CSA goes to PSF Brochure Creators

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation award Armin Stross-Radschinski and Jan Ulrich Hasecke the 1st Qtr 2015 PSF Community Service Award for their work on creating the PSF Python Brochure.

For the last several years, a dedicated team has toiled in obscurity on a task they knew to be important for the future of a programming language they loved, but at the same time, one that many thought would be a fool’s errand and would never pay off. These intrepid visionaries kept going, through thick and thin; through difficulties getting stories, legal permissions, and sponsors; through naysayers and those who said, again and again, that it was useless, since winter is coming (or something similar); through lions, and tigers and . . . ! Ultimately, they produced (drumroll, please) the PSF Brochure!

All kidding aside, the PSF brochure took an enormous amount of work and has been a huge success. It stands as a real-world ambassador for Python, for which we should all be grateful, and of which we should all be aware and proud! The next time one of your relatives, or friend of a friend, or a new acquaintance asks "so why is this open source language you’re spending so much time on such a big deal?" (see fn.* below), you needn’t break a sweat explaining; just hand them the brochure.

And beyond saving individual Pythonistas a lot of time and effort, the brochure, more importantly, conveys to “CIOs and chief developers, scientists and programmers, university lecturers, teachers and students, customers, clients, managers and employees” the benefits, functions, uses, applications, advantages, features, potential, and ease of using Python. 

Armin worked on the design and layout of the brochure, managed the visual aspects of the project, getting the sponsor ads into the brochure, managing the print runs, the project support website, ordering system, payment system, and finally all the shipping of the brochures to various conferences and user groups around the world.

Jan Ulrich was the main editor of the brochure content and worked with the sponsor story authors to create interesting stories. He also wrote the editorial parts of the brochure: the intro and the import success sections.

They both also helped with finding good success stories and sponsors, a task which took more time and effort than originally anticipated. According to PSF Director, Marc-Andre Lemburg, who headed up the project, 

Armin and Jan Ulrich both put a huge amount of work into the creation of the brochure. Armin on the visual and production side, Jan Ulrich on the editorial and content side. Without their efforts and passion, we would not have succeeded running this four year project to completion.”

You can find more information about the project on the wiki page, the support website, and by reading previous posts to this blog: PSF Brochure, Brochure Sold Out.

footnote*:  a real question really asked by real relatives!

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

PSF Python Brochure: Get your free copy at PyCon 2015

PSF Python Brochure PDF (low resolution version)

After having distributed the first 5,000 copies of the PSF Python Brochure to Python conferences and user groups around the world in the last 12 months, we have now finished the second print run with another 5,000 copies just in time for PyCon 2015 in Montreal.

Many thanks go to JetBrains for jumping in as additional ad sponsor to help finance the printing and community order shipping costs for this second print run. We would also like to thank all our initial sponsors and contributors for their hard work.

Promoting Python to new audiences

The feedback we have received for the brochure was positive all around.

Conference attendees were really happy to be able to easily show and prove how Python changes the world, to make the point that learning and using Python is a good investment.

The brochure helps them in promoting Python in their local and professional communities, especially to the many non-technical people we cannot easily reach with our python.org web site.

Get your brochure copy

Come and get your copy at the Python Software Foundation booth (booth number 101) at PyCon 2015 in Montreal.

If you cannot fetch your hard copy in person, you can order copies from our project page:

1. free Community Orders for conferences and user groups
2. paid Company Orders for companies and organizations

The costs for the community orders are sponsored through sponsor ads, the PSF and the company orders.

Meet the Team

I was very happy to work together with our core team members in the last 4 years:

• Jan Ulrich Hasecke who was responsible as editor in chief and managed the contribution side of things together with me.
• Armin Stroß-Radschinski and his company evenios which did the initial coordination of funding, layout concept, artwork, production and distribution.

