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Candidates for the 2015 PSF Board of Directors

The following people have been nominated as Directors of the Python Software Foundation for the term beginning in May 2015. Their self-written summaries follow.

The specific dates of relevance to the election are:

The above closing times are given in the "Anywhere on Earth" (AOE) timezone.

There are currently 11 seats on the Board of Directors (last changed in the 2012 PSF Members vote).

Links

Registering as a PSF Board candidate

To register as a candidate for the Board elections, add your nomination to this page using the format listed at the end of the page. We'd like as many groups within the PSF membership as possible to have the option of electing candidates that can directly represent their interests in Board discussions, so if there's someone you'd particularly like to have represent you, you may want to consider getting in touch with them and (politely!) asking if they'd be interested in nominating themselves.

While the overall time commitment will vary based on whether or not a Board member chooses to take on additional organizational responsibilities, candidates should be prepared to commit at least a few hours each week to assisting in managing the overall affairs of the Python Software Foundation (this is primarily a combination of mailing list discussions and 2x 1 hour IRC+teleconference based Board meetings each month). The Board quorum requirements are designed to handle the fact that not every Director will be able to make every Board meeting, especially given a global Board spanning a wide range of time zones.

Please note that the PSF bylaws require that Board candidates disclose significant organizational affiliations (for example, their employer).

Note

Please follow the instructions on the FrontPage to gain wiki edit access.

Registering to vote on PSF ballots

While PSF Membership is open to anyone that chooses to join, Basic Members are not entitled to vote on PSF ballots, including Board elections. In accordance with the bylaws, the following PSF Members are entitled to vote on PSF ballots:

To register as a Managing or Contributing member, refer to this post on the PSF blog.

To register as a Supporting Member, please use the PSF Associate Membership site.

PSF Fellows and Sponsor Members must themselves be approved through a PSF ballot, and thus only existing Fellows and Sponsor Delegates will be entitled to vote on the upcoming ballot.

Carrie Anne Philbin

New Board Member.

I'm an award winning secondary Computing & ICT Teacher, Author, and YouTuber from the UK. I currently lead the education mission for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. I am the author of 'Adventures in Raspberry Pi' a computing book for teenagers wanting to get started with Raspberry Pi and programming (including Python). Winner of Teach Secondary magazine's Technology & Innovation Best Author award 2014 and Talk Talk's Digital Hero Award in 2013.

In 2011 I started a journey from teaching an uninspiring curriculum that showed young people how to consume technology to leading the Raspberry Pi Foundation's education mission to advance the education of adults and children in the fields of computing, computer science and related subjects. This would not have been possible without the Python community. I talked about this in my Pycon UK keynote called 'Miss-adventures in Raspberry Pi' which you can watch here. I think this gives some insight into what drives me. This year I'll be giving talks at both EuroPython and Pycon Australia, as both conferences begin to introduce education mini conferences.

For possibly the first time, the UK is leading the way in transforming the education curriculum, introducing computer science at the age of 5 and forms an integral part of learning throughout a child's school life. I believe that Python has the potential to be the text based programming language used in education worldwide. It is rapidly becoming the language of choice in schools across the UK. The Python community has been at the heart of this, creating free and open libraries that make computing accessible, and more importantly creative and fun. Two stand out examples would be the RPi.GPIO library, and Minecraft Pi API. The first, RPi.GPIO was created so that the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi could be programmed with Python, initially to brew beer, but quickly adopted by makers and educators and now forms an integral part of the Foundation's free learning resources. The Minecraft Pi API allows anyone to program something to happen in the minecraft world with Python. Want to make a house appear, rather than building one? A few lines of code makes this happen. Want that house to follow you around the map, a few more lines of code will make that happen. I can't think of any tool more powerful to hook children's playful, imaginative and creative minds.

This is a great starting point, but I'd like to serve the PSF to help highlight great python education projects but also highlight where support is needed by the community. I'd like to help foster a wider conversation between industry experts, programmers and educators. I'd like to bring more teachers into the PSF.

I am the creator of a YouTube video series for teenage girls called The Geek Gurl Diaries. The episodes include interviews with women working in technology and hands on computer science based tutorials to inspire young people, particularly girls into STEM subjects and hopefully careers. In my role as Vice-Chair of Computing At Schools diversity initiative called #include, I help to organise and run conferences and hack days for teachers and industry experts to make computer science accessible to all regardless of gender, ethnicity, social economic status, special educational needs or disability. I would like to bring what I've learned from this experience to support the PSF.

Affiliation: Raspberry Pi Foundation

Marc-Andre Lemburg

2014 Board Member.

You may know me as Python Core Developer. I have designed and implemented the Unicode integration and codecs for Python and maintained it for more than a decade, among several other things in CPython.

More details about myself and what I've done for the Python community since I joined it in 1993/1994 are available on my wiki home page.

I am a founding Fellow of the PSF, have been PSF board member in the years 2002-2004 and then again since 2010.

