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PSF Community Service Awards

Contents

Introduction

The Python Software Foundation relies on volunteer efforts to achieve many of its goals. The PSF Community Service Awards are a formal way for the PSF Board of Directors to offer recognition of work which, in its opinion, significantly improves the Foundation’s fulfillment of its mission and benefits the broader Python community. The intention of these awards is to demonstrate that service to the Python community does lead to recognition and reward, rather than to provide a direct incentive to contributors.

Awards will be made periodically, normally every three months, although the Board may choose to consider awards at other times. Any PSF member is entitled to propose an award at any time, stating the reasons for which the award is merited. Proposals should be made confidentially to the Board by sending email to psf@python.org.

The minutes of award considerations will not name the individuals concerned unless an award is made. The Board will contact proposers to keep them informed of the status of their proposals (such as when the proposal will receive Board consideration).

In the event that more than one award is proposed in a given period the Board may elect to hold over a proposal. Awards will be considered in the order in which they are received.

While it would be unusual for a single individual to receive multiple awards, repeated awards will be appropriate to acknowledge ongoing contributions. Recipients need not be Foundation members (though receiving an award may be an indication that consideration for membership is appropriate).

Recognition will take the form of an award certificate plus both of the following:

  1. A cash award of $599. (Non-US based recipients will be subject to Federal US tax withholding of 30% unless all requirements are met, according to our Vendor Policies page. Contact accounting@python.org with any questions.)
  2. Free registration at all future PyCon US events, and the opportunity to apply for a travel grant for the recipient’s travel and accommodation expenses. (Receipts will be required for all reimbursements.)

The Board should consider awards at any quarterly meeting where a member award proposal has been received since the last award consideration. At each such meeting where no proposal has been received within the preceding three months the Board may, at its discretion, make an award to an individual nominated by the Board.

Expiration

If a Community Service Award recipient has not accepted their award within 6 months of written notification, the award expires.

December 2022

  • The Q4 2022 Community Service Award was given to Ned Deily for his contributions as the MacOS Release Manager since Python 3.2, and the Release Manager for Python 3.6 and 3.7.
  • The Q4 2022 Community Service Award was given to Carol Willing for her work as a Python Core Developer and her years of service on the Python Steering Council.

June 2022

  • The Q2 2022 Community Service Award was given to Philip James for all his contributions to the Python community, most notably his stewardship of the PSF’s Code of Conduct Work Group as the Work Group Chair for its first four years.
  • The Q2 2022 Community Service Award was given to Patrick Ben Koetter for his many years serving as postmaster for mail.python.org and supporting the Python community mailing lists and the PSF’s email traffic.

March 2022

  • The Q1 2022 Community Service Award was given to John Hawley for his many years of volunteering on behalf of the PSF to support students and their mentors working on Python projects via Google Summer of Code.
  • The Q1 2022 Community Service Award was given to Matthew Lagoe for his many years of volunteering on behalf of the PSF to support students and their mentors working on Python projects via Google Summer of Code.
  • The Q1 2022 Community Service Award was given to James Lopeman for his many years of volunteering on behalf of the PSF to support students and their mentors working on Python projects via Google Summer of Code.

December 2021

  • The Q4 2021 Community Service Award was given to Manabu Terada a member of the PyCon JP Association, for their work organizing local and regional PyCons, the work of monitoring our trademarks, and in particular organizing the “PyCon JP Charity Talks” raising more than $25,000 USD in funds for the PSF.
  • The Q4 2021 Community Service Award was given to Takanori Suzuki a member of the PyCon JP Association, for their work organizing local and regional PyCons, the work of monitoring our trademarks, and in particular organizing the “PyCon JP Charity Talks” raising more than $25,000 USD in funds for the PSF.
  • The Q4 2021 Community Service Award was given to Takayuki Shimizukawa a member of the PyCon JP Association, for their work organizing local and regional PyCons, the work of monitoring our trademarks, and in particular organizing the “PyCon JP Charity Talks” raising more than $25,000 USD in funds for the PSF.
  • The Q4 2021 Community Service Award was given to Shunsuke Yoshida a member of the PyCon JP Association, for their work organizing local and regional PyCons, the work of monitoring our trademarks, and in particular organizing the “PyCon JP Charity Talks” raising more than $25,000 USD in funds for the PSF.
  • The Q4 2021 Community Service Award was given to Jonas Obrist a member of the PyCon JP Association, for their work organizing local and regional PyCons, the work of monitoring our trademarks, and in particular organizing the “PyCon JP Charity Talks” raising more than $25,000 USD in funds for the PSF.

