List of EPS Board Candidates for 2022/2023

List of EPS Board Candidates for 2022/2023

At this year’s EuroPython Society General Assembly (GA), planned for Saturday, 29 October at 17:00 CEST, we will vote in a new board of the EuroPython Society for the term 2022/2023.

List of Board Candidates

The EPS bylaws require one chair, one vice chair and 2 - 7 board members. The following candidates have stated their willingness to work on the EPS board. We are presenting them here (in alphabetical order by first name).

We will be updating this list in the days before the GA. Please send in any nominations or self-nominations to board@europython.eu.

Please note that our bylaws do not restrict nominations to people on this list. It is even possible to self-nominate or nominate other candidates at the GA itself. However, in the interest of giving members a better chance to review the candidate list, we’d like to encourage all nominations to be made before the GA.

The following fine folks have expressed their desire to run for the next EPS board elections: Alexander Hendorf, Anders Hammarquist, Artur Czepiel, Cheuk Ting Ho, Nicolás Demarchi, Patrick Arminio, Raquel Dou, Silvia Uberti, Theofanis Petkos, Vaibhav Srivastav, Vicky Twomey-Lee.

Alexander Hendorf

Pythonista / Consultant / Serial Organiser

Alexander joined the EPS spontaneously as auditor at EuroPython 2014 in Berlin when no one else felt like it. In the following five years he was an integral part of the EuroPython team, in particular as program chair,  and for two years as board member.

Alexander was elected 2nd chairman of the German Python Software Association (PySV) in 2018. In this role, he is responsible for the German conference PyConDE, which he has co-organized since 2016.

To support Open Source Software in academia he was invited to join EuroSciPy in 2018. The Pandas documentation sprint was a good reason to establish two local PyData chapters, PyData Südwest and PyData Frankfurt the same year. Both thrive with more than 1300 members today.

In 2018, Alexander was named a PSF Fellow by the Python Software Foundation for his contributions to the community. In 2021 he was named a EuroPython fellow.

Alexander is responsible for data and artificial intelligence at the boutique consultancy KÖNIGSWEG. Through his commitment as a speaker, he is a proven expert in the field of data intelligence. He has many years of experience in the practical application, introduction and communication of data and AI-driven strategies and decision-making processes. He is very grateful that everyone at his company, Königsweg, in which he is also a partner, is in support of so many community activities.

Alexander is convinced it's time for EuroPython Society to take its mission to the next level - to act as a roof and institution of the European Python community - beyond the EuroPython conference. The EPS should become better at supporting local communities at a variety of levels in the future: e.g. diversity & outreach, organising community events, mentoring opportunities or infrastructure. With his candidacy, Alexander offers his expertise, experience and implementation power to make this a reality.

Anders Hammarquist

Pythonista / Consultant / Software architect

Anders is running his own Python consultancy business, AB Struse, since 2019 and is currently mostly involved with using Python in industrial automation. He has been using Python since 1995, and fosters its use in at least four companies.

He helped organize EuroPython 2004 and 2005, and has attended and given talks at several EuroPythons since then. He has handled the Swedish financials of the EuroPython Society since 2016 and has served as board member since 2017.

Artur Czepiel

Software developer

Artur started using Python around 2008, originally to implement backends for websites and later expanding to other areas.

He joined the EuroPython team after the conference in 2017, working initially on the website and support. He joined the board for the 2018/2019, and more recently, the 2021/2022 terms.

For the next term he would like to continue the infrastructure work started last year, and focus on improving how the Society works outside of the conference and its relationships with other organisations in Europe.

Cheuk Ting Ho

Pythonista / Developer Advocate / Data Scientist

==Background==

After spending 5 years researching theoretical physics in Hong Kong, Cheuk has transferred her analytical and logical skills in natural science and built a career in data science. Cheuk has been a Data Scientist before builder her career in Developer Relations.

Cheuk constantly contributes to the community by giving learning workshops and organizing sprints for open source projects, at the same time contributing to open source projects. On top of speaking at conferences, Cheuk has joined the organizing team of EuroPython as a member of the programming workgroup since 2019 and was hosting the lightning talk from the same year since.

In 2021, Cheuk joined the EuroPython Society Board and became the Python Software Foundation fellow. Cheuk has been leading the Financial Aid team to provide accessible tickets and travel grant for people around the world to join EuroPython. Cheuk has also started a speaker mentorship program in 2021 and organize workshops for new speakers. In this year’s EuroPython, Cheuk brings mentored sprint to the conference and hopefully encourage diverse contributions to open source projects.

