Python Software Foundation News: advocacy

Showing posts with label advocacy. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Highly Contagious: Python Spreads through South America!

As you may recall, I previously posted about a wonderful project in South America that has been funded in part by the PSF. That first blog post described the Python events that Manuel Kaufmann had organized in Argentina and his plans to move on to Paraguay and then Bolivia. Please check it out at Python in Argentina.

I’m very happy to report that Manuel Kaufmann has continued to be busy bringing Python events and knowledge to more and more people, as he left Argentina for Paraguay. He recently reached out to us to tell about his experiences. Here's a recap:

First of all, PyDay Asunción took place as scheduled on March 28th. This event was the culmination of Manuel’s efforts in creating the brand new Python Paraguay community. His Paraguayan adventure began by meeting with people from different Software Libre groups (PHP, OpenStreetMap, Sugar, Google Code In, etc) in an attempt to merge them into a new community focussed on Python. Their first meeting had 13 attendees who immediately began organizing for PyDay Asunción.

This first PyDay (or mini-conference) in Paraguay was a great success. Over 100 people with varying levels of programming and Python skill attended. Manuel was pleased to report that among the presenters were a 17 year old boy and a young woman–clearly the diversity of our community is growing demographically as well as geographically. In addition, the importance of this event was marked by the Paraguayan government, who declared PyDay Asunción an official Technology and Cultural Event. Congratulations to Manuel and everyone who worked to make this a reality.You can read more about the day (in Spanish) at Manuel’s own blog post.

PyDay Asunción

Of course, as before, the momentum didn’t stop at one event. With a new community formed, new events were bound to occur. It always amazes me the way hard work and a good idea will grow. In fact, Manuel reported that some of the attendees of last month’s PyDay Formosa, Argentina were so enthused that they travelled 400 km to attend and help out at PyDay Paraguay. That kind of passion and commitment says a lot about the quality of these events and the desire for more. Perhaps Python is contagious!

Similarly, Manuel tells us that a talk at PyDay Paraguay gave rise to another event: HACKÁra Asuka Guaraní: an event to translate the Sugar platform to Guaraní. This event was organized by Ricardo Saucedo and Martín Abente (one of the members of Python Paraguay). In fact, the idea of this event came out of Martin’s talk at PyDay Asunción. There were around 15 teenagers including 6 girls and a teacher who helped with the translation into their native language. According to Manuel, this potentially could lead to many people who don't speak Spanish being able to learn programming.

Manuel has no intention of slowing down. Although his original plan was to spend three months on the project, he hasn’t yet made it to Bolivia, so he’s going to extend his time commitment. One problem he’s having is with his car. Apparently it needs quite a bit of TLC to keep it going. If you’d like to help with that, Manuel is accepting donations at Manuel’s Project. Since a little goes a long way to keep a car running, I hope you'll join me in giving him the cost of a latte or two.

In any case, his project appears unstoppable, with many future events either completely set to go or in the planning stages. The following events are already scheduled for May:

PyDay at Apóstoles Misiones, Argentina on 7 May
20-22 May - Educational Track for secondary students at SciPy LA 2015, Posadas, Misiones, Argentina (http://scipyla.org/conf/2015/)
PyDay at Encarnación, Misiones, Paraguay on 30 May.

In addition, Manuel has some exciting ideas for future projects, such as creating a Robot Course for kids, and bringing Facundo Batista (one of the best Argentinian Python hackers) to Asunción, Paraguay to develop a 3-days course. These are in the early planning stages, but if I know Manuel, I think we can look forward to hearing about their successful completion in the future.

If you’d like to follow Manuel’s travel plans, or provide some support, please visit his website.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.

Thursday, April 09, 2015

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:

free Community Orders for conferences and user groups
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

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

python.org is getting a makeover!

It is with great pride that on behalf of the Python Software Foundation and the community as a whole, I am pleased to announce that the official Python.org website, sub-sites, and back-end architecture are getting a total makeover.

Introduction

Python has grown significantly in the last few years, both in terms of audience and the amount of topical information about it. This abundance of information has outgrown the current website’s taxonomy and fundamental design.

The key goal of the redesign project is to update Python’s official web presence with an eye towards better organizing the information we have today, and expect to add in the future.

