Improving PSF record-keeping
PSF record-keeping was rather scattered for a long time. The current Secretary, D. Goodger, set out to improve the state of affairs.
J. Hylton, Secretary from 2002-2006, still had some records in his possesion. They've been sent to the current Secretary, and he has begun scanning them and placing them in the Foundation's CVS repository.
D. Goodger also wrote a history of PSF officers & directors: http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/history/
D. Goodger also retrieved minutes from the early members' meetings, including the very first one. Only the minutes of the 2003 meeting are still lost. http://www.python.org/psf/records/members/
Funding actions
$500 one-time grant to assist in funding the Python en Santa Fe (Argentina) meeting Jun 9th, 2007. (http://www.python-santafe.com.ar/) According to Facundo Batista:
It was very successful, around +300 people assisted, and there were a lot of interesting talks (two introductory talks, Turbogears, PyWeek, Zope 3, security, creating 3D games, Plone, automatic security testing, concurrency, and programming the OLPC).
US$1000 to buy swag items for Google Highly Open Participation participants.
1500 Euros for a gold sponsorship of PyConUno (Italy) 2007.
US $2500 to The PyCon UK Society for its use in running PyCon UK 2007.
US$5000 to EuroPython 2007. About 225 people attended the conference.
Funded Jeff Rush as Advocacy Coordinator for 13 months ($4000/month): http://wiki.python.org/moin/AdvocacyAccomplishments lists what was accomplished.
Policy actions
Wrote a trademark policy (http://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) for use of the Python word mark and logo.
Decided upon selection process for Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community (presented at OSCON; the prize is one free registration for OSCON). The 2007 award was to Steve Holden. http://www.python.org/community/awards/frank-willison/
Resolved that the org.python.* Java package name be reserved for use by the Jython project.
python.org actions
Brett Cannon, Martin von Loewis, & the Infrastructure committee launched a new issue tracker at bugs.python.org, importing the existing bugs from SourceForge. The tracker is hosted by Upfront Systems (http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/).
The tracker supports multiple instances of Roundup. A new Jython bug tracker, bugs.jython.org, was launched a few weeks ago.
More memory was added to the python.org servers, supplied by XS4ALL, who is hosting the servers.
Outreach
The PSF again participated in Google's Summer of Code, coordinated by James Tauber. He wrote up a summary of the results: http://www.python.org/psf/reports/gsoc-2007/
The PSF also participated in Google's Highly Open Participation contest (http://pyfound.blogspot.com/2007/11/python-and-google-highly-open.html).
Stephan Deibel wrote a PSF article in the Python Papers (http://pythonpapers.org/). This article is now available at http://www.python.org/psf/summary/.
A. Kuchling went to Penguin Day, a one-day event aimed at non-profit organizations using free software; see http://mail.python.org/mailman/private/psf-members/2007-April/002414.html for notes.
Unresolved issues
We need to find an Assistant Treasurer to serve alongside Treasurer Kurt Kaiser, so that the assistant can learn the ropes and take over whenever Kurt retires. No one has volunteered. What can we do to find someone for this role?
We also need an Assistant Secretary. No one has volunteered for this position either.
The board is discussing a PSF Awards Program. See January 2008 minutes (http://www.python.org/psf/records/board/minutes/2008-01-14/) for summary; a vote was taken on this at the March 10 meeting.
There have been some suggestions to change the PSF's bylaws. S. Holden wrote up a list of clean-ups and simplifications, and S. Deibel proposed changes to how emeritus members are handled. Neither proposal is considered sufficiently complete to be brought to the members at this time.
