The members of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) have elected a new Board of Directors, consisting of 13 members:
- Raymond Hettinger
- Steve Holden
- Marc-Andre Lemburg
- David Mertz
- Doug Napoleone
- Jesse Noller
- Tim Peters
- Allison Randal
- Jeff Rush
- Greg Stein
- James Tauber
- Martin v. Löwis
- Gloria Willadsen
The 2010 Board of Directors
Raymond Hettinger has been a contributor to the Python core for 10 years, and has worked on many of the standard library modules, including itertools, sets, and collections. He regularly speaks at Python and Open Source conferences around the world. He is currently working on an update to the Python Cookbook, as well as the Python Swallowed Whole book project. In 2009, he lead an ongoing effort to ensure that we have signed contributor agreements from all contributors to Python core or the standard library. Raymond is Director of Technology at SauceLabs and is a Certified Public Accountant.
Steve Holden joined the PSF in 2003, its Board of Directors in 2004, and became Chairman in 2008. He founded and chaired the first Python community conference, establishing PyCon as the premier event for Pythonistas in North America. He again chaired PyCon in 2004 and 2005. He received the Frank Willison Memorial Award in 2007 for his services to the Python community. He is the author of Python Web Programming and for two years wrote the monthly "Random Hits" column in Python Magazine. Steve runs Holden Web LLC, a consulting and training company with a strong Python focus.
Marc-André Lemburg been working with Python since 1993 and on Python since 1997 as core developer. His major contributions include the design for Unicode integration, the codecs subsystem, pybench, and the platform module. From 2002-2004 Marc-André served on the PSF board and was PSF vice president in 2003-2004. He started the Public Support Committee (PSC) as a way of looking for income sources for the PSF. He also initiated the work of having signed Python contributor agreements for all contributors. Marc-André's company eGenix.com provides Python project support and produces several Python extension libraries for working with dates, text processing, and ODBC connectivity.
David Mertz is currently Chair of the PSF's Trademarks Committee, and served as Vice Chair last year. He proposed the adoption of a 2009 diversity statement by the Board. He is a developer and author, most notably of Text Processing in Python and the IBM developerWorks' column Charming Python. He is also co-authoring the updated 3rd Edition of The Python Cookbook. As CTO and board member of the Open Voting Consortium, David advocated for the use of Python to create an Open Source voting platform. For the last couple years, David has been consulting for D.E.Shaw Research, builders of *Anton*, the world's fastest supercomputer for doing computational biochemistry.
Doug Napoleone has developed with Python for the past 10 years and has been active in the community for 7 years. He is the lead developer of the PyCon-tech project, the application for managing most aspects of the PyCon US conference. He is also active on several organizing committees for PyCon US. Doug has worked with and helped organize three local Python user groups.
Jesse Noller is a prominent Python-dev team member, especially noted for his contributions to the multiprocessing module. He has been working with Python for over five years, on a variety of projects including distributed systems and automation frameworks. He writes on his blog and has contributed to Python Magazine as both author and editor. He also chaired the PyCon 2010 Program Committee. Jesse is a Senior Engineer at Nasuni Corporation.
Tim Peters has served on the Board since its inception. He corresponded extensively with Guido about Python's design before its first public release in the early 1990s, and contributed to many areas of the language implementation over the years, especially to optimization of time-critical paths. Other contributions include the first POSIX thread implementation, the first Python port to a 64-bit machine, the Emacs Python mode, The Zen of Python, SpamBayes, doctest, and Python's sorting algorithms.
Allison Randal is architect of the Parrot VM, as well as the lead developer of Pynie (an implementation of Python 3 on Parrot). In addition to sitting on the PSF board, Allison chairs the board of the Parrot Foundation, and is on the board of the Perl Foundation. In 2005, together with Dave Neary of GNOME, she founded FLOSS Foundations to bring together leaders of open source foundations to share resources and knowledge. Allison is currently studying at the University of Bristol in the UK.
Jeff Rush first became involved with Python in 1997 by porting it to OS/2. He started the Dallas Ft. Worth Pythoneers user group in 2005 and co-chaird PyCon in Dallas in 2006 and 2007. Jeff worked for the PSF as Python Advocacy Coordinator in 2006-2007. He frequently gives talks at Python and other Open Source conferences and user group meetings.
Greg Stein is one of the original members who incorporated the PSF, and is a prior Director. In addition to his many contributions to Python, he blogs, works on several Apache projects, the WebDAV specification, and Subversion. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation's board of directors, and was its chair from 2002-2007.
James Tauber has been working with Python for 12 years and open source for 17 years. He is lead developer of Pinax as well as a Django core developer. He was a mentor for the PSF's participants in the Google Summer of Code program from 2005-2007, and an administrator for the project from 2007-2008. He is a frequent conference speaker and currently sits on the PSF Trademarks Committee. James is CEO of Eldarion, a web startup that uses Django and Pinax and helps others do the same.
Martin v. Löwis is a Python core developer. Over the last year, he has been focusing on infrastructure issues such as hardware upgrades, PyPI, the bug tracker, and acting as a liason to the PSF's hosting provider XS4ALL.
Gloria Willadsen has been working with Python for over ten years. She has written online and in articles for The Python Papers and Python Magazine. She also had a regular column called "I Love Python" for DevChix. Gloria teaches tutorials at conferences around the world and has started two apprenticeship groups to teach Python tools and techniques to developers.
The Python Software Foundation
The mission of the PSF:
The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
About the Board
PSF Directors are elected annually and are responsible for managing the business of the foundation, as outlined in the bylaws. They fulfill two responsibilities:
- Completing or overseeing administrative tasks related to the legal standing of the Foundation. These include responding to trademark or licensing queries and monitoring the Foundation's financial health.
- Completing "special projects" such as fund raising, administering grants, and supporting day-to-day operations of the Python community.
A director's specific duties depend on the office and any sub-committee memberships held. The board meets monthly via IRC. Minutes from the meetings are available online. Most Directors are volunteers, although some Officer positions (Treasurer and Secretary) do receive a nominal salary.