The end result aims to help our audience find the information they need whether it’s official information like downloads and documentation, or resources from our vibrant community.

Although the current implementation of the Python website has served its purpose over the years, the time has come for the site to progress and complement the growth and maturity of the language itself as well as the vibrancy of the community.

There’s a lot we want to achieve

Modern design and experience
Concise and intuitive navigation
Showcase the simplicity and elegance of the language
Attract and convert potential Python users and Python Software Foundation sponsors
Represent our vibrant, active community
Make it easy for a wide range of contributors to add content
Enhance the visibility of the PSF and its sponsors
Provide examples of success stories
Enhance the visibility of alternate implementations
Stable and scalable infrastructure

The redesign involves some tall tasks. From the fresh and modern UI/UX to the online and offline content editing features, no aspect of the project is to be taken lightly, or even incrementally. Such approaches have stalled and ultimately failed in the past, and rapidly outstrip the free time our community of volunteers can dedicate to the project.

The Process

This is a process that started over two years ago with the drafting of the of the Request For Proposals. This year we issued it publicly, and since that time the psf-redesign team grew to include Nick Coghlan, Doug Hellmann, Idan Gazit, Steve Holden, Brian Curtin, Andrew Kuchling, Issac Kelly, Katie Cunningham, Noah Kantrowitz and others.

The team received seven bids in total - all of them which included strong points and compelling stories. The team deliberated, ranked, discussed, and asked questions of the bidders, working through the bids for several months. We were constantly impressed by the high quality, well thought out, professional work that the community members submitted to us.

After the review period came to a close, we had a single bid which ranked higher than any of the others, based on experience, references, and overall quality of the proposal. They'll be working with the second highest rated bid, which contained UI/UX and IA that absolutely floored the reviewers.

The first bid, submitted by a joint effort between Project Evolution and Revolution Systems, was the overall highest ranked bid. The team was unanimous in our recommendation to proceed forward with this bid based on the credentials of the team, quality of the proposal, and their deep understanding of how to work with volunteer organizations, oversight and the community as a whole.

This bid provides a clear project management and accountability system as well as detailing how they wish to work with the community as a whole to achieve the project goals.

Second, we had the Divio.ch team bid. The IA/UX/UI work which they poured over 120 hours into as a company impressed us a great deal. We were quite literally floored by the amount of thought, planning, and work invested in the visual and IA aspects of the Divio bid.

Together with Project Evolution and Revolution Systems leading the project, and the stellar Divio team consulting on the visual/IA aspects of the project, the redesign team and the board is sure that we will be able to deliver a next generation experience. The architecture being developed will achieve all of the goals we set forth when we went down the path of drafting the redesign RFP.

On September 26th, the Python Software Foundation's board of directors unanimously approved the combined bids:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation accept the Python.org site redesign proposal set forth by Project Evolution / Revolution Systems and Divio with a budget not to exceed $70,000 in total without further board approval.

Overview of the Accepted Bids

The redesign project will completed by the three teams, Project Evolution, RevSys, and Divio, with a division of labor using the best aspects of each team. The project plan and the back end will be handled by members of Project Evolution and RevSys. Members of Project Evolution will handle the front end work, incorporating the guidance of the Divio team.

The accepted bids from the three entities can be found below:

Project Evolution

Project Evolution (PE) is a design driven development team founded in 1999 with clients ranging from school districts to Fortune 1000 fashion conglomerates with international holdings. The 12-person team includes creative leads, front-end and back-end developers, and associated support staff all committed to open-source technology.

Revolution Systems

Revolution Systems, LLC., based in Lawrence, Kansas, was formed in 2002 by Frank Wiles to help businesses benefit from open source software. While many large organizations use open source software internally (sometimes without their knowledge), he realized that many organizations did not know how to properly take advantage of this revolutionary type of software.

Divio

Divio, a web agency located in Zürich, Switzerland, builds web applications and is specialised in the areas of design and development. For production, Divio uses the Django web framework and is heavily involved in the development of the successful open source projects django CMS and django SHOP.

The company relies on the agile SCRUM-methodology for its projects.

Screenshots, Maybe?