June 2021

  • The Q3 2021 Community Service Award was given to Daniella Korossy. Daniella has contributed many efforts towards diversity and inclusivity work in the Hungarian Python community, tireless and year-long organization of Django Girls Budapest, and involvement in the Budapest Python user group.
  • The Q3 2021 Community Service Award was given to Vicky Twomey-Lee. Vicky has been a PSF Fellow since 2012 and a long time volunteer to several PSF and Python spaces. 7 years ago she founded and continues to help organize the PyLadies Dublin chapter. Additionally, Vicky has been an active contributor to the PSF’s Grants WG since the beginning and continues to provide helpful feedback and reviews. She also helps with EuroPython, Python Ireland, and past PyCon Ireland events.

March 2021

  • The Q2 2021 Community Service Award was given to Dori Czapari. Dori has contributed many efforts towards diversity and inclusivity work in the Hungarian Python community, tireless and year-long organization of Django Girls Budapest, and involvement in the Budapest Python user group.
  • The Q2 2021 Community Service Award was given to Szilvia Kadar. Szilvia has contributed many efforts towards diversity and inclusivity work in the Hungarian Python community, tireless and year-long organization of Django Girls Budapest, and involvement in the Budapest Python user group.

January 2021

  • The Q1 2021 Community Service Award was given to Tereza Iofciu. Tereza is a PSF Code of Conduct WG member and has done a wonderful job helping, participating, and driving the Code of Conduct WG discussions. Tereza formed and continues to help organize the PyLadies Hamburg chapter and was a key organizer for the IWD PyLadies event in 2021. Tereza is also a member of the newly formed PSF Diversity & Inclusion WG.
  • The Q1 2021 Community Service Award to Daniele Procida. Daniele chaired PyCon UK for a number years and was an early part of the organizing team for EuroPython. He was instrumental in starting the Python communities in Namibia and Ghana. Making sure that these conferences had strong support both financially and structurally. Daniele has been an executive member of the Pycon Africa team since we started and has been a consistent source of guidance. He continues to be a member of the Django Software Foundation and has spoken at many PyCons and DjangoCons around the world.

December 2020

  • The Q4 2020 Community Service Award was given to Georgi Ker. Georgi has been instrumental with establishing PyLadies Global, she is also a PyLadies Bangkok organizer, member of the PSF Diversity & Inclusion WG, and an organizer with PyCon Thailand and APAC PyCon.
  • The Q4 2020 Community Service Award was given to Humphrey Butau. Humphrey is the co-founder of PyCon Zimbabwe and was an early member of the Python community in Harare. He is a PSF fellow and has been stewarding our local community for a number of years. Humphrey is also a great speaker and has given talks at many conferences including keynoting DjangoCon Europe, speaking at PyCon Namibia and PyCon Italia.

October 2020

  • The Q3 2020 Community Service Award was given to Elaine Wong for her community work. Elaine is an organizer for PyCon CA, PyLadies Toronto, and CSV Conference, a conference speaker, she co-hosts a monthly virtual Conference Organizer meetup, and Elaine helps with video at community events.
  • The Q3 2020 Community Service Award was given to Rami Chowdhury for his community work. Rami helps organize and contributes to the DC Python user group. For many years Rami has been a volunteer coordinator and incident responder at PyCon US. Most recently Rami has been a helpful member of the PSF Code of Conduct WG.

June 2020

  • The Q2 2020 Community Service Award was given to Noah Alorwu for his contributions to the growth of Python Ghana community, being an executive committee member of PyCon Africa and also organizing Django Girls workshop to bridge the gender gaps in tech. In 2019, he played an active role in organizing the first PyCon Africa and was the chair of the talk committee. Noah is also one of the founders of DjangoCon Africa, the upcoming inaugural conference for Django developers on the continent. He has spoken at several Python conferences including DjangoCon Europe. Noah is a consistent force for good, particularly in the African Python community.
  • The Q2 2020 Community Service Award went to Katia Lira for her contributions to PyCon LatAm as conference chair, which held its inaugural conference in 2019. Additionally she’s the DEFNA Vice-President and has collaborated in crafting the vision of PyLadies Global. Katia hosts and produces multiple Python/tech/community podcasts (e.g. El Dev Show), she’s a PyCon speaker, speaks at meetups, and is well respected in the community.