==Manifesto==

Believing in the benefit the society has with diversity and inclusion, Cheuk would like to continue bringing new faces to the society and keep connecting people in it. In the upcoming year, Cheuk would like to keep the financial aid program running, bringing new leadership for EuroPython and forging more connections with other Python communities - including local Python conferences and Pyladies communities around Europe and communities beyond Europe.

After visiting a few PyCons in Africa in the past, Cheuk would also like to strength the bond between Europe and Africa, by proposing new program to support Python conference organisers in Africa to attend EuroPython.

Cheuk would also like to start the speaker mentorship in early 2023 to start grooming the next generation of speakers for the community. This should be a continuous effort and not limited to the EuroPython conference. Mentees are encouraged to submit to various community events before EuroPython as well. Priority to join the program will be given to people in the underrepresented groups.

Nicolás Demarchi

Pythonista / Software Engineer

Nicolás is a self-taught software engineer working professionally for more than 15 years. After participating in some Linux User Groups and the Mozilla community, Nicolás joined the Python community around 2012, fell in love with it and never left. He is a founder and has been a board member of the Python Argentina NGO since 2016. In the PyAr community, he participated in several events and conferences as organizer and/or speaker, ranging from Python Days in various cities, PyCamp to the Python Argentina national conference, being a core organizer in the 2018 one in Buenos Aires (an open and free conference with ~1500 attendees). Since 2014 Nicolás has been maintaining the Python Argentina infrastructure that supports the mailing list, webpages, etc.  He was (still helping a bit) the host of the Buenos Aires Python Meetup. In June 2019, Nicolás moved to Amsterdam and he is currently living and working there.  A few months after the move, he joined the organization of the Python Amsterdam meetup and he is working with a small team to build the local community: py.amsterdam. He also joined the https://pycamp.es/ team trying to replicate the Pycamp Argentina experience in Europe. In 2020 he volunteered in the Media Workgroup of Europython 2020 online as a core organizer.
He joined the EPS board in 2021 and helped to organize Europython2021-online and Europython-2022 in Dublin. In Dublin his focus was particularly on the Operations team and the hybrid format of the conference.

He has also been named PSF Fellow in 2021.

I would like to continue in the EPS board because I think Europython is the event connecting all European communities and therefore the right place to invest my time on. After the 2022 conference I think I know the EPS much more and I would like to invest my time in the conference organization but also in improving our organization, lowering the burn-out risk and keeping volunteers engaged for a longer time.

Patrick Arminio

Developer Advocate / Python Italia Chair

Patrick started his journey with the Python community at PyCon Italia 2 in 2008. After many years of helping run PyCon Italia (and other conferences) as a volunteer he became the Chair of Python Italia in 2017.

He has also been nominated as a PSF Fellow for his contribution to conferences and also open source software.

He currently works as a Developer Advocate at Apollo GraphQL.

Raquel Dou

Linguist / Python enthusiast

Raquel first met Python in 2013, during her MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition, where she used Python to model the evolution of a simple communication system over time. She operates a small business providing language and technical services, in which Python is one of her primary tools. In her previous life, her undergraduate dissertation in Spanish was about ACTA in Mexico and had an earlier MSc in anthropology specialising in human origins.

She first attended EuroPython when it took place at her doorstep (Edinburgh) in 2018, and was an onsite volunteer. Since then she remained closely engaged in the EPS, as well as the organisation and execution of the conferences. She has been serving on the EPS board since 2019, working closely with the brilliant teams which delivered the two EuroPython Online editions. In 2021-2022, she had the privilege of serving as chair of the EPS. She led the organisation, supporting the rest of the board and the newly reformed teams in society affairs and organising the EuroPython conference in Dublin & Online.

Throughout the past 4 years she has experienced warmth, openness, creativity and desire to do good in every aspect of her engagement with the Python community which she proudly serves. She firmly believes that it is precisely these qualities that create strong bonds between the diverse humans that make up the community. She would like to continue to foster and strengthen this culture, and help make EPS a space for developing and trying out new ideas. Going forward, she would like to listen and engage in dialogue with other European Python communities to explore ways to gather experience and contributions, and build a collective knowledge base of community organisation. For the EuroPython conference, she would like to support more effort in curating the programme to showcase a broader spectrum of what we do with Python, the state of art of Python development, using Python to make art, Python in education and research, to name a few.