As if the bids and the prospect of the project were not enough to get you excited, I thought I might share some tidbits from the current mockups we're working through:
Docs intro
Psf homepage

In Closing

I am sincerely proud, as both a Python community member and PSF director, to have been part of this process. The entire review team, every single submitted bid, and the Foundation's board works tirelessly for a great deal of time pulling together what is already turning out to be an impressive and surprising redesign.

The design will work on mobile devices. It will follow all of the guidelines of the RFP, support accessibility requirements, and much much more.
Most of all, it will showcase our language and global community like it has never has been before.

Jesse Noller (person post on this), Director Python Software Foundation, on behalf of the entire team.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

PSF Granted PyTexas 2011 US$750

The Python Software Foundation gave the recent PyTexas conference US$750 in funds.

About the Conference

PyTexas 2011 was the fourth annual free Python programming conference in Texas. It took place Saturday, September 10 - Sunday, September 2011 at the Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. They have a blog that has some photos from the conference on it. All of the talks at PyTexas were recorded and are starting to appear on NextDayVideo and Miro. If you would like to help plan next year's conference, you can join the PyTexas mailing list.

They estimate about 170 people attended PyTexas 2011, up from 94 at PyTexas 2010, and 22 at PyTexas 2009.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

PyLadies gets a PSF Grant

The PSF has given a grant of US$1220 to the PyLadies for use at their women’s Python events. In addition, the Python Sprints project has announced a separate grant of US$300 to PyLadies to go toward organizing a Python sprint in Los Angeles.

PyLadies

PyLadies is a group of women who use and love the Python programming language. They organize workshops, meetups, and hackathons with a goal of increasing the number of women active in the Python community. They started in Los Angeles, California, but plan to expand with local chapters in other areas.

June 18: PyLadies/SoCal Python Interest Group Hackathon

The SoCal Python Interest Group and LA PyLadies are two of LA’s biggest Python user groups. They are teaming up for a day of sprinting Saturday June 18, 2011. Tickets are available through the eventbrite site.

Schedule:

2-7pm: Hack on your own projects
7-8pm: Dinner, drinks, and lightning talks
8pm-midnight: Python Ladies’ Night 4 at The Hollywood Canteen. Gentlemen of the Python community and friends not attending the hackathon are invited too. The more, the merrier!

This is no ordinary sprint: thanks to the pythonsprints.com grant, at least 10 mentors will be on hand to provide one-on-one help and tutoring throughout the event. Mentors will bring beginners up to speed and teach attendees a variety of Python-related skills, such as git, PyPI packaging, Sphinx docs, installing Python, and other open-source subjects. Think of this as free Python tutoring!

Free T-shirts for Open Source Work

Participants in the hackathon who release their projects as open source (or contribute to an existing open source project) will receive limited-edition PyLadies/PyLadies Supporter t-shirts, funded by the PSF.

Invite the Smart Women in Your Life

The hackathon is open to participants of all skill levels. Invite a smart lady or two of any age to attend the event with you. Even if they are absolute beginners, the mentors will help them start learning Python through online tutorials such as Learn Python The Hard Way, while you hack on other projects.

Contact

Contact audreyr at pyladies dot com with questions about PyLadies or the hackathon on June 18.

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Python Core Mentorship Program

Jesse Noller recently announced the formation of the Python Core Mentorship program. The idea behind the program is to help programmers, including students and developers from other projects, connect with experienced contributors who serve as mentors to ease them into Python Core development.

Contributors Wanted

The mentors will help people regardless of experience level by bringing them up to speed, answering questions, and giving guidance as needed in a non-confrontational and welcoming way. The contributors will receive guidance through the entire contribution process, including discussions on the related mailing lists, the bug tracker, Mercurial, code reviews, and much more.

Early Success

The program already has been successful, and the participants have actively committed a number of patches. There have also been several constructive discussions on the mailing list, helping guide people in the right direction for a variety of issues.

Code of Conduct

The program has a code of conduct explained on the website that aims to assuage concerns many new contributors have when interacting with experienced developers and mailing lists on contribution in general. Jesse and the other mentors hope that this program can act as a model for other projects long-term, not just benefiting Python-Core. They also want the program to help increase the overall diversity of the contributors to Python.

