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Today's post, like the  previous one , features a development project that the PSF has been delighted to fund once again this year. On April 28, 2015, the PSF Board unanimously approved the following resolution: RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant   $8,000 to Read the Docs, Inc. for developmental work. What is RTD? Looking for somewhere to host your open source project’s documentation in a way that will make it readily available, easy to find, fully searchable for your users, and exportable in PDF format, while at the same time offering you ease of use and the ability to add content as your project develops? Then, you’ll want to check out  Read the Docs , the world’s largest documentation website for open source projects.  Read the Docs … hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar. We support webhooks so your do...

In looking back over the PSF newsblog posts, it appears that most of the PSF funded projects I’ve written about were conferences, workshops, and education/outreach efforts. These are, of course, truly important. However, it’s also important to get the word out about several development projects that the PSF has sponsored in 2015. One such project is Armin Rigo’s work on CFFI 1.0.   RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation grant Armin Rigo $2500 towards cffi development aimed at making cffi generated extension modules importable without runtime dependencies on an extension module build toolchain. CFFI  or  C Foreign Function Interface for Python  provides a way to call compiled C code, i.e., external C libraries, from Python using interface declarations written in C. This eliminates the need to use a programming language other than C and Python. At the same time, CFFI minimizes the amount of C code that needs to be written, so it really is a boon for Python devel...

For those of you who haven't followed the recent discussion on the PSF members list, there has been an important development regarding the election of members to the Board of Directors.  Due to ambiguity with respect to the candidate nomination deadline (the former election administrator interpreted the deadline as midnight May 1, UTC; while others were operating with the understanding that the deadline was midnight Anywhere on Earth ), a candidate who wished to self-nominate was not able to. The PSF Board moved quickly to respond to this issue and the following solution was adopted:  Here's the official explanation by the Chairman of the Board of Directors, Van Lindberg: Due to some procedural problems with the current election for the Board of the Python Software Foundation, the Foundation has taken some steps to make sure that the elections are freely open for nominations and that there are no conflicts of interest. Specifically, today the board adopted the following resolu...

For the first time ever, the PSF has joined forces with another open source organization,   NumFOCUS , to create a collaborative working group to make decisions on allocating grants or sponsorships for Scientific Python projects, conferences, etc.   NumFOCUS , based in Austin Texas, has been promoting and funding open source computing resources for scientific research since 2012. Their core projects include  AstroPi ,  Data Carpentry ,  IPython ,  Julia ,  SimPy ,  NumPy , and  SciPy ,  Matplotlib ,  Cython ,  PyTables , and more. This new joint working group was spearheaded by PSF Director David Mertz, who will co-chair along with mathematician and Python evangelist Tim Couper. The PSF has recently pledged initial annual support in the amount of of US$25,000, and agreed to match any amount NumFOCUS contributes beyond $25,000, up to $50,000 contributed by the PSF, during the PSF Board meeting on 4/28/15 (for combined fundi...