March 2020

  • The Q1 2020 Community Service Award has been given to to Manuel Kaufmann for the amazing efforts he put towards Python outreach and education in the Latin American Python communities and most recently in the Spanish Python communities. Most recently, Manuel helped organize efforts to translate Python material to Spanish.
  • The 2020 Q1 Community Service Award went to Abigail Dogbe in recognition of her efforts with leading the PyLadies Ghana community, helping organize PyCon Africa, and volunteering for PyLadies global and PyCon US.

December 2019

  • The Q4 2019 Community Service Award to Débora Azevedo in recognition of her work in supporting the wider Python community in Brazil and the PSF generally. She’s a cofounder of PyLadies Brasil leader, organizer for Django Girls Natal, and helped found and organize the PyLadies Brasil conference. In addition, Débora’s also been interested in supporting the wider community. Last year Débora assisted the PSF by translating a survey into Portugese. Additionally, she is a regular presenter and attends many community events.
  • The Q4 2019 Community Service Award went to Mark Sapiro in recognition of years of service maintaining mail.python.org’s Mailman lists and Postfix installation. Through good times and bad, Mark has regularly stepped up to ensure that the system is operating correctly and assist or lead the restoration of data after accidents and outages.

August 2019

  • The Q3 2019 Community Service Award went to Mannie Young for being a humble and thoughtful leader, being an Executive Committee member for PyCon Africa, and for being a leader for Python Ghana. Mannie worked tirelessly to make sure PyCon Africa was a successful event by traveling to Accra several times to work on conference planning and was behind all of the conference design and social media activities for the event.
  • The Q3 2019 Community Service Award went to Katie Bell for her work on PyCon AU as Co-Chair, her contributions in the years before her time as chair to PyCon AU, and helper/keynote/speaker at previous KiwiPyCons. She has also worked exceptionally hard participating in the incident reporting team at PyCon AU 2018 and 2019. This has stood as a go-to example for other conferences in the region, including feeding back into the PyCon Conduct process. She has also been the main person implementing on-site childcare at PyCon AU 2018 & 2019, which has also been an example for other conferences.
  • The Q3 2019 Community Service Award went to Lillian Ryan for her work on PyCon AU as Papers Chair, and her contribution as speaker/keynote to a number of PyCons and DjangoCons. She has also worked extraordinarily hard behind the scenes to implement anonymous proposal submissions for PyCon AU. This effort has enabled PyCon AU to reduce bias in the conference proposal process, and has stood as an example for other conferences.
  • The Q3 2019 Community Service Award went to Jessica Upani for being one of the most active members of PyCon Namibia, as well as the Conference Chair. As a high school mathematics teacher in Namibia, Jessica is bringing Python into the community in several ways such as promoting Python as a language to universities and also helping build out a variety of Python programming in her community for young people (eg PyNam Scholars). Jessica also is a prominent Python speaker having most recently spoke at PyCon Africa.

June 2019

  • The Q2 2019 Community Service Award went to Felipe de Morais for his work towards facilitating the growth of the Python Brazilian community by organizing workshops, contributing to open source code that benefits the Brazilian people and for setting an example for all community organizers.
  • The Q1 2019 Community Service Award also went to Chris Angelico for his work towards fostering the online Python community by helping maintain the pydotorg-www mailing list, helping community members get edit access to the public facing Python wiki, and also for being an active contributor to python-ideas mailing list and the python-dev mailing list.

March 2019

  • The Q1 2019 Community Service Award went to Stefan Behnel for his work as the main developer and maintainer of two important Python projects: Cython and lxml. Stefan forked off Pyrex and started Cython almost 11 years ago. Cython makes writing and maintain a C extension or C library bindings simple. It plays a vital role in the numeric and scientific community, too. Without Cython, Python 3 adoption would have taken much longer. Cython hides much of the Python 2 / 3 C-API differences from the developer. https://pypi.org/project/Cython/ lxml is the fastest and most feature rich XML parsing, transforming and querying package for Python. It’s also commonly used to parse HTML. https://pypi.org/project/lxml/ Stefan has been maintaining these two important libraries for over a decade. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and very helpful on the mailing lists.
  • The Q1 2019 Community Service Award also went to Eric Ma for going above and beyond in his responsibilities as PyCon’s Financial Aid Co-Chair for two years and this year stepping up to be Chair. Additionally, Eric has been a dedicated PyCon Program Committee member for several years.

