Hi!
I’m proud to have been part of the board over the last few years, as we’ve seen the organisation grow its staff to serve the community better, put necessary work into our grants program, and deliver our first strategic plan in 7 years. It would be my honour to continue serving the community alongside my colleagues on the board.
For those who don’t know me, I’m a Queer Australian, and I live in semi-rural northern California with my partner, and two cats. I ran PyCon Australia several years ago, and I currently run the North Bay Python conference here in California. I’ve been a happy Python user for more than half my life at this point!
My key contribution over the last few years has been institutional development, helping the Foundation update its bylaws to make voting easier, to better respect international privacy laws, and to better enable us to enforce our code of conduct. As an immigrant to the US, I’ve got an international perspective and can understand how the PSF can perform its role supporting the international community as a US non-profit: we have a wealth of international perspectives on the board, and I want to do everything in my ability to help those perspectives make the PSF better at accomplishing its mission.
Along with with continuing the work implementing our strategic plan, and helping the foundation on its way to financial sustainability, I have two key areas I want to focus on and believe I am well suited in supporting:
For my next term, I want to see the Grants program return to full strength, but with added financial sustainability. At the start of my term, the grants program had resumed following its pandemic-era shutdown, but was underperforming. Working to publicise the program made it grow too quickly and become unsustainable. I want to see us supporting our international community, and become a partner the community can trust and rely on again: grants are the best way we can do that.
I want to see PyCon US return to full strength so that it can contribute financially to the PSF again. PyCon US is the single biggest undertaking that the foundation makes every year, but it’s run at a loss for several years. At the same time – and not unrelatedly – the US has become a less welcoming place for our international community, and the few places in the US that are welcoming to our entire diverse domestic community are becoming increasingly expensive. I’ve spent my entire term on the PyCon US committee, and I have a good understanding of the structure of the conference’s budget, and a good understanding of how we can structure PyCon so that we aren’t locked into structural deficits four years in advance. I also want to work with international conference organisers so we can support them in bringing key international meetings to more of the global community, just like the successful move of the Language Summit to EuroPython.
The Python Software Foundation is unique among Open Source Foundations at the moment: it helps Python be accountable to its community in ways that no other programming language has succeeded in at the moment. That community accountability has helped Python become the most popular language in the world, precisely because we can anticipate our community’s needs. It would be an honour to help guide the Foundation and our community through the next three years.