Signing Up

The program is run via the mailing list and has a clear, concise website devoted to it. If you would like to join to ask questions and begin on the path of core contribution, or even if you are an experienced developer (even experienced in Python-Core) looking to ask questions you're worried about asking on other lists, this is an excellent opportunity to jump in, ask and get your feet wet!

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Summer pyGames Registration Open

The 2011 Summer pyGames event is now accepting registrations for student teams and volunteer coordinators. Registration will remain open until the competition begins on 11 June at 9:00 AM US Eastern time.

Summer pyGames

The Summer pyGames project is a six-week long competition during which high school students develop open-source educational software and games to be used and distributed to schools in South Carolina. Many of last year's competing teams presented at the FIRST Championship in St Louis. The program has also been showcased at the FIRST Robotics Palmetto Regional, POSSCON and INNOVENTURE Southeast.

Competition Details

The Summer pyGames will begin on June 11th at 9am with the announcement of this year's challenge. Students will have 6 weeks to create a new video game or modify previous games submitted to the competition. Scoring, theme, and rules will be announced at the season kickoff.

Teams may be made up of 1-7 students. The competition is geared for high school age students, high school graduates for 2011 are welcome to participate. Younger students may be admitted to the competition upon request. All teams must have an adult contact who can communicate directly with the Summer pyGames coordinators.

Resources will be available on the Summer pyGames website, and additional forums and chat channels will be made available to registered teams. Volunteers will be available to assist students with questions regarding their projects.

The projects will be graded by professional programmers, graphic artists, audio professionals, teachers, and students.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

GSoC Student Applications Accepted

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to announce that 36 applications from students wishing to participate in the Google Summer of Code program have been accepted with Python-related projects sponsored by the PSF.

Accepted Projects

Below is a list of the projects accepted for this summer. The links point to the application abstracts on the GSoC site, so click through for more details about a given project.

Name	Project Title
Amaury Medeiros	PySoy’s interactive widgets
Anthus Williams	Mesh morphs for PySoy
Bart Baker	statsmodels times series and state-space model estimation
Ben Edwards	Implement Community Detection Algorithms in NetworkX
Benedict Stein	Mailman: # Complete the Django web u/i
Boris FELD	PYpi Test Infrastructure
Daniel Kluev	Pyjamas - in-browser python interpreter
Daniel Neuhäuser	Developing a benchmark suite (for Python 3.x)
Danilo Freitas	Turn Codespeed into a multi-project, statistically savvy application
Douglas Morato	TRYTON : Add full text search capabilities on Tryton records
Drew Rodman	Mailman 3 Pipermail SQL conversion and upgrade script
Dushyant Bansal	Developing Archives for Mailman 3
Ezio Melotti	Enhancements to the Python issue tracker
Greg Slodkowicz	Python Import Engine
Henri Bollig	Tryton, Pysql, python module to generate SQL strings
Xu Dehai	fulfil setuptools features for distutils2
Idan Kamara	Mercurials command server
Joe Dallago	Pylons Project - Porting Pyramid to Python 3
Joel Bohman	Porting Pyramid to Python 3
Jon Neal	Game Networking using ICE-UDP for pysoy
Juhani Åhman	PySoy: Enhanced 2.5D scenes
Mark Florisson	Cython: Supporting Parallelism, Templates and Typed Views on Memory
Max Holtzberg	Implementing a POS system for the Tryton project
Mayank Singh	Motion-sensing as an alternative user input for PySoy games
Pieter Holtzhausen	Focused improvements to scikits.image
Putra Manggala	NetworkX: More Flow!
Rodrigo Hübner	A Rich Text Editor for Tryton Client
Romain Guillebert	Python backend for Cython using PyPy's FFI
Sara Foster	PySoy Scene Designer
Sara Kazemi	Creature Artificial Emotion [PySoy]
Martin Leon Sébastien	[Tryton]Relatorio: FODT format, embed opendocument and support for opendocument spreadsheet.
Torsten Becker	Implementing a Flexible String Representation for Python Based on PEP 393
Vlad Niculae	Dictionary learning in scikits.learn
Wojciech Wojtyniak	Implementing parallel builds of Python's modules
Yeswanth Swami	PyTI(PyPI Testing Infrastructure)
Yun Lee	Improve Mercurial's built-in help

Statistics

This has been a growth year for the PSF's involvement in GSoC. We have had the largest group of applicants and mentors since we began participating in the program, up about 10% from last year. Students submitted 89 applications, both for core Python development work and for one of the projects being sponsored by the PSF. The community has provided 72 mentors to help the students.