December 2018

  • The Q4 award went to Maricela (Mayela) Sánchez Miranda for her work as a PyCon Charlas 2019 Chair and founding member of PyCon Charlas as well as being an organizer for Python Day Mexico, and DjangoGirls Puebla.
  • The Q4 award also went to John Roa for his work as a founder and Conference Chair of PyCon Colombia.

September 2018

  • The Q3 award went to Mariatta Wijaya for her contributions to CPython, her efforts to improve the workflow of the Python core team, and her work to increase diversity in our community. In addition, her work as co-chair of PyCascades helps spread the growth of Python.
  • The Q3 award also went to Alex Gaynor for his contributions to the Python and Django Communities and the Python Software Foundation. Alex previously served as a PSF Director in 2015-2016. He currently serves as an Infrastructure Staff member and contributes to legacy PyPI and the next generation warehouse and has helped legacy warehouse in security (disabling unsupported OpenID) and cutting bandwidth costs by compressing 404 images.

June 2018

  • The Q2 award went to Mario Corchero for his leadership of the organization of PyConES, PyLondinium, and the PyCon Charlas track in 2018. His work has been instrumental in promoting the use of Python and fostering Python communities in Spain, Latin America, and the UK.
  • The Q2 award also went to Chukwudi Nwachukwu for his contribution to spreading the growth of Python to the Nigerian community and his dedication and research to the PSF grants work group.

March 2018

  • The Q1 award went to Jon Clements, Melanie Jutras, Rhys Yorke, Martijn Pieters, Patrice Neff, and Marc-Andre Lemburg. This is the PSF Jobs Volunteer Team and they have received this award for the many hours they have contributed to reviewing and managing the hundreds of job postings submitted on an annual basis

December 2017

  • A. Jesse Jiryu Davis for the work he does on the PSF blog, his outreach & education efforts, and for organizing PyGotham 2017.
  • Russell Keith-Magee for his contributions to Django, for his work on the BeeWare project, and for being an active international speaker at PyCons.

September 2017

  • Eric Floehr for his work Chairing the PyOhio Conference. He is the founder and co-organizer of the Central Ohio Python User Group. COhPy has served as a resource for Python programmers in Columbus, OH. Eric’s efforts to “spread Python love” via discussions with leaders of PyNash and IndyPy lead directly to the creation of the annual PyTennessee conference and the Pythonology quarterly mini-conferences.
  • Thomas Kluyver for his contributions to the Scientific Python Community. Thomas has also served on many other open source projects and is active on the Python subreddit helping many people in the Python community.

June 2017

  • Lynn Root for her work as the founder of the San Francisco Chapter of PyLadies, as a member of the Django Software Foundation, and as a tireless volunteer at PyCon.
  • Glyph Lefkowitz for his work on the Twisted network programming framework and his contributions to the Python community in general.

March 2017

  • Brian Costlow for his work organizing and chairing PyOhio, and for being the head volunteer for PyCon US captioning.
  • Ian Cordasco for contributions to PSF elections and active mentoring of women in Python community.

December 2016

  • Shannon Turner is the founder of Hear Me Code, an organization offering free, beginner-friendly Python coding classes for over 1500 women in DC. She teaches them all herself on her own time. She empowers hundreds of women to code with Python by lowering barriers to entry. More than just a class where women learn to build websites, Hear Me Code focuses on leadership development, peer mentoring, and turning students into teachers. Shannon never seeks praise or press because that is not what motivates her. She’s a compassionate leader who is more concerned with elevating other women through her networks. Shannon’s work, her impact in the Python community and the women who she has empowered to code are all examples that speak loudly for her.
  • Ernest W. Durbin III for being a dedicated PSF volunteer for internal and external Python infrastructure as well as his contributions to PyCon US.

October 2016

  • Sheila Miguez and William Kahn-Greene for their monumental work in creating and supporting PyVideo over the years.

