educational efforts, and will continue to fund more in the future; acting as Board liaison is useful.
He created the voting procedure used by the PSF for the prior several years (and the small software tools needed to make it work), assisted the PSF Secretary in its operation, and administered the last election. In response to some requests by members, he worked wtih PSF member (and Web2Py lead) Massimo Di Pierro to get his E-vote software to provide all the same wonderful cryptographic and security guarantees as the prior email-based system (and some more).
He was very pleased to serve as PSF/Board representative to give one of the two keynotes at PyCon-India in 2012. As well as enjoying representing the PSF broadly, this tied in with the mission of the Outreach & Education to regionally/nationally diversify interest in and commitment to Python and to the PSF. He also gave the keynote in PyCon-UK 2013.
By background, he is a recovering humanities academic, tempted away from post-structuralist political philosophy by the intrigue and wiles of algorithms and data structures (always best expressed in this language Guido gave us).
He is the author of Addison Wesley's Text Processing in Python, of the IBM developerWorks' column Charming Python (since 2001), and of various other articles advancing and explaining the use of Python and its tools and libraries. He has created some moderately well-used FOSS Python tools (most collected in Gnosis Utilities); these have been poorly maintained in recent years.
Often a speaker at PyCon and OSCON. he had been an advocate for use of Python by several public-interest software projects, including in the voting software developed by the Open Voting Consortium (he was CTO and board member of that organization). He has also been a consultant with a number of notable Python-using organizations, at the margins helping to expand that use.
Affiliation: David Mertz is a consultant for D. E. Shaw Research and owner of Gnosis Software.
Rachel SandersNew Board Member.
I helped found PyLadies San Francisco in 2012, and have run the South Bay chapter ever since. Internally at LinkedIn, I work on Python advocacy and standards in addition to my regular engineering work.
I've greatly benefitted from the outreach and work of the PSF board and general Python community, and I want to help contribute and advocate for it.
I would like to work on:
- Outreach to underrepresented groups
- Outreach to groups outside the United States and working on global diversity
- Understanding the real needs of the Python and PSF community and contribute to what needs doing
Affiliation: Rachel Sanders works for LinkedIn.
Selena DeckelmannNew Board Member.
(nominated by Jessica McKellar)
I've been involved with free and open source software since 1995 and began running conferences for PostgreSQL in 2007. In 2012, I founded PyLadiesPDX, a Portland chapter of PyLadies. I founded Open Source Bridge, Postgres Open and I speak internationally about open source, databases and community. I am a major contributor to PostgreSQL.
A few conferences I've keynoted include DjangoCon, OSDC Taiwan, Computer Science Teachers Association annual conference, PgCon (Postgres conference), SCaLE and FrOSCon. I've given talks at PyCon, JSConf, Linux.Conf.AU, RICON, OSCON, LISA, MySQL Users Conference, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and FOSDEM. I've participated as a mentor for Google's Summer of Code (PostgreSQL) and GNOME Outreach Program for Women (Socorro, a BI tool for Firefox Crashes written mostly in Python). I list these because the connections I've made and experience with relating to many open source communities are relevant to the goals I have for joining the board and extending Python's community engagement with K-12 teachers.
I've experienced tremendous support from both the Django and Python software communities and would love to give back more. I'm currently serving on the Django conduct working group, in addition to being an active PyLadies organizer. I've been working as a Python developer for 2 years, and have been a professional developer since 1999 using a variety of languages including Perl, Java and C. I've contributed code to PostgreSQL core, Bucardo (a trigger-based replication system), Socorro and many other small projects. The bulk of my open source contributions have come in the form of community organizing, outreach, speaking engagements and conference creation.
In 2011/2012 my volunteer work focused on expanding my volunteer network to include K-12 teachers. I learned about the dire state of computer science curriculum and the specific problems open source poses for those teachers. I've worked over the last year and a half on developing a strategy for lesson plans that consistently work for in-person, beginner events. With the help and advice of teachers, I am putting together units, learning objectives and sample lessons that demonstrate how to use Python and related open source technology in a classroom setting.
