How Useful is the Python Job Board?

A service that the PSF has run for a very long time now is the Python Job Board. This allows any potential employer with a requirement for Python skills to post a free advertisement. The service is free because it is primarily intended to benefit Python community members. Employers are encouraged, but not required, to contribute to the Foundation.

So what I'd like to know is this: how useful is that service? If you have ever found the Job Board helpful, as either employee or employer, or even just to keep an eye on the Python employment market, please post a brief comment here letting us know what the Board did for you.

Employers and agents: please read this page before submitting jobs: the Board is run by volunteers, and you can make their task easier.

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!

In Search of Success Stories

The PSF is looking for information about successful uses of Python in order to create an updated list of success stories and find organizations that might be interested in sponsoring activities for the community. If you know of a company that uses Python for any purpose, please take a few minutes to answer the questions on our short survey. You don't have to work at an organization to tell us about how they use Python! Don't worry about duplicates, either, we'll take care of them once we have all of the data collected.

The answers to this survey will be kept private. If you still don't want to identify yourself, no problem! We just want to know where Python is being used, so responding still helps us out.

If (and only if) you decide to include contact information and you give the PSF permission, we may use the contacts provided to find sponsors for the PSF and Python-related events (PyCon, EuroPython, DjangoCon, etc).

Individual answers from this survey will never be published.

So please, take the survey now!

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.

Second-Quarter Community Service Awards

The Foundation tries to recognize those whose assistance has been significant in its growth and development as well as its day-to-day operations. This quarter's Community Service Award winners are two particularly noteworthy examples.

Stephan Deibel Stephan was last year's outgoing chairman after four years in harness. This year Stephan has stepped down as a director, after helping to ensure that the Foundation's bylaws were reorganized. Stephan developed pythonology.com to promote Python, and his work as founder of Wingware and a developer of the Wing IDE has also had a significant impact.

Sean Reifschneider Sean has master-minded the PyCOn networking every time it's worked, and without the support of this always helpful and reliably competent tummy.com director our conferences simply would not have been the same.

Our thanks and congratulations go to both these recipients.

"conferences" new mailing list created

The conferences@python.org mailing list is for open discussion of issues related to Python conferences. All conferences are welcome: established and planned, worldwide. The archive is open to all.

Subscribe here.

Please spread the word to conference mailing lists and to anyone who would be interested.

PSF Board & Members' meeting minutes available

The minutes of all 2009 meetings through April were approved at the May Board meeting, and are available here:

• 12 January 2009 Board meeting
• 9 February 2009 Board meeting
• 12 March 2009 Board meeting
• 27 March 2009 Members' meeting at PyCon
• 27 March 2009 Board meeting at PyCon
• 13 April 2009 Board meeting

Previous minutes: Board meetings, members' meetings

PSF Community Awards - March 2009

Sunday, March 29th, at Pycon 2009 in Chicago: On behalf of the PSF Board of Directors, Python BDFL and PSF President Guido van Rossum announced two Python Software Foundation Community Awards.

PSF Community Awards are given semi-regularly, several times each year, to people who have made significant contributions to the broader Python community, helping the Foundation to fulfill its mission. Each prize includes a free PyCon registration and $500 towards travel and hotel.

This time we recognized two people who have helped to make PyCon possible:

Mary Rush has given selflessly for four years now, staffing the registration desk and providing a friendly face for PyCon.

Carl Karsten has been a great asset to PyCon for the last three years. His energy and enthusiasm have helped PyCon reach new highs.

Congratulations and many thanks to Mary and Carl!

Thanks to 2008 Donors

From figures supplied by the Treasurer it appears that the PSF received donations totalling $23,807.65 in 2008. The smallest donation was one cent, and the largest was $2,052. We are grateful for them all. As a non-profit it's important for the Foundation to maintain what's known as the public support ratio, to retain our non-profit status.

I realize that times are hard right now, but if you are feeling at all expansive we really would be grateful to anyone who can make a donation, no matter what the size.

Thanks again to all contributors for your support, and thanks also to those who contributed in other ways by attending conferences, serving on committees and donating their valuable time to help organize PSF activities.