Simon Cross Awarded Community Service Award

On Friday, Python Software Foundation administrator Ewa Jodlowska presented Simon Cross with the PSF’s Community Service Award for the third quarter.

Photo by Morgan Collett

The award was presented at the first PyCon South Africa in Cape Town, of which Simon is the lead organizer. Simon and team were able to start from the ground up and build a solid conference with a very nice schedule, including many of the community’s best speakers. They even brought in ten sponsors to help keep the conference costs low, including the PSF.

Simon is also a leader in the Cape Town Python User Group, a group which often meets to discuss hot topics in the Python world. Along with talks, the group has been getting together to hack on projects they all use. In 2010 and 2011, the PSF sponsored sprints lead by Simon and crew to port matplotlib and Genshi to Python 3. The matplotlib code was merged but not yet released by the project, and Genshi has been available on Python 3 since shortly after their sprint.

Simon’s efforts also extend around the Python community, where he’s a maintainer of Genshi and contributes to PyPy, among other projects.

The PSF wishes to thank Simon for his efforts with PyCon ZA and everything else he does for the Python community.

Kenneth Gonsalves Posthumously Awarded Community Service Award

The Python Software Foundation, represented by director David Mertz, posthumously awarded Kenneth Gonsalves with the foundation’s Community Service Award for the third quarter. The award was presented to his daughter last weekend at PyCon India.

Kenneth passed away on August 3, 2012 at the age of 59. After finding the open source world in 1995, he was drawn to the Python community in 2003 and has since taught over 50 seminars on Python and Django in his area. He was also a major contributor to many mailing lists, generously helping as many people as he could.

Kenneth was known for founding and leading the Indian Python Software Society, and is credited with helping to shape the Python community all across India. He was also a well known member of the Django community, where his presence and action will surely be missed.

Outside of software, Kenneth took interest in golf, even becoming a referee and earning international certification. Throughout his time as an official he was assigned to several national tournaments.

In addition to the Community Service Award, the foundation presented a grant of $3500 USD (~190K Rs) to the IPSS to seed an award in Kenneth’s name. The award is planned to be given annually to a community member who goes above and beyond to evangelize, innovate, and mentor other members of the Python community. As much of Kenneth’s work was focused on students, the IPSS wants to see further efforts in growing their community and educating the membership.

Kenneth Gonsalves -- 1952-2012

Photo by Kushal Das

Announcing the 2012 Distinguished Service Award - John Hunter

The Distinguished Service Award

The Python Software Foundation voted unanimously on September 12, 2012 to authorize the creation of a new award: the Distinguished Service Award. The award is offered in recognition of long-term excellence in the Python community, and is intended to stand as the Foundation's highest honor. Whether for contributions of code, activism, evangelism, or for other services to Python and its global community, the Foundation seeks to honor those who have a record of sustained and prolific giving to the Python world.

The award will not be made to a schedule, but as deserving candidates emerge. It comes with a check for $5,000, in simple recognition of the kind of devoted service for which the award will be presented.

Full details of the award, and a list of recipients, can be found on the Foundation's awards page.

The First Recipient

The inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Service Award is John Hunter, who passed away on August 28, 2012 after losing an all-too-brief battle with colon cancer.

He is survived by his wife Miriam and three daughters Clara, Ava, and Rahel. To mark his passing, the NumFOCUS Foundation has setup a memorial fund for the care and education of his three daughters at http://numfocus.org/johnhunter/.

John Hunter

There are few projects in the Python world which have enjoyed the reach, longevity, and value that matplotlib has offered in the 10 years since its creation. John Hunter, at the time a post-doctoral neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, started the matplotlib library as a way to work around downtime created by limited licensing for expensive proprietary tools. His choice to use Python was a bold one at the time, given Python's relatively young age, especially within the sciences. However, his efforts paid off and he was able to create an open alternative to allow him to continue analyzing epileptic seizure data in children without the limitations he was experiencing with other products.

Over time, John left the academic world and entered Chicago's finance industry, taking employment at TradeLink Securities. While there, he took his science background and matplotlib project into the field of quantitative analysis. In the ten years since matplotlib's creation, John brought three daughters into the world and cared for his family all while maintaining the number one spot on the matplotlib committer list. He became further involved in the numeric and scientific communities, presenting at conferences and expanding his involvement to the recently formed NumFOCUS Foundation, at which he was a founding board member.

John's creation and contribution of matplotlib to not just the Python community, but to the science and mathematics communities, is truly an effort that will live on and continue to influence these communities and more for many years to come. Whether you found Python through matplotlib or matplotlib through Python, John Hunter's efforts have left a lasting mark on so many people in so many places.

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In addition to the Distinguished Service Award, the Foundation will be contributing $3500 to a project which is currently in the works, the John Hunter Technical Fellowship. More details on this will follow.

Welcome New PSF Members!

Just the other day the Python Software Foundation held an election, the second and final one of the year, and the results are in! 18 new members were introduced, and the membership approved three new sponsor members. Please join us in welcoming all of them!

Candidates for PSF membership are nominated by an existing member for their work in the Python community. The membership is comprised of people from around the world and from many areas of the community.

These new members are selected from many different areas of the Python community. While some members are known for their contributions of code, many are known for their work to grow their local and regional communities. Some members are known for their work in educational workshops and conferences. It takes a diverse membership to ensure the success of a foundation steering a diverse community, so we're happy to have members of all types from all areas, both geographically and within the Python world.

