Regional Conference Grants

As part of the ongoing work to make Python conferences more widely accessible, the PSF Board has awarded grants to two regional conferences to help with their expenses.

PyCon PL 2009 is being planned for 16-18 October in Ustroń, Poland. The first PyCon PL last year had 130 attendees and 13 separate talks. With the move to the new location this year, Filip Kłębczyk and the other organizers are preparing for at least 160 participants and have added an extra day to allow for more talks. They are also adding a lightning talks session.

The pyArkansas 2009 conference (pyAR) is planned for November 14th. It will be hosted on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas, in the United States. The one day program includes four tracks covering topics ranging from beginning programming to Django and Twisted.

PSF Sponsors SciPy 2009

The Python scientific community has its annual conference in Pasadena CA August 18-23rd. SciPy 2009 has just opened up registration.

The keynote speakers include Peter Norvig and Jon Guyer. A preliminary schedule has been posted on the conference website.

The PSF is pleased to be sponsoring ten students to attend the conference. See the student sponsorship page for more details.

Associate Memberships

Following discussions at EuroPython there has been some talk about the possibility of introducing associate memberships. At present nobody is really clear exactly what such a package would comprise, but it's likely that there'd be a mailing list, a quarterly (printed, snail-mailed) newsletter and perhaps other benefits.

Current evidence is that many people would like to support Python and the Foundation's mission by paying for such an associate membership, and it could also be seen as a "starter grade" for those with ambitions to eventually become full members.

What do you think a PSF Associate Membership should provide, and what should the obligations of membership be (if any)?

Python 3.0 is an ex-release! Long live Python 3.1!

There will be no Python 3.0.2 release or further 3.0.x maintenance/security releases. All users of Python 3.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Python 3.1.