June 2016

  • Ned Batchelder for his tireless work helping run the Boston Python user group, being a regular speaker at conferences, maintaining coverage.py, and being a friendly face for the community on IRC and elsewhere.
  • Stéphane Wirtel for his work organizing a Python User Group in Belgium, for his continued work creating marketing material for the PSF, for his continued outreach efforts with spreading the PSF’s mission.

March 2016

The following awards were announced in March for the 2016 1st Quarter:

  • Damien George for his extensive volunteer work on the BBC micro:bit and MicroPython. Furthermore, Damien has spent time answering questions, offering help and reviewing code from the wider MicroPython/micro:bit community. Through his work on the MicroPython board, optimizations have also been made to CPython’s speed.
  • Jacqueline Kazil for her diligent volunteer effort running the Grants Work Group and for her continued assistance with PyCon’s PyLadies Auction.

December 2015

The following awards were announced in December for the 2015 4th Quarter:

  • Terri Oda her successful organization of Google Summer of Code for the past few years (2013, 2014, 2015). Acting as the GSoC coordinator for Python, Terri organizes students, mentors, and participating Python projects. In 2015, over 70 students participated for Python.
  • Berker Peksağ for his consistent volunteer efforts with pydotorg in 2015 (https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/graphs/contributors).

August 2015

The following awards were announced in July for the 2015 3rd Quarter:

  • Serhiy Storchaka for his contribution to Python. Serhiy has been a Python core developer since December 2012, and has been the most active core developer over the past three years.
  • Victor Stinner for his contribution to Python. Victor has been a Python core developer since January 2010, and has been the second most active core developer over the past three years.

July 2015

The following awards were announced in July for the 2015 2nd Quarter:

  • Nicholas Tollervey for his work in getting Python promoted in UK education, running the education track at PyCon UK for several years and initiating the Python Code Dojo in London.

May 2015

The following awards were announced in May for the 2015 1st Quarter:

  • Armin Stross-Radschinski for his work on creating the PSF Python Brochure
  • Jan Ulrich Hasecke for his work on creating the PSF Python Brochure

December 2014

The following awards were announced in February 2015 for the 2014 4th Quarter:

  • Ola Sitarska for her work creating and growing Django Girls, an educational program which has reached more than half a dozen countries, and continues to grow to many more
  • Ola Sendecka for her work creating and growing Django Girls, an educational program which has reached more than half a dozen countries, and continues to grow to many more

October 2014

The following awards were announced in October for the 2014 3rd Quarter:

  • Christoph Gohlke for his work in providing hundreds of Python C extensions as pre-compiled Windows binaries for the community to use. Without him, a lot of Python software would be next to impossible to run on Windows 64-bit
  • Armin Ronacher for his work on the Jinja2 templating library, the Flask web framework, the Logbook logging library, the Click command line application library (including making all of the preceding Python 2/3 compatible), the python-modernize Python 2/3 migration tool, contributions to the modernisation of the Web Server Gateway Interface for Python 3, as well as invaluable detailed feedback given to the core development team on some of the remaining operating system integration issues in Python 3

March 2014

The following awards were announced in March 2014:

  • Diana Clarke, for work with the Canadian Python community, her organizing efforts for PyCon CA and PyCon US over the past several years, and her mentorship of many others in the community.
  • Benjamin Peterson, for his work as core committer, his work on six and most recently his recent efforts on getting the new www.python.org website working, by fixing bugs faster than anyone else.
  • R. David Murray, for his work as a core committer and as a long-time mentor of new contributors.

December 2013

The following awards were announced in December 2013:

  • Donald Stufft, for his tremendous contributions to the Python community by working on Python packaging, pip, security related problems and PyPI maintenance.
  • Harald Armin Massa, <http://www.lightningtalkman.com/>, for being a great community builder and single-handedly driving the lightning talks sessions on almost all European Python conferences in the past years, giving the talks his very own personal touch and turning them into memorable events every single time.

November 2013

The following awards were announced in November 2013:

  • Barry Warsaw for his work on Python 2.6 & Python 3.0, contributions to the CPython project, his work on the GNU Mailman project, and his contributions to the Debian and Ubuntu projects.

June 2013

No awards were given.

April 2013

The following awards were announced in April 2013:

  • Tim Golden for his work on supporting the Windows Management Interface in Python and supporting that code and Windows users generally on comp.lang.python.
  • Robin Dunn for being the principal maintainer of wxPython.

