Python Software Foundation News: organization

Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Python Job Board - Call for volunteers

Dear Python Community,

for many years, the Python Job board was run by volunteers - most of the time by just one volunteer at a time until they moved on to spend their time on other things. We've now reached such a point again.

In these years, the volume on the job board has significantly increased, as it got more and more popular. It is now at around 2-5 postings per day and most of those positions get filled quickly
- which is an indication of how useful this service is to the Python community.

To scale up and revive the job board, the PSF would now like to setup a *team of volunteers* to run the job board and this is our call for help.

How does the job board work ?

At the moment, the job board is maintained on the legacy site , but since we've launched our brand new website, we'd like to move the job board over to that site.

Instead of the repository based approach used on the old site, the new site has database support to aid in more easily processing and filing job listings.

There's a job board mailing list which helps coordinate the task of reviewing and filing job offers. Currently, all job submissions get sent to this mailing list, but with the job board app, the submission process can be moved over to the website's database.

What does it take to run the job board ?

You have to review the job postings, request changes if they are too long, don't clearly state the need for Python skills, or have quality issues.

After review, the job board app will then allow posting the jobs on the website by simply setting the status to published.

Communication with the submitters is usually done by email and via the mailing list, so all team members can see the communication and help out if necessary.

Please note: This is just a high level overview. The details need to be hashed out by the new team.

Does the job board app work already ?

It does, but is disabled at the moment due to lack of volunteers.

Since the site just launched there may also well be some issues with the job board app.

On the positive side there's a lot happening around the site at the moment, so if you have change requests, these will usually be implemented quickly - or you can jump in, hack on the job board app and submit a pull request yourself:

https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/tree/master/jobs

These are exciting times and this is your chance to make a difference !

Ok, I like new challenges - where do I sign up ?

Great :-) Please write to jobs@python.org

I have a question...

If you have questions, you can write to the jobs list at jobs@python.org or the PSF board at psf@python.org.

Many thanks,
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.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Minutes for Members' Meeting of March 11, 2011 Now Available

The minutes for the members' meeting at PyCon on March 11, 2011 are now available online.

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Infrastructure Committee

The PSF Board has approved the appointment of Sean Reifschneider as chair of the Infrastructure Committee for 2010-2011. Prior to this, Sean has served as a committee member and handled system adminstration tasks for the python.org servers. He works for tummy.com, a Linux hosting and consulting company, and has years of experience with system administration and hosting.

The Infrastructure Committee

The Infrastructure Committee is responsible for the technical details of the Foundation's presence on the internet. They manage web server space, email, DNS registrations, software application hosting for tools such as bug trackers and PyPI, and all of the other tasks around maintaining a professional presence on the net. If the PSF puts something on the internet, the Infrastructure Committee is involved with it in some way.

The other members of the committee are:

Thomas Wouters is the liaison between the PSF and XS4ALL, the Dutch ISP that generously hosts many of the servers for python.org. Thomas has been contributing time and energy since the servers were originally moved from CNRI to XS4ALL, and still handles a lot of the on-site hardware service when needed.

Martin v. Löwis handles a lot of the system administration tasks on the PSF's servers. He manages DNS and development tools like subversion, Buildbot, and the Roundup issue tracker instances for Python-dev, Jython, and setuptools. Martin is also the primary developer of the software behind the Python Package Index, PyPI.

Andrew Kuchling joined the committee during the migration from SourceForge to Roundup several years ago. He also wrote the templating system used for python.org content, and is still involved with the content management.

Barry Warsaw is another long-time member of the committee. He has been intimately involved in the email infrastructure, including the development and configuration of the Mailman mailing list management software. Today he acts primarily as an advisor to the other team members.

Volunteers

Besides the formal committee members, there are two teams of volunteers who do a lot of the day-to-day work for us.

The postmaster team, including Brad Knowles, Skip Montanaro, Ralf Hildebrandt, Patrick Ben Koetter, and Martijn Pieters, run all of the email services for python.org. That includes individual accounts and aliases for contributors with @python.org addresses along with the Mailman mailing lists and an NNTP-SMTP gateway for the newsgroups. Their motto is "Low spam, high deliverability!"

The pydotorg-www group serves as webmaster for python.org. Their responsibilities include typical webmaster duties, content management, and wiki curation. For example, Michael Foord helps with moderation of the python-dev mailing list as well as editing website content, including managing the Planet Python feeds; Martin Thomas adminsters the Job Board and news sections of the site; and Aahz triages and responds to email sent to the webmaster alias and handles some of the site updates directly.

Upcoming Initiatives

The Infrastructure Committee has several projects planned for this year:

Establishing a ticketing system for managing internal Foundation business (not Python development). The Board and designated committees will use the new system for managing tasks and project plans.
Complete the move from Subversion to Mercurial for Python development, including any changes necessary to host the new repositories.
Seek an increase of our bandwidth to better handle recent spikes in traffic to the python.org sites, especially from users downloading new releases of the installation program for the interpreter.

Volunteering

To volunteer to help with the pydotorg-www team, see the Maintenance and Administration page for instructions.

If you're interested in volunteering to help with the Infrastructure Committee, contact Sean directly at jafo at tummy.com.

Thursday, July 01, 2010

What do you want to know about the PSF?

One purpose of this blog is to deliver news from the PSF to the Python Community. But the broader goal is to deliver information, even if it isn't new.

With that in mind, what would you like to know about the Python Software Foundation? Leave a comment below, and we'll put the suggestions into the queue for upcoming articles.

Monday, June 21, 2010

PSF Officers for 2010

The 2010-2011 Board of Directors for the PSF has appointed officers to oversee activities of the Foundation.

Returning Officers

Guido van Rossum returns as President of the PSF. As President, Guido serves as the principal representative of the Foundation.

