PyCon 2016: A look back, my take away, and thank you!

Portland, Oregon
photo credit: A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

A quick look back at PyCon 2016

I am writing this during my flight home to Chicago as I reminisce about PyCon, which officially ended yesterday in Portland, Oregon. This was yet another successful conference! We had over 3200 pythonistas check in! The 2016 tutorials and talks sold out in March, which is much sooner than previous conferences. Both committees did a great job reviewing and providing guidance to those that needed it. Personally I only found time to watch Lars' talk, but thanks to our efficient AV crew, I will watch the rest in the comfort of my home over the next few weeks. Hearing the positive feedback from our sponsors, even when logistical issues popped up, tells me the companies that helped make PyCon happen, are just as dedicated to our community as we are. I appreciate their support and understanding. 

PyCon 2016 was my ninth PyCon. I have enjoyed organizing each one of those nine conferences. Over the last nine years I have seen the Python community grow and become a respected community. PyCon is, for many, the central time of the year and I know it is for me and the PSF. Through our learning experiences at PyCon, we are able to help the Python community all around the world. We are able to offer others insight on conference childcare, our financial aid system, and volunteer involvement amongst other things. We also learn from others within our community and welcome guidance for how processes could be more effective and less overwhelming. On a larger scale, PyCon's revenue helps us (the PSF) fund hundreds of other PyCons and teaching workshops around the world per year. But those are not the only ways that PyCon impacts our community.

My main take away

I have noticed that it is easier for us to improve and grow as a community when we meet in person from time to time. Over the years I have learned through my own experiences that emailing about community relations is not always easy nor productive. When I come to PyCon and see the many interactions, I understand the reasons why conferences are so vital to any community. When we are face to face, we are able to put our differences and opinions aside. It is easier for us to put ourselves into someone else's shoes. When we find common ground, we become a stronger community. Watching Twitter the last few days has been my evidence for this happening at PyCon. I have seen so many moving "good-byes" and appreciations for our community. I have seen attendees publicly thanking our community for its openness and acceptance. Witnessing this energizes me and inspires me to further support the community through my PSF and PyCon work. Thank you PyCon 2016 for motivating me and making me a stronger individual in so many ways. Let us keep this inspirational motivation going all year round!

My long list of thank yous

• Betsy Waliszewski (psf event coordinator): Welcome to the PSF & PyCon community! Thank you for all of the time and energy you put into the pre-planning and onsite work. Having you at PyCon 2016 was a tremendous help that I have never had before. I look forward to developing your role as event coordinator!
• Kurt Kaiser (psf treasurer): Thank you for all of the work you do for PyCon, especially for financial aid. The work you do impacts hundreds of PyCon goers every year.
• Brandon Rhodes (conference chair): Thank you for being such a wonderful person. It was a pleasure working with you and seeing the way you work. Working with you has taught me much more than you know.
• Ruben Orduz, Carol Willing, Allen Downey (tutorial chairs): Thank you for all of your work reviewing tutorial proposals and helping those that needed guidance.
• Ned Jackson Lovely, Karen Rustad Tölva (program chairs), and the program committee: Thank you for all of your work reviewing hundreds of talks. Thank you for coming together as a community when needed. I admire your strength and ability to work through certain situations.
• Ashwini Oruganti and LVH (financial aid chairs): Thank you for continuing to improve our financial aid process. I know this task needed a lot of time, but we will continue to work to make it better for the volunteers as well as the recipients. 
• Barry Warsaw and Larry Hastings (language summit chairs): Thank you for working to put together a great language summit. I look forward to seeing the evolvement of the summit and the python language.
• Chalmer Lowe, Jessica Ingrassellino, Ria Baldevia (education summit chairs): Thank you for continuing to grow the education summit. This year, the event was a huge success and I look forward to what it will bring to PyCon 2017!
• Rami Chowdhury and Yarko Tymciurak (volunteer chairs): Thank you for helping organize our volunteer efforts. Our volunteers make our conference significant and special. I am sure they all appreciate you two also :)
• Felix Crux (mobile guide chair): Thank you for helping with the mobile guide. Your attention to detail helped us put together an awesome guide that many attendees took advantage of.
• Anna Ossowski, Kinga Kięczkowska and Hobson Lane (open space chairs): Thank you for putting so much effort into improving Open Spaces. I look forward to seeing what you will bring to 2017!
• David Wolever and Julia Duimovich (session staff chairs): The work you two put forth onsite is immeasurable. Without you both, the talks would not happen like clock work! The session chairs give our speakers the attention they deserve. Thank you all who volunteered to be a session chair and/or runner!
• Brian Costlow (CART coordinator): Thank you for taking on this task this year. Your thorough feedback will definitely help us make the process better going forward!
• Hannes Hapke and Gustavo Pinto (poster session chairs): I enjoyed seeing the posters get so much attention this year. Thank you for making that event run so smoothly!
• Lynn Root and Thursday Bram (lightning talk chairs): Thank you for putting together the lightning talks daily and moderating the 5 minute talks. 
• Don Sheu and Yannick Gingras (startup row chairs): Thank you for working so hard to give startups a chance to market their work and to meet awesome pythonistas!
• Mathieu Leduc-Hamel and Nick Lang (5k coordinators): Mathieu - thank you for helping us pre-plan the 5k. Also, your dedication to wake up that early and get everyone organized is appreciated! Nick - thank you for helping us onsite and giving us pointers on how we can improve the process!
• Doug Napoleone, Jackie Kazil and Lynn Root (pyladies auction chairs): Thank you for making the PyLadies Auction such a fun event and raising so much money for a great cause.
• Luke and Meagan Sneeringer (young coder setup and other volunteer tasks): Thank you for all of your support onsite. Having you both there makes us a stronger team. I really appreciate you both being up so early every day to help registration!
• Kushal Das and Naomi Ceder (sprint chairs): Thank you for the help you both provided to get the sprinters informed and organized. Your work at the Sprints impacts so many in our community!
• Barbara Shaurette and Andrew Dupont (young coder teachers): Thank you for staying strong and teaching the Young Coders classes this year. Your dedication is appreciated by me and the children! 
• Noah Kantrowitz (general volunteer): Thank you for just being there to help us with random tasks that needed attention. Having someone there with institutional knowledge that can jump in to help with anything is very useful.  
• Jon Henner (accessibility chair): It was unfortunate that you could not join us onsite, but we look forward to seeing you at 2017! Thank you for working with us to make PyCon more accessible. I am grateful for your guidance and I look forward to seeing the impact you will have on PyCon 2017.
• Jessica McKellar (diversity chair): Thank you for helping PyCon increase its diversity year after year! I look forward to seeing what 2017 will bring!
• Paul Hildebrandt (swag coordinator): Not only do you bring awesome gifts for our speakers year after year, but you also dedicate so much time to get swag organized and distributed. We are all thankful for you!