Please join us in welcoming all of the new members to the Foundation!

• Nick Barcet
• Dana Bauer
• James Blair
• Thierry Carrez
• Anand Chittipothu
• Antonio Cuni
• Anne Gentle
• Noufal Ibrahim
• Vish Ishaya
• Christopher MacGown
• Dave Malcolm
• Joshua McKenty
• Mark McLoughlin
• Mariano Reingart
• Bruno Rocha
• Monty Taylor
• Dean Troyer
• Vicky Twomey-Lee

The following sponsor members were approved:

• DreamHost
• Globo.com
• Hood Media GmbH

For the full PSF membership roster, please see http://www.python.org/psf/members/

Redesign Proposals Due July 21

Just a quick reminder: Proposals for the python.org redesign are due by 11:59 PM EST on July 21, 2012. That's four days away!

For more details, please read our Request for Proposals.

As always, questions and comments can be emailed to the psf-redesign mailing list at psf-redesign@python.org.

PSF Sponsors First PyCon Philippines

The Python Software Foundation donated USD $600 to the first Python Conference in the Philippines. The conference will be held in Manila from June 30th to July 1st, 2012. The organizers behind this conference are the Philippines Python User Group (PHPUG), pyDanny, Audrey Roy and various other members of the Python community. You can meet and greet them in a very nice tropical clime. Who wouldn't want to study Python on a beautiful island? They're still accepting registrations, so act fast!

PSF Sponsors Upcoming International Python Conferences

The Python Software Foundation is happy to announce the sponsorship of five upcoming Python related conferences all over the world. The PSF donated EUR 3500 to EuroPython which is being held in Florence, Italy this year from July 2-8. Next on the calendar is PyCon Australia 2012, which the PSF granted AUD $1500 . The Pythoneers down under will be in Hobart, Tasmania on August 18th through the 19th. The PSF gave NZD 1000 to Kiwi PyCon which is being held September 1-2 in Dunedin, New Zealand. PyCon Argentina received USD $3000 in funding this year. They will be holding their conference in Buenos Aires starting November 12th and running through the 17th. Finally PythonBrazil also received USD $3000 in funding and will be holding their conference November 21-24 in Rio de Janerio.

If you're in the area or in the mood for travel and you want to learn some Python or just meet some of the international Python people, this year is a good one. You can travel to scenic Italy for EuroPython, head down to Australia for their exotic animals and then take a boat over to New Zealand for Kiwi PyCon. When it starts getting cold outside, you can head down to South America and spend a couple weeks learning Python in Argentina and Brazil. Can you think of a better way to get out of the cold?

Welcome New PSF Members!

After the spring elections, the Foundation is happy to welcome a new group of members.

All members of the PSF are nominated by an existing member for their work in the Python community. We have quite a diverse set of community members joining us this year, with representation across many countries and individuals contributing to many areas of the Python world.

As with years past, a group of individuals known for their contributions of code, either to Python implementations or other projects in the Python ecosystem, were elected. We also have a number of members recognized for their work with PyCon and other Python conferences around the world. Community effort is another theme and we have several members known for their work building and expanding their local Python communities as well as the global community. Several folks who keep various Python infrastructure up and running were also elected.

Please join us in welcoming all of the new members to the Foundation!

• Tim Ansell
• Martin Aspeli
• Henrique Bastos
• Benoit Chesneau
• Jan Ulrich Hasecke
• Larry Hastings
• Stephen Hawkes
• Ewa Jodlowska
• Andreas Jung
• Noah Kantrowitz
• Peter Kropf
• Jannis Leidel
• Chris McDonough
• Paul McMillan
• Carl Meyer
• Luciano Ramalho
• Kenneth Reitz
• Armin Ronacher
• Michelle Rowley
• Tres Seaver
• Hanno Schlichting
• Armin Stroß-Radschinski
• Christian Theune
• Giles Thomas
• Nicholas H. Tollervey
• Wilfredo Sanchez Vega
• Chris Withers

For the full PSF membership roster, please see http://www.python.org/psf/members/

2012 Q1 Community Service Awards

The Foundation wishes to thank Carl Trachte and Audrey Roy for their work in the Python community with Community Service Awards for the first quarter of 2012.

Carl has put significant effort into diversifying and supporting non-English speaking writers for the Python Wiki.

Audrey also put in a lot of time diversifying the community with her work in creating the PyLadies group as well speaking on outreach issues as numerous conferences.

On behalf of the Python community, the PSF thanks Carl and Audrey for their time and effort!

Request for Proposal: Redesign python.org

The main Python site at www.python.org was redesigned in 2005-2006 -- over six years ago. It's time for a redesign, to improve the organization of the site and its appearance, and to simplify the task for the volunteers who maintain the content. The PSF would therefore like fund the design and implementation of a new look and architecture for python.org. The web development landscape has also changed a lot since 2006, and we look forward to seeing what this community can produce.

The Request for Proposal for the python.org redesign has been published on readthedocs.org. Questions and comments can be e-mailed to the psf-redesign mailing list at psf-redesign at python.org. Proposals are due by July 21st 2012, two months from today.

The RFP was initially drafted by Jesse Noller, and feedback from the python.org site maintainers was incorporated by Andrew Kuchling.