Third-Quarter Community Service Awards

Regular readers will know that the Foundation periodically honors those who have made significant contributions to its mission. Often these people aren't even members of the Foundation, but this doesn't exclude them. At its recent meeting the PSF Board voted Community Awards to two people, one of whom isn't currently a member.

Noufal Ibrahim Noufal was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was "first among equals" this award also recognizes the work of everyone who helped to make the inaugural conference so successful.

Barry Warsaw Many people are unaware of the huge volume of mail that is processed by software written in Python every hour of every day. This is because they don't know about the Mailman project, which was Barry's brainchild. Barry, a founder member of the Foundation, also acted as release manager for several recent Python releases.

The Foundation is grateful to Noufal and Barry for their efforts, each of which helps to promote Python's popularity and increase the Python community as a whole.

Reminder: 5 days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals

October 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a week away. If you're planning to present, you should submit your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance.

Python at the 2009 Atlanta Linux Fest

We should all give Brandon Rhodes a hearty "Thanks!" for doing a great job representing Python at the Atlanta Linux Fest on September 19th. You can read Brandon's account of the day for more details and his advice to anyone planning similar outreach activities.

What modules need documentation work for Python 3.x?

As part of ongoing preparations for GHOP, Titus Brown and the other organizers are soliciting feedback about what modules in the standard library need more documentation work.

Are there any modules that lack useful examples? Or where the writing or examples could be clarified?

Head over to this survey and give us your opinion today, or forever hold your tongue!

Reminder: 14 Days left for PyCon US 2010 Proposals

October 1, the deadline for submitting PyCon talk proposals, is now just under a month away. Start thinking about your outline now! See the proposal instructions for guidance.

GHOP 2009/2010 Planning

The Google Highly Open Participation contest ('GHOP') is going to run again this year in December starting around Dec 7th. Closer to December we will start talking about suggestions and thoughts on how to make GHOP work well for the PSF and Python.

What's that?

If you're not familiar with GHOP, it is a contest framework that lets Google pay students for doing small units of work (coding, testing, doc writing, etc.) on a wide variety of projects. It was a success for the PSF last time, in that tons of doc changes and test fixes got committed to core, many other projects benefitted, and most of the people involved had a pretty good time.

However, before GHOP can run again, the organizers (Google + GHOP enthusiasts) need help with the Melange application used to drive the contest. Since it's written in Python/Django, they hope the Python community can help out.

Volunteering

The best way to help with Melange is by joining the melange dev mailing list and research the areas where melange could use some help.

Titus Brown has also posted additional information to his blog about what Melange is and the sort of help needed, and an upcoming team meeting on IRC.

Buildbot Champion Needed

The Python buildbots have been switched off. The reason for this is that there is nobody to manage them, and configuration changes would be required (along with continuous management) for the buildbots to be restarted.

If you'd like to help Python's continuous integration process, please drop an email to pydotorg at python dot org.

EDIT: the buildbots referred to are the community buildbots used to run tests for specific projects. The primary need is for people to donate, and actively manage, build slaves.

Call for Tutorials -- PyCon 2010

The period to submit proposals for PyCon 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) is now open and will close on October 18. Tutorials are 3-hour long classes on a specific Python technique, package or technology and are taught by members of the Python community. If you have knowledge in a particular topic and would like to be considered to teach a class we invite you to submit a proposal outlining the material you would like to cover. Once we receive your proposal, we will "score" it based on content and then select 24 classes (subject to change) for presentation.

Class instructors will be paid $1000.00 per class. If a class has more than one teacher, the fee will be split between them.

Interested? Click on over to the Tutorial Proposal Page to see more details, examples of classes that have been requested in the past (though you are free to submit a proposal on anything Python), an example proposal and an empty template to help you prepare your own proposal. Once complete, email your proposal to pycon-tutorials@python.orgso we can get it out to the evaluation committee and get you on your way to being a PyCon instructor.

Questions? You can contact us at the PyCon Email List (pycon-tutorials@python.org) and we will get back with you.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Greg Lindstrom, Tutorial Coordinator for PyCon 2010 (Atlanta)

PSF Helps Sponsor 3 Conferences

In their August board meeting, the PSF's board of directors voted to sponsor three conferences. Each conference will receive US$750. The three conferences are:

• PyCon 2009 Argentina, September 4-5 2009, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• DjangoCon, September 8-12, Portland OR, USA.
• Kiwi PyCon 2009, November 7-8 2009, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Call for proposals -- PyCon 2010

Submission Due date: October 1st, 2009

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something new to hundreds of people, face to face.

Previous PyCon conferences have had a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad range of subjects and case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers and come from a myriad of backgrounds. Some are new speakers, some are old speakers. Everyone is welcome so bring your passion and your code! We're looking to you to help us top the previous years of success PyCon has had.

PyCon 2010 is looking for proposals to fill the formal presentation tracks. The PyCon conference days will be February 19-22, 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia, preceded by the tutorial days (February 17-18), and followed by four days of development sprints (February 22-25).

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted through October 1st, with acceptance notifications coming out on November 15th. For the detailed call for proposals, please see the submission information on the PyCon site.

For more details about the conference, see the main site. Videos of talks from previous years are available on http://pycon.blip.tv

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!