Candidates for the 2008 PSF Board of Directors

The following people have been nominated as Directors of the Python Software Foundation for the term beginning 14 March 2008. Their self-written summaries follow.

Incumbent Directors David Ascher and Andrew Kuchling have decided not to run for the Board this year.

David Goodger

I have been an enthusiastic Pythonista since 1998, and the Python community is very important to me. I was elected as a member of the PSF in 2003. Working with the PSF as a Director is one way for me to contribute to the Free Software movement in general, and to Python and its community in particular.

My contributions to the PSF & the Python community:

  • Creator of Docutils and reStructuredText

  • PEP editor since 2002

  • Python.org maintainer

  • PyCon volunteer since 2004

  • PyCon 2008 Chair

  • PSF Secretary since PyCon 2006, Assistant Secretary in 2005

    As Secretary (and Assistant Secretary before), I maintain the minutes of the Board and Members' meetings, and am in the process of organizing our paper records.

  • PSF Director since PyCon 2006

    As a Director, I continue to propose and take on many tasks. In addition to the regular administrative tasks I work on, ongoing tasks include:

    • Working on some logos for the PSF
    • Establishment of an annual budget, a budget policy, and a strategy/action plan (e.g. a grants process)

My home page.

Brett Cannon

I am running for re-election for the board of the PSF (currently finishing my second term on the board). At the moment I am the executive vice president of the board and the chairman of the Infrastructure committee.

During this past term in office my great accomplishment has been completing the transition of Python's issue tracker from SourceForge to our own infrastructure (having spearheaded the project when I first joined the board).

A rough timeline of my involvement with the Python community:

  • 2002: Active member of python-dev.
  • 2003: Gain commit privileges for Python, join the PSF.
  • 2006: Join the PSF board.

Home page.

Raymond Hettinger

Python contributions:

  • Core Python developer for years (contributing sets/frozensets, itertools, collections, optimizations, etc.)
  • Active member of the community (python-help, python-dev, comp.lang.python, ASPN contributor, PyCon, OSCON, etc.)

Personal Info:

  • Certified Public Accountant
  • Chief Visualation Officer at EWT (Python development)
  • Currently programming at FATTOC working on re-invigorating Psyco

Steve Holden

Python involvement:

  • Established PyCon as the Python community conference, chairing the first three events
  • Author, instructor and correspondent on Python topics (comp.lang.python, "Python Web Programming", columnist for "Python Magazine", various tutorials at PyCon and other conferences)
  • PSF member since 2003, director since 2004

Personal:

Loosely Python-related blog | Vaguely Open Source blog | Yorkshireman in America

Stephan Deibel

I'm the current chairman of the board of the PSF (since 2004) and will be running again as a director. I'm also co-founder of Wingware, maker a commercial IDE for Python, and have been involved with various advocacy related efforts such as the somewhat dated pythonology.org website and the Python Success Stories collection (which are also on python.org). I've been using Python since 1998.

In my past work for the PSF, I've concentrated on trademarks and licensing. I worked with legal counsel on the trademark policy, drafted parts of the license FAQ, and respond to questions on trademarks and licensing that are emailed to the board mailing list.

I've also supported funding of the website redesign (where I also participated as a volunteer), paying nominal salaries for the critical work done by the Treasurer (Kurt Kaiser) and Secretary (David Goodger), funding Jeff Rush in the Python Advocacy Coordinator position, and donating to Python conferences around the world.

Recently, I wrote up an article on the PSF that was just published in volume 2 issue 4 of The Python Papers.

I should note that even if I am reelected to the board, I think it's good time for someone else to take on the role of chairman. While I've done OK with it, there's room for someone with more time, energy, and vision to take the PSF farther than I have been able to.

Tim Peters

I'm running for the PSF Board again as the oldest surviving member of the Institutional Memory Party ;-) Due to family illness, I was mostly inactive in the Python community during 2007, but I at least attended the Board meetings, and like to think I prevented the youngsters on the Board from absconding with all the funds.

I should have more time for Python in 2008, and would like to contribute more of it to PSF work. While it's true that "a vote for Uncle Timmy is a vote for the status quo!", I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. The PSF is financially healthy and, as far as I can tell, has done no harm ;-)

Martin v. Löwis

I'm running for re-election to the board. I want to continue my involvement in the infrastructure committee (where I contributed to the bug tracker migration last year), and hope to find more time for working on the intellectual-property issues.

James Tauber

  • open source developer since 1993
  • Python developer since 1998
  • have led numerous open source projects in Python including Redfoot, Cleese, Leonardo and Pyjamas
  • wrote first Python implementation of numerous standards: TREX (precursor to RELAX NG), Atom Publishing Protocol, Unicode Collation Algorithm
  • PSF mentor for Google Summer of Code 2005, 2006 and 2007
  • PSF administrator for Google Summer of Code 2007
  • participated as a panelist and session chair in PyCon 2007
  • nominated to join PSF membership in 2008
  • Chief Scientist at mValent where I introduced Python as scripting language for large-scale Java-based product (and converted numerous developers to Python in the process)
  • outside of Python have been involved in numerous committees including standards (W3C, OASIS), former member of Apache XML Project Team, UWA Graduates Association (including membership drive and fundraising)

Home page.

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