Increasing Diversity

The PSF is committed to increasing the diversity of the Python community. One way we have been working toward that goal is by encouraging women and other minorities to apply to participate in GSoC through one of the PSF-sponsored projects. This year, three of the 36 accepted applications are from women. That is an improvement over past years, but we still have work to do to raise the participation rate further.

What Next?

The GSoC program is now in the Community Bonding Period. Community members should watch for messages from the student participants on mailing lists and in other forums, and take the opportunity to get to know them. This is also a good time to introduce them to the development tools and processes, and answer questions about how patches are reviewed and approved or how best to communicate with other team members.

For more details about the schedule, see the GSoC timeline on the project web site.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

High School Students Program Robots with Python

Vern Ceder's Canterbury High School students are learning to program in Python by making robots play music, find objects in the room, and perform other challenging tasks. The local paper, The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, wrote a story about the class earlier this month, and Vern blogs about how he arranged that on the Learn Python blog for the benefit of other members of the community with similar projects.

Congratulations to the students at Canterbury High, and keep up the good work!

For more information about how you can use Python in educational settings, join the edu-sig mailing list.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Python at the 2009 Atlanta Linux Fest

We should all give Brandon Rhodes a hearty "Thanks!" for doing a great job representing Python at the Atlanta Linux Fest on September 19th. You can read Brandon's account of the day for more details and his advice to anyone planning similar outreach activities.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

GHOP 2009/2010 Planning

The Google Highly Open Participation contest ('GHOP') is going to run again this year in December starting around Dec 7th. Closer to December we will start talking about suggestions and thoughts on how to make GHOP work well for the PSF and Python.

What's that?

If you're not familiar with GHOP, it is a contest framework that lets Google pay students for doing small units of work (coding, testing, doc writing, etc.) on a wide variety of projects. It was a success for the PSF last time, in that tons of doc changes and test fixes got committed to core, many other projects benefitted, and most of the people involved had a pretty good time.

However, before GHOP can run again, the organizers (Google + GHOP enthusiasts) need help with the Melange application used to drive the contest. Since it's written in Python/Django, they hope the Python community can help out.

Volunteering

The best way to help with Melange is by joining the melange dev mailing list and research the areas where melange could use some help.

Titus Brown has also posted additional information to his blog about what Melange is and the sort of help needed, and an upcoming team meeting on IRC.

Friday, August 07, 2009

In Search of Success Stories

The PSF is looking for information about successful uses of Python in order to create an updated list of success stories and find organizations that might be interested in sponsoring activities for the community. If you know of a company that uses Python for any purpose, please take a few minutes to answer the questions on our short survey. You don't have to work at an organization to tell us about how they use Python! Don't worry about duplicates, either, we'll take care of them once we have all of the data collected.

The answers to this survey will be kept private. If you still don't want to identify yourself, no problem! We just want to know where Python is being used, so responding still helps us out.

If (and only if) you decide to include contact information and you give the PSF permission, we may use the contacts provided to find sponsors for the PSF and Python-related events (PyCon, EuroPython, DjangoCon, etc).

Individual answers from this survey will never be published.

So please, take the survey now!

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Sys Admin Magazine Calls for Papers

Have you used Python to improve your life as a system administrator? (Yes, even system administrators are supposed to have lives). If so then Sys Admin magazine would like you to write an article., and this year's December issue has scripting as its theme. The required lead time for print publications is longer than you might anticipate - see their editorial calendar, and you should also check their author guidelines - so we are publishing this notice early enough to allow plenty of time for planning and writing. Let's see lots of Python articles in that issue. Fame and fortune await you, not to mention the gratitude of your fellow Pythonistas! We understand that the magazine does pay for published articles, but you should agree payment terms and amount with them in advance.