The PSF Board has approved the appointment of Sean Reifschneider as chair of the Infrastructure Committee for 2010-2011. Prior to this, Sean has served as a committee member and handled system adminstration tasks for the python.org servers. He works for tummy.com, a Linux hosting and consulting company, and has years of experience with system administration and hosting.
The Infrastructure Committee
The Infrastructure Committee is responsible for the technical details of the Foundation's presence on the internet. They manage web server space, email, DNS registrations, software application hosting for tools such as bug trackers and PyPI, and all of the other tasks around maintaining a professional presence on the net. If the PSF puts something on the internet, the Infrastructure Committee is involved with it in some way.
The other members of the committee are:
Thomas Wouters is the liaison between the PSF and XS4ALL, the Dutch ISP that generously hosts many of the servers for python.org. Thomas has been contributing time and energy since the servers were originally moved from CNRI to XS4ALL, and still handles a lot of the on-site hardware service when needed.
Martin v. Löwis handles a lot of the system administration tasks on the PSF's servers. He manages DNS and development tools like subversion, Buildbot, and the Roundup issue tracker instances for Python-dev, Jython, and setuptools. Martin is also the primary developer of the software behind the Python Package Index, PyPI.
Andrew Kuchling joined the committee during the migration from SourceForge to Roundup several years ago. He also wrote the templating system used for python.org content, and is still involved with the content management.
Barry Warsaw is another long-time member of the committee. He has been intimately involved in the email infrastructure, including the development and configuration of the Mailman mailing list management software. Today he acts primarily as an advisor to the other team members.
Volunteers
Besides the formal committee members, there are two teams of volunteers who do a lot of the day-to-day work for us.
The postmaster team, including Brad Knowles, Skip Montanaro, Ralf Hildebrandt, Patrick Ben Koetter, and Martijn Pieters, run all of the email services for python.org. That includes individual accounts and aliases for contributors with @python.org addresses along with the Mailman mailing lists and an NNTP-SMTP gateway for the newsgroups. Their motto is "Low spam, high deliverability!"
The pydotorg-www group serves as webmaster for python.org. Their responsibilities include typical webmaster duties, content management, and wiki curation. For example, Michael Foord helps with moderation of the python-dev mailing list as well as editing website content, including managing the Planet Python feeds; Martin Thomas adminsters the Job Board and news sections of the site; and Aahz triages and responds to email sent to the webmaster alias and handles some of the site updates directly.
Upcoming Initiatives
The Infrastructure Committee has several projects planned for this year:
- Establishing a ticketing system for managing internal Foundation business (not Python development). The Board and designated committees will use the new system for managing tasks and project plans.
- Complete the move from Subversion to Mercurial for Python development, including any changes necessary to host the new repositories.
- Seek an increase of our bandwidth to better handle recent spikes in traffic to the python.org sites, especially from users downloading new releases of the installation program for the interpreter.
Volunteering
To volunteer to help with the pydotorg-www team, see the Maintenance and Administration page for instructions.
If you're interested in volunteering to help with the Infrastructure Committee, contact Sean directly at jafo at tummy.com.
