Hi! I’m Christopher Neugebauer. I’m a first-term Director seeking re-election.

You may know me from my work organising conferences: I was a member of the PyCon Australia core team from 2012 until 2017, and more recently, I’ve run North Bay Python in Petaluma, California.

My goal as a Director is to ensure the Foundation is a group that can steward and grow a Diverse and International Python community. I love using Python because it’s a language that is stewarded by the community, with core infrastructure run by the community. The Foundation is key to ensuring Python remains in the hands of our community, and can grow and thrive with the support it needs.

When I started as a Director, the Foundation was largely funded by PyCon US revenue. The language was solely led by our BDFL. Our grants program funded a vibrant range of events and workshops throughout the world. My term as PSF Director has come at a challenging time: in the wake of COVID, the Foundation has had to re-think how we can sustain the programs that we run. In that time, we’ve not only been successful, but we’ve also grown them.

As a re-elected board member, I want to continue working to ensure that the Foundation’s revenue sources remain diverse, even as PyCon US returns to being held in-person. I want to make sure we continue to fund staff and infrastructure that are key to the sustainability -- and community ownership -- of our language. I want to make sure the PSF remains an example of how effective Open Source community governance can be.

In my first term, I believe I’ve worked effectively to guide the Foundation through a position where it is doing more important work than ever, even despite the pandemic, which has reshaped how the Foundation serves our community.

I helped to achieve alignment in the board as COVID struck, advocating for frequent communication -- and high levels of transparency -- in the lead-up to cancelling our in-person PyCon US 2020. This communication strategy bought Foundation staff time to negotiate a financially advantageous cancellation, which made it possible to focus on growing new programs throughout 2020 and 2021.

As an inaugural member of our PyCon US Board committee, I advocated for locking in a hosting agreement with Pittsburgh for 2024 and 2025, as a way to achieve financial certainty, while letting our staff focus on running a fully-online PyCon US 2021.

I helped advocate for the board to restructure our sponsorships program following the cancellation of our in-person events last year. As a result, the Foundation has gone from running three separate sponsorship programs to just one. The new sponsorship program has been incredibly successful: even though our flagship PyCon US benefits were not able to be offered this year, we have been able to attract new, and bigger sponsorships which have enabled the Foundation to fund new community assets, including the first ever community-funded Core Python developer. As a result, I believe Python’s status as a language of its community is stronger than ever.

Finally, I helped align the board in the last stages of the adoption of our new Code of Conduct. I spent countless hours listening to the concerns of individual Directors, and people involved in the drafting process, and helped the board understand and resolve concerns, to produce a document that is both effective and applicable to the diverse and international community that the PSF serves. As a result, the Foundation has gone from having separate Codes of Conduct for the Foundation’s online infrastructure and the conferences we run, and now has an effective and independent incident review working group.

If you have any questions about my candidacy, you can reach me at [email protected] or via @chrisjrn on Twitter. Thank you for your consideration!