For S/He's a Jolly Good. . .The PSF Fellow Recognition Program

As most of you already know, last year the PSF changed the bylaws regarding membership in order to become more inclusive, diverse, and participatory. Several previous blog posts have detailed aspects of this change and its implications (see e.g., Enroll as a Voting Member, or Membership Vote).

Building on this foundation, PSF Director Nick Coghlan has recently completed a draft of the procedures detailing the process for recognition as a PSF Fellow Member. The full text of this draft has been posted to the members' list and to the PSF Wiki, for your review and discussion.

The category of Fellow Member is described in the bylaws as 

based upon certain criteria to be established by the Board of Directors and which criteria shall be designed to emphasize extraordinary contributions (see Bylaws).

The full text of Nick’s draft has been posted to the Members' List and to the PSF Wiki, for your review and discussion. 

These bylaws will be approved in accordance with the new procedure for Strategic Decision Making (see Let’s Make Decisions Together). For your convenience, I’ve excerpted some of the basic ideas from the draft text below: 

 PSF Fellow Recognition Program 

Proposal editor: Nick Coghlan
(DRAFT for discussion with full PSF Membership) 

The PSF Fellow recognition program aims to explicitly acknowledge notable efforts of Python community members in contributing to, managing and growing the global Python community […] 

Nominating candidates for recognition as PSF Fellows 

To nominate a candidate for recognition as a PSF Fellow, the following steps should be completed by the nominating Fellow:

1. 
   affirmatively ensure that the potential candidate is interested in recognition as a Python Software Foundation Fellow
   
   


2. 
   confirm the candidate has registered as a PSF Member
   
   


3. 
   work with the candidate to prepare a recognition statement for reference by Voting Members when voting on the recognition nomination
   
   


4. 
   submit the nomination to the PSF Board for inclusion in the next PSF Fellow recognition ballot
   
   

Nominations for recognition as a PSF Fellow should be based on one or more of the following criteria:

• 
  the candidate has been active as a managing or contributing member of the Python community for at least 3 years, or
  
  


• 
  the candidate has initiated or significantly influenced a project within the Python community which has significantly increased the Python user base, has significant relevance for Python applications, or has had a significant impact on the public awareness of Python as a programming language, or
  
  


• 
  the candidate has received an official Python community award (e.g. PSF Community Service Awards, Frank Willison Award).
  
  

The following non-exhaustive list of significant contributions to the Python community and ecosystem may help make the above criteria less abstract and provide assistance in preparing a compelling recognition statement:

• 
  leaders of and long term contributors to PSF Working Groups
  
  


• 
  founders of and long-term contributors to major Python implementations (e.g. CPython, Jython, PyPy, IronPython, Stackless)
  
  


• 
  founders of and long-term contributors to projects in the Python Packaging Authority ecosystem (e.g. PyPI, pip, setuptools, packaging.python.org)
  
  


• 
  founders of and long-term contributors to other significant open source Python software libraries, frameworks, environments and applications
  
  


• 
  founders and long-term organizers of local Python user community groups
  
  


• 
  founders and long-term organizers of Python conferences
  
  


• 
  authors of Python focused technical books and other key learning materials
  
  


• 
  organisers of Python focused educational workshops and teaching programs
  
  


• 
  long term moderators of community mailing lists and other communication channels
  
  


• 
  long term curators of content on the Python wiki
  
  


• 
  as above, but for subcommunities of the Python community with a significant impact on the broader community, whether organized around a particular tool or framework (e.g. Django, NumPy), a particular problem domain (e.g. data analysis, network security, community outreach), a particular platform (e.g. Linux, Windows), or a particular region (e.g. USA, India, Europe) […]
  
  

 Recognising nominated candidates as PSF Fellows

[…] If a nomination for recognition is approved by 2/3rds of the eligible Voting Members (discounting failures to vote and abstentions), then the candidate will be formally recognised as a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, explicitly thanking them for their significant contributions to the Python community[…]

As always, the PSF welcomes your input, so please review the full text of this proposal and then let us know your thoughts. Many thanks to Nick Coghlan for his hard work on this as well as on the proposal for Strategic Decision Making. 

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