Silvia Uberti

SRE / IT Consultant

She is a Site Reliability Engineer with a degree in Network Security, really passionate about technology, travelling and her piano.

She’s an advocate for women in STEM disciplines and supports inclusiveness of underrepresented people in tech communities.

She fell in love with Python and its warm community during PyCon Italia in 2014 and became a member of EuroPython Sponsor Workgroup in 2017.

She enjoys working in it a lot and wants to help more!

Theofanis Petkos

Software Engineer / Python enthusiast

Theofanis' first encounter with Python was in 2011 during his Computer Science studies. In 2017, after a few years working at  non tech jobs, he resigned and followed his dream to become a software engineer. Right now he lives in Spain and he is a part of a DevOps team working mainly with Python. Recently, he became a member of Python Canarias.

He first attended EuroPython in 2020, as a speaker. He was a volunteer for the next two years as a part of the Financial Aid (2021), Mentorship programme (2021, 2022) and the Ops team (2022).

He loves animal facts, and he has a better sense of humour under pressure!

Vaibhav Srivastav

ML Tinkerer & Consultant

Vaibhav (VB) is a Machine Learning Researcher and Consultant. He has been working with Python and adjacent scientific communities for over a decade. He is an open source enthusiast and thrives on building and running open source communities. Python has been an integral part of VB’s career and life. He started by organising Python meetups in Delhi in 2016. He then went on to volunteer for various PyCon across APAC (India, Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia). At the peak of the pandemic, VB moved from India to Germany to pursue his masters and research speech and natural language processing at the University of Stuttgart. After a brief hiatus, he joined the EuroPython 2021 volunteering team to help with the Sponsors team. He renewed his commitment to EuroPython by volunteering for the communications and programme team for the year 2022.

Through each chapter of his volunteering journey, VB has been lucky to have gotten the opportunity to work with some truly exceptional people. He also is grateful to the EuroPython Society for giving him the autonomy to run comms related experiments throughout last year.

Should VB make it to the EuroPython Society 2023 board, he’ll spend his time and energy on rethinking the way the programme has worked in the past and tweak to fit the present needs of our community. He’d also like to focus on introducing more avenues of interaction for marginalised communities (especially neuro-diverse) to support each other and prosper under the EPS’s umbrella.

You can read more about his commitment and plans on https://vaibhav.wiki/running-for-europython-board.

Keep calm and keep eating spaghetti! (pipx run saghetti)

Vicky Twomey-Lee

Diversity in Tech Advocate / PyLadies Dublin

Vicky Twomey-Lee has been involved with the Python community since 2005 where she took over running monthly Python Ireland events until she handed over the reigns in 2016. She was chair of the first four PyCon Irelands from 2010 to 2013, where in 2013 she launched PyLadies Dublin which she currently still organise monthly meetups. She advocates diversity in tech through her other initiatives as co-founder of Coding Grace, a co-director Women Who Code Dublin, a member of Women in Technology and Science Ireland as well as collaborating with many community groups including Women in AI Ireland, international PyLadies chapters like PyLadies Paris, PyLadies Munich, and PyLadies London.

She was made a PSF Fellow in 2012, and was awarded the PSF Community Service Awards and EPS Fellow in 2021.

She previously was on the EPS board in 2012 to learn how to improve PyCon Ireland’s process in conference admin and logistics, and is delighted to be invited to be on the EPS board again. She will contribute her knowledge to the board from experiences she collected over the years of running events and being involved with specifically the Irish Tech Community. She’s also still learning about logistics and administration when it comes to community events, and being part of the EuroPython team in 2022 was quite an exhilarating experience. And she wants to encourage communities to be just as excited to get involved with EuroPython and help make it accessible for all.

Chair Nominations

Raquel Dou is running for the chair position again this year.

What does the EPS Board do ?

The EPS board is made up of up to 9 directors (including 1 chair and 1 vice chair); the board runs the day-to-day business of the EuroPython Society, including running the EuroPython conference series, and supports the community through various initiatives such as our grants programme. The board collectively takes up the fiscal and legal responsibility of the Society.

At the moment, running the annual EuroPython conference is a major task for the EPS. As such, the board members are expected to invest significant time and effort towards overseeing the smooth execution of the conference, ranging from venue selection, contract negotiations, and budgeting, to volunteer management. Every board member has the duty to support one or more EuroPython teams to facilitate decision-making and knowledge transfer.

In addition, the Society prioritises building a close relationship with local communities. Board members should not only be passionate about the Python community but have a high-level vision and plan for how the EPS could best serve the community.