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 one of the following:

1. A cash award of $500, allowing a single award to a US taxpayer to be made without requiring any formalties; or
2. Free registration at PyCon, with optionally a contribution of up to $500 towards the recipient's travel and accommodation expenses. This award would be preferred for recipients from outside the USA, as there are fewer tax implications.

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 descretion, make an award to an individual nominated by the Board.

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 Argentia 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.