Steve Holden is Board Chair. He is responsible for organizing and presiding over all Board meetings and keeping the Foundation focused on fulfilling its mission.

Van Lindberg will serve as PyCon Chair again this year. Van manages all of the activities related to running PyCon US, including organizing the volunteer and paid efforts.

Most officers are volunteers from the community, but there are two paid positions on the Board. The Secretary and Treasurer both require regular and timely activity in order to keep up with their duties, so nominal compensation is provided for these officers to make that possible.

Pat Campbell is Secretary, and keeps all of the records of the Foundation. She also prepares the minutes of the Board meetings and delivers formal notices, for example before the start of official voting periods.

Kurt Kaiser continues as Treasurer. Kurt manages the finances of the PSF, receiving income and making payments. He reports the financial status of the Foundation to the members regularly through the members' mailing list.

New Roles

In addition to the traditional organizational roles, the Board is working to identify other areas where focused attention is needed and appoint officers to oversee them. Positions for overseeing Membership, Voting, and other areas are planned but not yet filled.

As Communications Director, Doug Hellmann is responsible for publishing information from the Board, with priority given to any actions taken at Board meetings. He will also be helping to connect other members of the community with information channels to publicize the work they are doing.

More Information

PSF Board Responsibilities
PSF Bylaws, including the duties of each officer.
Board history

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Chairman's Report for the Year 2009

As there is desire for more communication from the board I thought I would take the time to summarize the major activities of last year.

This dated list is not complete, and reflects only the formal published board resolutions.

February

Started the trademarking process in various foreign markets for "Python" (currently on hold for financial reasons).

March

Ran PyCon 2009.
Funded a laptop purchase for the PSF administrator.

April

Supported PyCon Italia with a $3,500 grant.
PSF Community Service Award to Stephan Deibel.
Funded Vern Ceder's attendance to present Python paper at NECC with a grant of $500.

May

Supported EuroPython 2009 with a $6,000 grant.
Offered support for a grant application to the Mellon Foundation.
Supported Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 with an $800 grant to the GNOME Foundation.

June

Supported SciPy 2009 with a $10,000 grant to enable student attendance.
Funded ($2,000) research into support for video recording of user group meetings.
Published the Trademark Policy under a Creative Commons license.
PSF Community Service Award to Sean Reifschneider.
Funded ($800) materials for the first ever Python booth at OSCON.

July

Supported PyCon Poland 2009 with a $2,500 grant.

August

Supported PyCon Kiwi with a $750 grant.
Supported PyCon Argentina 2009 with a $750 grant.
Supported DjangoCon 2009 with a $750 grant.
Undertook to move to a professional membership administration system

September

Modified mission statement to reflect a desire for greater diversity.

October

PSF Community Service Awards to Noufail Ibrahim and Barry Warsaw.
Formally adopted the PSF Diversity Statement.
Lent formal support to the European FOSS-ORI organization.

November

Recommended SEO Moves for sponsor membership.
Supported PyTexas Unconference 2009 with a $150 grant.
Supported DjangoSki with a grant of $750.
Supported the Blender Foundation with of up to $1,500 Euros by matching other funding.
Appointed Wendroff Accountants to provide monthly management accounts and other accounting services including annual tax return.

Review

Although the above apparently represents just twelve hours of board meetings, of necessity many of the actions detailed have required a lot of time in preparatory work such as discussions and negotiations. I am grateful to my fellow directors and the other officers for the work they have put in to try and develop the Foundation.

Besides this formal stuff I personally have continued outreach work to such user groups as I have been able to attend, and I would encourage other directors to do the same. At every meeting I have found a groundswell of interest in and support for the Foundation's activities that is both gratifying and humbling.

I have also undertaken preparatory investigations to allow us to undertake "fiscal sponsorship", a scheme that will effectively let user groups and other affiliated organizations make use of the Foundation's charitable status by raising funds in a way that allows donors a tax deduction without the need for formal incorporation as a 501(c)3 or similar. I hope that this will also allow the Foundation to start sponsoring sprint activities that will get developers together at crucial times to ensure that development velocity can be maintained.

We have produced the first issue of a quarterly newsletter (small quantities were available at PyCon) which will be the primary communications channel with the new associate members I hope we will shortly see swelling our ranks (and our coffers). Without the preparatory work to bring the membership management system on-line this development would not have been practical.

While the Foundation is not yet as organized as I would like to see it we have made some kind of start in a new direction. The financial problems of 2009 did not make things easy. Much remains to be done, but overall we are much better placed to move forward than we were a year ago.

Steve HoldenChairman, Python Software Foundation
(posted by Doug Napoleone)

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Organizational Changes

Further to our recent cogitations on better meeting the PSF's goals the Board has taken a number of decisions which I'd like to let you know about.

I am in the process of appointing a part-time administrator to help us with the more mundane tasks. I anticipate this will initially require between 10 and 20 hours per week, and be performed on a contract basis.
Kurt Kaiser, our Treasurer, will commit to spending a quarter of his time on PSF-related duties. His remuneration will increase to give him a reasonable hourly rate for the job.
David Goodger has accepted a six-month contract as paid chairman of PyCon. Besides organizing next year's conference he will focus on ensuring that the chairman's role is properly documented, allowing us to respond appropriately to the development needs of the conference.

We are currently in a transitional phase: Kurt has assumed his enlarged role with immediate effect; I anticipate that David and the new administrator will take up their posts early in December. Hopefully this will mean we are able to more adequately take care of business.

The Board will be assessing the impact of these changes over time, and review the overall position after PyCon. In the meantime we will welcome any observations from you about how the changes affect the way the Foundation serves you.

Follow-up: The administrator position is now filled