Duties & Responsibilities Of PSF Directors
In a nutshell, the Directors work to fulfill the mission of the PSF; we take responsibility for moving Python and the PSF forward. The formal responsibilities of Directors and Officers are listed in the bylaws, articles V and VI. Please see the minutes of the monthly Board of Directors meetings for specific actions and decisions taken.
The PSF's Directors and Officers conduct business via monthly meetings (one hour on IRC) and an active mailing list. We discuss the work being done and the work to be done, and Directors vote on resolutions.
The position of Director is currently unpaid, purely volunteer. Certain Officers (Treasurer and Secretary) do receive a nominal salary.
There are two sides to a Director's responsibilities:
- Regular/adminstrative tasks to keep the PSF's legal standing healthy, and to respond to things like requests to use trademarks or questions about the licensing of Python.
- Special projects, the most neglected of which include general funding raising, reviving our grants process, and doing something about the fact that python.org is not really being maintained.
We need both people who can learn over time about the PSF so they can eventually take over more of (1), and we need people willing and capable of helping with some aspect of (2).
Obviously, some of (2) could be done outside of being a Director of the PSF, but typically some PSF-level leadership is needed even for more general things like the python.org maintenance quandary.
While we have 8 Directors now, we need more because we have found it's the Directors and Officers that do most of the work and as volunteers we're simply not finding enough time to take care of everything. The bigger the Board, the more gets done.
A Director's physical location is not an overriding factor. All of our monthly meetings are virtual; we meet on IRC. We only meet face-to-face once per year, at PyCon, and even then, it's rare for all the Directors to attend. We currently have Directors in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Germany. Having Directors in other parts of the world and other time zones may pose a logistical problem, but this will be worked around.
The time commitment is up to you -- what you want to work on, and how much time do you want to spend on it. Some activities are heavy, others aren't; take your pick. Attending the monthly Board meetings is extremely important -- we need a majority of Directors in attendance in order to acheive quorum and pass any resolutions.
The PSF-Board mailing list typically sees about two or three messages a day, but it can peak at ten or twenty around PyCon, when the members' meeting is held and we have major business to deal with.