December 2012

The following awards were announced in December 2012:

  • Antoine Pitrou for his contribution to CPython, including his work on the GIL and his work involving the PSF infrastructure.
  • Stefan Krah for his contribution to closing out PEP 3118, including being a maintainer of cdecimal.

October 2012

The following awards were announced in October 2012:

  • Kenneth Gonsalves for his significant contributions to furthering the use and awareness of Python in India. Kenneth passed away on August 3, 2012 and the award was presented to his daughter at PyCon India 2012. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.
  • Simon Cross for his efforts as lead organizer for the first PyCon South Africa, for efforts as a leader in the Cape Town Python User Group, and for contributions around the open source world. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.

June 2012

The following awards were announced in June 2012:

  • Doug Hellmann for his efforts in getting the PSF’s communications sorted out, and greatly improving the understanding of what the PSF does and stands for in the Python community.
  • Thomas Heller for his many contributions to the Python codebase and ecosystem, from his work on the ctypes standard library to his work outside of core Python on projects like py2exe.

February 2012

The following awards were announced in February, 2012. More information about the awards is available on the PSF blog.

  • Audrey Roy for her outstanding work in creating PyLadies, with outreach and diversity issues, and for keynoting and advocating Python at numerous international conferences.
  • Carl Trachte for his outstanding work to bring in foreign language speakers and support them on the Python Wiki.

December 2011

The following awards were announced in December, 2011:

  • Armin Rigo for his efforts in developing the PyPy implementation and his long-term contributions to the Python core. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.
  • Mike Müller for supporting Python in the scientific world, organizing the first two EuroSciPy conferences and the new annual PyCon DE conference. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.

September 2011

The following awards were announced on October 4, 2011:

  • Arc Riley was awarded in recognition of his dedicated long-term support of the PSF’s Summer of Code activities and domain management. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.
  • Nick Coghlan was awarded in recognition of his outstanding core development work and technical leadership, particularly with reference to the core-mentorship list. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Arc and Nick’s contributions to the community.

April 2011

The following awards were announced on October 3, 2011:

  • Laura Creighton was awarded in recognition of her continuous efforts in making community events happen and especially for her work with the PyPy team. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.
  • Tarek Ziade was awarded in recognition of his hard work on getting Python packaging back on track, maintaining distutils, and forking setuptools into distribute. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Laura and Tarek’s contributions to the community.

January 2011

The following awards were announced on September 29, 2011:

  • Van Lindberg was awarded in recognition of his leadership work on PyCon for the past two years as well as the pro bono work done for the PSF over the years. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.
  • Benjamin Peterson was awarded in recognition of his work as release manager and the numerous contributions to the Python Core. The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Van and Benjamin’s contributions to the community. More information about the award is available on the PSF blog.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Van and Benjamin’s contributions to the community.

December 2010

The following award was announced on January 6, 2011:

  • Doug Hellmann was awarded in recognition of his contributions to Python online and offline. Doug is the creator and maintainer of the Python Module of the Week <http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/> series, worked on Python Magazine, and is the leader of the PSF Communications team.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to give this award to this worthy member of the Python community.

The following award was announced on January 3, 2011:

  • Andrew Kuchling was awarded in recognition of his work promoting Python everywhere he can. Andrew chaired PyCon for two years and has contributed significantly to Python’s online presence. He also prepares the “What’s New” documentation <http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/index.html> for new releases of Python.

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to recognize Andrew’s contributions to the community.

October 2010

The following award was announced on November 03, 2010 in a PSF blog article:

  • Michael Foord was awarded in recognition of his incredible work in promoting Python everywhere he could. Michael is active on IRC channels, mailing lists, conferences, sprints and similar events. On the development side, he has been doing incredible work on unittest and unittest2. Michael also helps maintain the Planet Python RSS feed and python.org website, and with organizing the Europython meeting and Summit.

July 2010

The following award was announced on October 30, 2010 in a PSF blog article:

  • John Pinner in recognition of his organizational skills and contributions as one of the primary organizers of PyCon UK and EuroPython received his award at EuroPython 2010.

