Welcome New Board Members

The PSF is thrilled to welcome six new board members, chosen on June 11 during the 2017 PSF Board Election. The PSF would not be what it is without the expertise and diversity of our board, and we look forward to seeing what our new members accomplish this quarter. Read on to learn more about them and their initial goals as PSF Board Members.

Paul Hildebrandt has been a Senior Engineer with Walt Disney Animation Studios since 1996. He resides outside of Los Angeles with his wife and three boys. In his first quarter, he hopes to serve the Python community by better understanding the well-oiled machine that is the PSF and by handling regular board activity. He desires to contribute by focusing on sponsorship and corporate involvement opportunities.

Eric Holscher is co-founder of Read the Docs and Write the Docs, where he works

to elevate the status of documentation in the software industry. He has hiked 800 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, and spends most of his spare time in the woods or traveling the world. His wish is to focus on sustainability and to create a new initiative that will bring in sponsors who are focused on the sustainability of the ecosystem such as PyPI, Read the Docs, and pip.

Marlene Mhangami is the director and co-founder of ZimboPy, an organization that teaches Zimbabwean girls how to code in Python. Through her organization she has worked with the organizers of Django Girls Chinoyi and Harare, as well as PyCon Zimbabwe to grow the use of Python locally. Her goals for the quarter are to help connect, support, and represent issues relevant to Pythonistas in Africa. She will seek to increase the number of PyCons in the region and facilitate the inclusion of women and other underrepresented groups.

Paola Katherine Pacheco is a backend Python developer and organizer of Python groups such as PyLadies Brazil, PyLadies Rio de Janeiro, Django Girls Rio de Janeiro, Pyladies Mendoza and Python Mendoza. She runs a YouTube channel where she teaches Python in Portuguese. Her goals this quarter are to energize Python events for the Brazilian and Argentine Python communities, and to increase diversity by promoting education and events to women and underrepresented groups.

Kenneth Reitz is the product owner of Python at Heroku. He is well-known for his many open source software projects, specifically Requests: HTTP for Humans. He seeks to contribute towards the PSF's continued optimization of its operations, increase its sustainability, and the sustainability of the entire Python ecosystem.

Thomas Wouters is a long-time CPython core developer and a founding PSF member. He has worked at Google since 2006, maintaining the internal Python infrastructure. His immediate goal is to get reacquainted with the PSF procedures and the matters the board attends to, both of which have changed a lot since he last served on the Board of Directors. Longer term, he would like to work on the awareness of the practical side of the Python community: the website, mailing lists, and other help channels like IRC, as well as actual code development and services like PyPI.