Our efforts have resulted in a brochure of almost fully CC-3.0-BY-SA content that is reusable by the community. The feedback after one year of circulation is quite promising and we are considering doing a second volume with more success stories and use cases, provided we can get enough support from sponsors and the PSF.

More information

More information on the brochure, the idea and people behind it, media data and ordering links are available on our project page:

• PSF Python Brochure Project Website

Marc-Andre Lemburg
Director, Python Software Foundation

Python Events Calendars - Please submit your 2015 events

Introduction

As some of you may know, the PSF has a team of volunteers who are maintaining a set of central Python event calendars. We currently have two calendars in place:

• Python Events Calendar - meant for conferences and larger gatherings focusing on Python or a related technology (in whole or in part)

• Python User Group Calendar - meant for user group events and other smaller local events

The calendars are displayed on http://pycon.org/ and also on the new https://python.org/ website at https://www.python.org/events/python-events/ and https://www.python.org/events/python-user-group/.

You can subscribe to the calendars using iCal and RSS feeds and also embed the calendar widgets on your sites. We have also added a Twitter feed @PythonEvents to get immediate updates whenever a new event is added. Please see our wiki page for details:

   https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar

The calendars are open to the world-wide Python community, so you can have local user group events, as well as regional and international conference events added to the calendars.

News

Looking back on 2014, the calendars have proven to be a great tool for the Python community to connect, with more than 60 conferences and more than a hundred of user group events listed.

We would therefore like to encourage everyone to submit their 2015 events, so that the Python community can get a better overview over what's happening in Python land.

Adding Events

Please see the instructions at https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar#Available_Calendars for details on how to submit an event. We've made it really easy for you: just need to send an email to our team address using the email template we provide for this. Thanks.

PS: Please help spread the word about the calendars - we'll all benefit from knowing more about Python events happening around the world. Feel free to forward this posting to your local user groups and conference teams. Thanks.

Python Events Calendars - Please submit your 2014 events

Introduction

As some of you may know, the PSF has put together a team of volunteers who are maintaining a central Python events calendar. We currently have two calendars in place:

• Python Events Calendar - meant for conferences and larger gatherings focusing on Python or a related technology (in whole or in part)

• Python User Group Calendar - meant for user group events and other smaller local events

The calendars are displayed on http://pycon.org/ and in a smaller version in the sidebar of the http://python.org/ website.

You can subscribe to the calendars using iCal and RSS feeds and also embed the calendar widgets on your sites. Please see our wiki page for details:

   https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEventsCalendar

The calendars are open to the world-wide Python community, so you can have local user group events, as well as regional and international conference events added to the calendars.

News

Created in Oct 2012, the project has proven to be a success as you can see in the past events listed in the calendars.

We would like to encourage everyone to submit their 2014 events, so that the Python community can get a better overview over what's happening in Python land.

Adding Events

If you want to have entries added to those calendars, please write to events@python.org and include the following information:

• Name of the event
• Type of the event (conference, bar camp, user group, etc)
• Focus on Python and approximate size
• URL
• Location and country
• Date and time (if relevant)

For recurring events, please also include a description of the recurrence in a way that's compatible and supported by Google calendars.

PS: Please help spread the word about the calendars - we'll all benefit from knowing more about Python events happening around the world. Feel free to forward this posting to your local user groups and conference teams. Thanks.

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!

Sys Admin Magazine Calls for Papers

Have you used Python to improve your life as a system administrator? (Yes, even system administrators are supposed to have lives). If so then Sys Admin magazine would like you to write an article., and this year's December issue has scripting as its theme. The required lead time for print publications is longer than you might anticipate - see their editorial calendar, and you should also check their author guidelines - so we are publishing this notice early enough to allow plenty of time for planning and writing. Let's see lots of Python articles in that issue. Fame and fortune await you, not to mention the gratitude of your fellow Pythonistas! We understand that the magazine does pay for published articles, but you should agree payment terms and amount with them in advance.