These are the things I'd like to focus on for the 2015/2016 term:

  • integrate the PSF more into the global Python community and make it's organizational structures more diverse and international to better represent the community than it does today (see Python Events Calendars for a map showing how our community is structured)
  • help (re)create a friendly, cheerful and open PSF community, where people can share their projects, ask for help, get others excited or simply hang out, without having to deal with the formalisms that come with a large organization such as the PSF
  • make more use of the new PSF work group setup and work out the organizational details for this, to give more members a chance to actively participate in and use the PSF's resources to bring Python forward
  • create a marketing work group to (a) develop a more diverse marketing strategy for Python which doesn't only focus on developers, (b) create more marketing material and tools to enable Python user groups and evangelists to better promote Python in their local and professional settings, and (c) create more Python merchandise
  • push for getting the python.org website setup with a real CMS in order to attract more content contributors and maintainers
  • rewrite the Python trademark policy to make it more readable and straight forward to use
  • get the PSF to adopt more community friendly PyPI terms & conditions
  • if we can get PSF funding, help create a second volume of the PSF Python Brochure

I'd like to continue my work as director and look forward to another year serving on the board.

PSF things I've been working on in the 2014/2015 term:

in addition to the usual PSF board and trademark committee work.

Other Python community projects I'm currently involved in:

Affiliation: eGenix.com GmbH, Germany

Alex Gaynor

2014 Board Member

I've served as a board member for the past two years.

In the last year, here are some of the things I've worked on:

  • Served as a member of the PSF Sprints and Outreach and Education committees
  • Collaborated with the infrastructure committee on a variety of projects
  • Served as co-chair of the PyCon program committee

Affiliation: I'm employed by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs

Alyssa Coghlan

2014 Board Member.

I have been a part of the Python community for more than a decade, a CPython core developer since 2005, and a member of the Board of Directors since 2014. (Full bio on personal site)

As a PSF board member, my two primary concerns would be addressing the challenges the PSF faces around volunteer burnout (including for Board members), as well as continuing to address the long term structural risks potentially impacting the sustainable operation of PSF provided infrastructure and services.

Key perspectives I believe I bring to Board discussions:

  • Experienced CPython core developer
  • Heavily involved in the Python software distribution & deployment ecosystem
  • Employed by a major commercial redistributor of Python
  • Professional training and experience in infrastructural risk management

Specific initiatives I would personally be aiming to advocate for and participate in over the 2015/2016 Board term include:

  • Providing additional community visibility into the ongoing activities of the PSF Board through the Strategic Decision Making Process proposal
  • Enhancing the PSF's ability to suitably recognise contributions to the broader Python community through the updated PSF Fellowship Recognition Program proposal
  • Providing a more constructive framework for discussions regarding the allocation of PSF funds and effective direction of volunteer time and energy by capturing and clearly documenting agreed strategic priorities for the PSF (which also includes clearly documenting things the PSF isn't doing itself, as other organisations are better positioned to handle them)
  • Working with the PSF Events Coordinator and other PSF Directors to finalise and publish the "International PyCon Prospectus" (a proposal developed in collaboration with a number of conferences the PSF has previously sponsored). The intent of this proposal is to allow other organisations to easily sponsor multiple regional conferences via the PSF, rather than having to arrange payment individually with each conference throughout the year
  • Working with Selena Deckelmann on a Strategic Hiring Plan proposal for the PSF, with the aim of enhancing the PSF's core staff and volunteer management capabilities to help reduce the incidence of volunteer burnout within the Python community

Affiliation: Alyssa Coghlan works for Red Hat.

Kushal Das

2014 Board Member

I have been a part of the Python community for 9+ years now, I am also a member of Board of Directors from 2014, and CPython core developer.

Things I did in 2014:

  • I am a part of PyCon US organisers, work in various roles before and during the conference days. The developer sprints (last 4 days) is my primary responsibility. Many of you may have seen me running around during the conference.
  • Gave the keynote in PyCon India about contribution, and building up the community.
  • Organized one PSF members meeting during PyCon India.
  • Wrote couple of blog posts for PSF blog.
  • I am also one of the org-admin for PSF project under GSoC.
  • Organized, and ran the dgplug summer training for almost 3 months, where we build up upstream contributors, Python is the primary tool of choice for this training. In 2014 there were 150 students attended the sessions regularly. This project has a very high rate of women participation.
  • Worked with other students to bring them into the upstream community.
  • Helped in the CPython sprint during PyCon development sprints.
  • Working on moving my python book on Python3 to make sure the new contributors get it easy to start with.

New things I want to work on 2015:

  • I am working a better CI system which can be consumed by upstream CPython (and then other implementations) for untested patches.
  • Making the PSF much more approachable for the new contributors.
  • Working on the global Python communities to make a closer relation with PSF.

I'd like to continue my work as director and I am looking forward serve the global community.

Affiliation: Kushal Das works for Red Hat.

Berker Peksag

New Board Member

I'm a core developer on CPython, Gunicorn, GNU MediaGoblin and Hylang projects.

In addition to my CPython Core Developer duties I've also:

  • selected as a PSF Contributing Member
  • helped to launch the new Python Job Board
  • overhauled the contributing documentation of python.org (currently in docs/ directory, will be on Read the Docs)
  • working on switching from Chef to Ansible in provisioning of python.org (the WIP branch is here)
  • helping maintaining of planetpython.org
  • working as a PEP editor

You can also see my work on python.org at the following links:

I'm also a regular contributor to the Django project and selected as a Fellow by Django Software Foundation in 2014: https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2014/oct/13/announcing-inaugural-django-fellows/