PSF Members (Nominated & Sponsor)

New PSF members need to know about the following:

• The psf-members-announce mailing list, which is a low-traffic list used only for PSF internal announcements.
• The psf-members mailing list, which is used for PSF internal discussions.
• The psf-board-public mailing list, which is used for board discussions which are not legally or otherwise sensitive, allowing them to be shared with the wider PSF membership.
• This PSF member's wiki. In order to get access, you need to create a profile, and then write to the wiki admins (e.g. goodger@python.org) to get your user name added to the MembersGroup page.

The mailing lists and the members' wiki are restricted to PSF members only as discussions of nominees, proposals and other items under consideration by the PSF may be sensitive or otherwise not yet ready for exposure to a wider audience. Particular pages on the wiki are flagged for public access when these concerns do not apply (registered PSF members can edit this page to see an example of how to make pages public).

To quote the mission statement, the aim of the PSF is "to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers." Potential members are nominated because they're already helping with this mission, so the day to day contribution of many PSF members is simply to continue with what they were already doing.

A key additional responsibility shared by all PSF members is to participate in PSF voting activities, primarily the approval (or disapproval) of new nominated and sponsor members and the election of board members. From time-to-time, other motions may be put before the full membership for a vote, but the day-to-day activities of the PSF are generally handled by the PSF board and the committee members. Voting is primarily electronic these days - it is important that members at least submit their ballots (even if they explicitly abstain from all motions) to ensure quorum is reached. (All votes, including abstentions, are counted for purposes of reaching quorum, but only yes and no votes are subsequently counted for purposes of approving or disapproving of motions).

PSF members can also choose to help out in other ways. The PSF are stewards of the Python intellectual property and deal with many of the non-programming tasks that help guarantee Python has a bright future: keeping the servers running, handling trademark violations, funding Python sprints, administering PyCon, etc. PSF members that wish to be more active in these kinds of tasks may choose to join one of the PSF committees (e.g. the trademarks committee, the outreach and education committee or the infrastructure committee) or eventually put their names forward as potential board members or officers of the foundation (see the additional info below).

The existing members that nominated new members for PSF membership (or the board in the case of sponsor members) should point them towards this page when informing them of their successful nomination.

Committee Pages/Sites

The list of currently active committees is at http://www.python.org/psf/committees/

Some supplementary links:

• Outreach & Education committee: http://psf-outreach.org/ (Help needed getting this populated!)
• Sprints committee: http://pythonsprints.com/

Board Members (Directors) & Officers

New Board members (Directors) and Officers should:

• Join the psf-board mailing list: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psf-board

• Subscribe to the "PSF Board" Google Calendar.

• Note the following wiki pages:

  Agenda for Board meetings: http://wiki.python.org/psf/BoardAgenda

  List of action items: http://wiki.python.org/psf/Action_Items

• Note the schedule of meetings:

  Our regular meetings are held on IRC on the #psf channel on the third Monday of each month at 12:00pm (noon) Eastern time (currently 16:00 UTC).

• There is an overview of the Duties & Responsibilities Of PSF Directors here: http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSoftwareFoundation/DutiesAndResponsibilitiesOfDirectors

A wiki admin should add the Director's/Officer's wiki account to the "BoardGroup" page: http://wiki.python.org/psf/BoardGroup