My goal is to share what I've learned with the teachers I know and collaborate with them on developing "missing manual" lesson plans that will help students and teachers participate in open source communities. My test audience for these lessons are the women in PyLadiesPDX.
My accomplishments in the Python community are primarily that I established PyLadiesPDX in 2012 and have increased its membership to 230 women (as of March 2014). We have 1-2 meetings a week, a Saturday hackathon and a bi-weekly workshop. In the fall, we take a Coursera class together for 8-10 weeks, having a workshop weekly in addition to the Saturday meetups. I've collaborated primarily with three community members in Portland on the scheduling and organization.
With the PSF, I'd like to work to:
- Increase connections and outreach to computer science teachers through the CSTA, code.org and related organizations
- Create a central place to curate and reference any and all Creative Commons and freely-licensed lesson plans for intro to Python courses given by PyLadies and similar education-focused user groups
- Create a "For Teachers" section of the python.org site that puts useful teaching resources in a single place, vetted and used by licensed teachers
- Cultivate a teachers community around the resource to maintain it over time
Affiliation: Selena Deckelmann works for Mozilla.
Kushal DasNew Board Member.
I am working with the Python community in India for the last 8 years. I spend most of time in building new developer base and teaching programming using Python. I gave regular talks on Python in many conferences all across India and outside.
I am organizing an online summer training for the last 6 years where people from all over the world participate and learn about FOSS in general and then programming using Python. The idea behing that training is to get more global developers, diversity is a key factor in that training. We get average 50% or more women participation in that program.
I wrote an open book to introduce Python to the new programmers called "Python for you and me". The source is available in github and you can read it at http://pymbook.rtfd.org
I was nominated into PSF last year and started working more on the global community. I maintain the core-mentorship list and now helping out with the PSF blog posts.
I do help to organize PyCon in every way possible. This year I am also participating as sprint corordinator other than being a regular volunteer and speaker.
This year being part of PSF board I would like to work on:
- Outreach and education programs: I want to help out the smaller groups to connect easily with PSF and putting an effort to increase contribution from South East Asia.
- Diversity program: Through the different educational events and online summer trainings I am working to increase the participation of women in developer communities. I want to spread and help others to replicate the same kind of effort in other parts of the world.
- Helping the other members to do regular PSF work.
Affiliation: I work in Eucalyptus Systems.
Alyssa CoghlanNew Board Member.
(nominated by Van Lindberg)
I have been a part of the Python community for more than a decade, and a CPython core developer since 2005. Since joining Red Hat I have been working to gain more formal recognition of Python's strategic significance for the company and that effort, in combination with ongoing efforts from other Red Hatters in the Python community, has already resulted in Red Hat joining the PSF as a sponsor member.
As a PSF board member, I would seek to continue to improve the interaction environment on the core development lists by:
I'm aware there's some risk here of blurring the line between my personal technical involvement in CPython core development and the Python packaging community, and the deliberately non-technical role of the PSF board. I can only offer my assurance that I will do my best to keep that distinction clear, and that my board involvement will be about advocating for the resources we need to provide a more pleasant collaboration environment for our volunteers, as well as expanding that volunteer pool to a much broader group of people by continuing to lower barriers to contribution.
Affiliation: Alyssa Coghlan works for Red Hat.
Travis OliphantNew Board Member.
(nominated by Van Lindberg)
Travis has a long history with Python, having been a primary maintainer/documenter/user of the various numeric stacks for... perhaps fifteen years now. Travis is well-known in the scientific Python community and has single-handedly done an incredible amount of work to move Python forward.
Travis also has experience on the board of NumFOCUS, a complimentary organization to the PSF. He brings business experience and an array of industry contacts that will help us make sure that we are thinking of and responsive to some this important part of our community.
Finally, Travis cares deeply about Python and the people in the community. When I have seen organized efforts to help someone, I have many times found Travis behind the effort.
Affiliation: Travis Oliphant is the CEO of Continuum Research
...More candidate entries go here...
Please use the following format:
Candidate Name ============== *2012 Board Member.* or *New Board Member.* Description. Affiliation: ... ----
PythonSoftwareFoundation/BoardCandidates2014 (last edited 2025-03-16 15:52:29 by elena)
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