March 2010

The following awards were announced on March 19, 2010 in a PSF blog article:

  • Ken Whitesell has been a PyCon supporter for a very long time. It’s hard to remember a time when Ken wasn’t working behind the reception desk to make sure that delegates received all the help they need. Ken has also done sterling work in presenting many tutorials at PyCon, and has evangelized Python to the commercial world over a long period.
  • Yarko Tymciurak has provided several years meritorious service in developing and maintaining electronic registration and payment systems for PyCon. He has also shown exceptional dedication to providing high levels of customer service to both delegates and sponsors, going above and beyond the call of duty in assisting with registration issues.

December 2009

The following awards were announced on March 19, 2010 in a PSF blog article:

  • Catherine Devlin received her award for her long-term contributions to PyCon, the organization of the first two PyOhio regional conferences, for promoting diversity in the Python community and for education efforts.
  • Facundo Batista’s award came for organizing PyCon Argentina and the Argentinian Python community as well as contributions to the standard library and work in translating the Python documentation.

October 2009

The following awards were announced on October 25, 2009 in a PSF blog article:

  • Noufal Ibrahim was nominated for heading up the organizing team for the recent (and very successful) first PyCon India conference held on September 26 and 27 in Bangalore, attracting 450 delegates. Although Noufal was “first among equals” this award also recognizes the work of everyone who helped to make the inaugural conference so successful.
  • Barry Warsaw. Many people are unaware of the huge volume of mail that is processed by software written in Python every hour of every day. This is because they don’t know about the Mailman project, which was Barry’s brainchild. Barry, a founding member of the Foundation, also acted as release manager for several recent Python releases.

June 2009

The following awards were announced on June 18, 2009 in a PSF blog article:

  • Stephan Deibel was last year’s outgoing chairman after four years in harness. This year Stephan has stepped down as a director, after helping to ensure that the Foundation’s bylaws were reorganized. Stephan developed pythonology.com to promote Python, and his work as founder of Wingware and a developer of the Wing IDE has also had a significant impact.
  • Sean Reifschneider has master-minded the PyCon networking every time it has worked, and without the support of this always helpful and reliably competent tummy.com director our conferences simply would not have been the same.

March 2009

The following awards were announced on March 29, 2009, at PyCon 2009 in Chicago (PSF blog article):

  • Mary Rush has given selflessly for four years now, staffing the registration desk and providing a friendly face for PyCon.
  • Carl Karsten has been a great asset to PyCon. His energy and enthusiasm have helped PyCon reach new highs.

August 2008

The following awards were announced on August 7, 2008 (PSF blog article):

  • Georg Brandl has been an enthusiastic contributor to the core for several years, and a while ago stunned the Python development world by building the Sphinx documentation system as an alternative to the LaTeX-based system we had been using previously, and converting the Python documentation to use it.
  • Brett Cannon has also been an active core developer for many years, but was nominated for his infrastructure work in migrating the Python bug-tracking system off of SourceForge to our own Roundup instance, and for his efforts keeping the Python developer introduction updated.

March 2008

The following awards were announced on March 16, 2008, during PyCon in Chicago (and followed up with a PSF blog post):

  • Matthew Dixon Cowles: Matthew has been a tireless (and unfailingly polite) responder to the many users of the python-help mailing list, used by those seeking assistance not readily available through other channels. This assistance covers not only elementary questions but also quite advanced ones. Matthew has been a member of the Python community for many years, patiently answering questions and enlightening those who seek to get more out of the Python language.
  • Brad Knowles: Brad has managed the python.org e-mail since I can remember, and it’s down to him that our lists and newsgroups are so blissfully free of spam. It’s hard to appreciate the sheer volume of mail that Brad handles, and he is fiercely defensive of our domain’s status on the Internet. Keeping the e-mail flowing is essential not just to the PSF but also to all the users of mailing lists and newsgroups. Brad does all this not because he is a big Python user, but because it needs to be done. This is the community service ethic at its best.
  • Peter Kropf and Martin Thomas: Peter and Martin are probably best known to those people who want to employ Python programmers, as they have jointly been almost the sole workforce behind the Python Job Board for the last several years. The fact that the Job Board exists, and is available free of charge to anyone looking to hire people with Python skills, is possibly more central to Python’s rise in popularity than we appreciate. PyCon chairman David Goodger paid tribute to the Job Board as helping him out of unemployment in his opening remarks this year, and I know there are dozens if not hundreds of others who should be similarly grateful to Peter and Martin.