Statement
Introduction
My name is Cristián and I'm currently a Team Lead and Developer at The Qt Company, working mainly on the Qt for Python project, which is the official set of Python bindings for the Qt Project, which is written in C++. I'm originally from Chile 🇨🇱, but I have been living for the past 11 years in Germany 🇩🇪.
I have been around to Python since 2009, while I was studying Computer Science back in my country. Afterward during my further studies, I used Python and C++ both for my Masters and Doctorate. So in a nutshell, Python has been around during my whole student/professional life.
Around 2019 I decided to try and join a few Python events to see if it was a nice thing to do during my spare time, And since then I haven't stopped. My involvement in communities and initiatives (see last section) led me to join also conference organization teams as well, including PyConUS and EuroPython.
I'm a hands-on person, that not only has ideas, but prefer to present tangible proof of concepts in order to improve processes and initiatives.
My nomination goals are:
- Maintain and improve the transparency
- Improve communication and resources
- Helping invisible communities and fellowship
- Advocacy for PyCons and PyLadies
that you can read in the following sections.
Qualifications and Experience
After being involved in many communities, i have the feeling that I will be a good fit to join the board dynamics in order to contribute to all the active initiatives.
My experience from conferences will make me able to react quickly when problem arises, and do my best to have a friendly environment.
And my professional experience will help me acquiring stakeholders requirements in order to find solutions that can improve the participation of people in the Python community but also having in consideration my technical background, I can easily approach conversation that involves CPython and Python development.
You can read more about the initiatives I actively contribute in the final section of this statement.
Goals
I want changes. My main goal is not to be around and keep doing what everyone is doing in the board, but to push for new ways of bringing more people to the PSF, by improving the way we communicate, and present our resources and initiatives.
Maintain and improve the transparency
The PSF board does a lot of things, do you know which ones? If the answer is no, you can quickly jump to https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/minutes/ where you can discover that most of the members provide monthly reports of their activities. I want every PSF member to be aware of those reports, so they can check the progress of everyone behind the board.
I firmly believe that having official channels where those reports are shared, and even more important, to keep track of the individual goals that people promised in their nominations is crucial to keep people posted. Personally, I adopted a format of daily logs of my contributions that I will keep around for my own Board duties.
There are other processes that the PSF is in charge as well, that as long as there is information that can be public, we could communicate and highlight how did it happen, like the recent hires for PyPI, PSF staff, etc, so people can be closer to our decisions. The same with the grants, I believe the board can be transparent on recommendations for good practices while requesting grants, sharing at the same time negative points that some might have, so people is able to improve their applications.
Improve communication and resources
The resources we have under https://python.org/psf-landing are essential to the participation of more people in the PSF for the working groups, join as members, apply for grants, etc. However, the way the information is presented can be improved in order to be a proper resource hub.
I would like to migrate the content to a documentation-focused web that can be better indexed, easy to navigate, and that people can contribute to, specially with their translations. The PSF website needs to be an example of i18n and a10y, and our resources needs to be presented in a way that anyone can find any topic when needed.
Similarly, we need to document our working groups processes publicly (when possible) so people can suggest improvements, or even mimic what we do. Providing information about the working groups on the same page is essential to improve the participation from new faces.
There has been lots of work on https://psfmember.org which is great, so I believe a proper resources/docs web for the PSF will complement that functionality perfectly.
Helping invisible communities and fellowship
For me, an invisible community is one that is formed by people that has been working through the years that most people is not aware of, that have no PSF fellows around, and no participation in big projects. Those communities are the key for the evolution of the PSF, and we need to nurture them, and do our best in order to recognize their work.
Similarly, I'm aware of many communities that try to get PSF grants and have failed so far. Like I stated before, I would like to help them to get PSF help, not only to increase the percentage of grants we give to countries in other continents, but to let them know that it's in our full interest that they do get our support and they are important for us.
I know organizers from South America, Central America, Africa and Asia that will be very happy if such initiative's scope could reach them out.
During PyConUS 2024 I started an initiative with two active board members, to start gathering names of people that have been doing lots of the Python community and are not yet PSF Fellows, so we could promote them and enable them to keep looking for others that needs to be recognized
Advocacy for PyCons and PyLadies
Due to my contributions to different PyCon and PyLadies initiatives, I will be actively contacting organizers to provide the most feedback and support I can in order to improve their dynamics, engagement, and organization.
I want to actively help the Global PyLadies Council to grow even further, by being around and being available to listen to any issue that might require the help from the board, and I believe my experience from PyLadies Berlin and PyLadiesCon has helped me understand how to support this amazing organization.
Final words
I know there are a lots of things to be done, and many hours per weeks needs to be used in order to make real progress, so part of my plan is to focus my attention to my PSF Board duties, delegating my other responsibilities to other community members, so I can have enough time for this new role.
As any nomination, some of the goals might be impossible to achieve, but I want to ensure you I will do my best to fulfill them all, and if somethings falls down, I will provide you with the reasoning behind I couldn't achieve what I stated here.
Community contributions
I decided to keep track of my contributions since mid 2022 on a public repository but the following are the communities/initiatives/conferences I have helped with:
- For public speaking in Python conferences, meetups, podcasts, panels, etc you can check this list
- PSF Fellow since 2021
- Coordinator of the Python en Español initiative since 2020. Maintaining the official website and Discord bot. Moderating and administrating the Discord server. Helping with the moderation of the Telegram group as well. In charge of the merchandising and communication in different events and conferences.
- Co-chair of the PyCon Charlas, the Spanish track at PyConUS since 2022.
- Translator and co-coordinator of the Python Docs ES initiative. You can see my contributions here.
- PyPI moderator since 2022, helping with the project/upload size limit request.
- Helped a few Python-related Chilean communities in order to start a nation-wide formal Python Chile association, organizing the first PyDay and first PyCon with the approval and support from the PSF.
- Co-organizer of the PyLadies Berlin chapter, helping with organizational, design, and mentoring tasks.
- Member of the Spanish Python Association since 2020, Volunteer and co-organizer of the PyCon Spain conference2021, 2022, and 2023.
- Volunteering at EuroPython 2023, and Co-organizer of EuroPython 2024 in charge of the Programme team.
- Co-organizer of the first PyLadiesCon in 2023, helping with the website and infrastructure.
- Co-organizer of Python Pizza Hamburg 2023.