Revision 8 as of 2018-05-03 02:05:15

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Candidates for the 2018 PSF Board of Directors

The following people have been nominated as Directors of the Python Software Foundation for the term beginning in June 11, 2018. Their self-written summaries follow. The specific dates of relevance to the election are:

This is a notification of the 2018/19 board of director election timeline:
  • Open call for Board Director Nominations: May 1, 2018
  • Board Director Nomination cut-off: May 25, 2018 23:59:59 AoE[1]
  • Voter application cut-off date: May 25, 2018 23:59:59 AoE
  • Voting start date: June 1, 2018 AoE
  • Voting end date: June 10, 2018 23:59:59 AoE

[1]The above closing times are given in the "Anywhere on Earth" (AOE) timezone.

There are currently 3 open seats on the Board of Directors (last changed in the 2017 PSF Members vote).

Links

Registering as a PSF Board candidate

To register as a candidate for the Board elections, add your nomination to this page using the format listed at the end of the page. We'd like as many groups within the PSF membership as possible to have the option of electing candidates that can directly represent their interests in Board discussions, so if there's someone you'd particularly like to have represent you, you may want to consider getting in touch with them and (politely!) asking if they'd be interested in nominating themselves.

Read through the Letter from PSF Director of Operations - Expectations of Board Directors & Duties and Responsibilities of Directors. Please note that the PSF bylaws require that Board candidates disclose significant organizational affiliations (for example, their employer).

Note

Please follow the instructions on the FrontPage to gain wiki edit access.

Registering to vote on PSF ballots

While PSF Membership is open to anyone that chooses to join, Basic Members are not entitled to vote on PSF ballots, including Board elections. In accordance with the bylaws, the following PSF Members are entitled to vote on PSF ballots:

To register as a Managing or Contributing member, refer to this post on the PSF blog.

To register as a Supporting Member, please use the PSF Associate Membership site.

Outgoing Directors

The following members of the 2017/18 Board are stepping down due to their term ending and are not re-running:

Please use the following format:

Candidate Name
==============

*2016 Board Member.* or *New Board Member.*

Description.

Affiliation: ...

Christopher Neugebauer

New Board Member.

Background

I’m an Australian Python developer, speaker, and serial conference organiser. These days, I'm based in Petaluma, California, USA.

I’ve been closely involved in PyCon Australia for many years, including as a lead organizer, and also as their lead for outreach and inclusion. During this time, PyCon Australia grew from 240 attendees to upwards of 600, and the financial aid we’ve been able to offer has grown to $20,000 (or close to 10% of the total conference budget).

I'm director of North Bay Python, a Python conference based in Petaluma, north of the San Francisco Bay. Running on a shoestring budget, we built a conference – from the ground up – that delivers on the Python community's values of inclusion and diversity: in our first year, we paid out more than 25% of our budget in outreach and inclusion activities, and more than 40% of our speakers were not men.

I’ve served as a Council Member for Linux Australia, an organisation that provides financial, legal, and technical support for open source-related conferences including PyCon Australia. In that role, I helped to develop and implement a policy for making sure our events are run in a sustainable fashion, and made sure that Linux Australia continued to be a healthy organisation.

Since 2015, I’ve served on the PSF’s Grants Working Group. We’ve helped substantially grow the PSF’s capacity to offer grants to important Python projects throughout the world. In my role in that working group, I've taken a strong interest in guiding policy around the PSF's ability to support events and causes that help promote the PSF's mission throughout the world.

What I want to get done

Through the PSF's grants program, we've done some great work making Codes of Conduct an expected part of Python events throughout the world, but this is only one step in promoting the PSF's mission of growing a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

The PSF has other means to promote diversity, through their trademarks and grants policies, and I've been working in this space within the PSF for some time now. I think now's the right time for me to promote this at a board level: we need to establish diversity and inclusion targets for all events that seek our support, and we can achieve this now.

Secondly, the PSF needs sustainable funding beyond PyCon US, and the Python community needs more events than just PyCon US. The PSF can play a vital role in empowering people who want to run local events, and this can provide both a vital revenue source for the PSF, and a more diverse set of events to grow our community.

In summary, this is what I hope to achieve in my first year:

  • Work at strengthening the PSF's policies around grants and trademark licensing, to ensure that events aligned with the PSF work in support of the PSF's mission
  • Build the PSF's capacity for fiscal sponsorship to empower the community to run projects through the PSF, and raise funds for the PSF
  • Help identify diverse sources of funding for the PSF, to reduce our reliance on PyCon US's success to deliver the remainder of the PSF's goals

Where to find me

Affiliations

  • Shutterstock, Inc. (Employer)
  • PSF Grants working group
  • North Bay Python Project Leadership Committee, at Software Freedom Conservancy
  • PSF Fellow

Katie McLaughlin

New Board Member. (Nominated by Trey Hunner)

Trey: I nominate Katie McLaughlin for the PSF Board of Directors. I have witnessed Katie enthusiastically greet new community members at conferences and patiently shepherd first-time open source contributors during BeeWare sprints. Katie is a concerned and compassionate Python community member. Katie wears many hats but also seems to have a good understanding of her own boundaries, both qualities that are helpful for PSF directors.

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