The PSF has hired an IT Manager!

We are pleased to announce that the PSF has hired a part-time Infrastructure Manager. Please join us in welcoming Mark Mangoba!

Mark has a background in IT management and has experience with non-profits. Mark is excited to be part of the team and is ready to lead new PSF infrastructure projects and better support the community volunteers leading existing ones. In his own words, "I look forward to working with our infrastructure team of volunteers to optimize, streamline processes, and to bring enterprise level tech support to the services we provide to the Python community". 

In the coming months, Mark will work on documentation for our infrastructure setup and improvements to the PSF voting process. Later this year, he will work on python.org improvements. It takes a while for any new employee to learn the ropes, but Mark has not wasted any time. He has jumped right in, getting to know our volunteers and working with the PSF. Mark expressed that "its been an amazing experience so far working with the PSF and I am glad to be a part of it!". 

The PSF has visited the idea of improving Python.org usability and our voting system before. We have made incremental improvements, but we didn't have the resources to fully examine all of the existing issues, let alone complete all of them. With Mark on the team, we'll be better equipped to face our current and future challenges.

With our growing team, I'm confident that the PSF will continue to make a positive impact on the Python community in 2016 and beyond. I look forward to working with Mark and seeing all of the wonderful goals he'll help us achieve. 

Welcome to the PSF, Mark!

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 Job Board - Call for volunteers

Dear Python Community,

for many years, the Python Job board was run by volunteers - most of the time by just one volunteer at a time until they moved on to spend their time on other things. We've now reached such a point again.

In these years, the volume on the job board has significantly increased, as it got more and more popular. It is now at around 2-5 postings per day and most of those positions get filled quickly
- which is an indication of how useful this service is to the Python community.

To scale up and revive the job board, the PSF would now like to setup a *team of volunteers* to run the job board and this is our call for help.

How does the job board work ?

At the moment, the job board is maintained on the legacy site , but since we've launched our brand new website, we'd like to move the job board over to that site.

Instead of the repository based approach used on the old site, the new site has database support to aid in more easily processing and filing job listings.

There's a job board mailing list which helps coordinate the task of reviewing and filing job offers. Currently, all job submissions get sent to this mailing list, but with the job board app, the submission process can be moved over to the website's database.

What does it take to run the job board ?

You have to review the job postings, request changes if they are too long, don't clearly state the need for Python skills, or have quality issues.

After review, the job board app will then allow posting the jobs on the website by simply setting the status to published.

Communication with the submitters is usually done by email and via the mailing list, so all team members can see the communication and help out if necessary.

Please note: This is just a high level overview. The details need to be hashed out by the new team.

Does the job board app work already ?

It does, but is disabled at the moment due to lack of volunteers.

Since the site just launched there may also well be some issues with the job board app.

On the positive side there's a lot happening around the site at the moment, so if you have change requests, these will usually be implemented quickly - or you can jump in, hack on the job board app and submit a pull request yourself:

• https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/tree/master/jobs

These are exciting times and this is your chance to make a difference !

Ok, I like new challenges - where do I sign up ?

Great :-) Please write to jobs@python.org

I have a question...

If you have questions, you can write to the jobs list at jobs@python.org or the PSF board at psf@python.org.

Many thanks,
Marc-Andre Lemburg
Director, Python Software Foundation