"I Found My Secret Calling As An Auctioneer": Community Service Award Recipient Jacqueline Kazil

When a pair of cufflinks in the shape of the Python logo sold for $900, Jacqueline Kazil thought, "We're on to something." The cufflinks were the most coveted item of the PyLadies Auction at PyCon in 2014. So the next year Kazil made a pair of Python socks—"2015 was the year of the sock, in fashion"—and a Python tie. The socks sold for $550. The tie sold for $600 to Jacob Kaplan-Moss, the Django contributor. He tweeted:

Yissss got the tie to go with my cuffs from last year. #pycon #pyladies

— jacobian (@jacobian) April 11, 2015

Kazil had begun volunteering with the auction in 2013, "at the last minute." By 2015 she stepped up to help collect items and auction them. Her fellow auction coordinator, Lynn Root, says, "She came in and just like, did shit. She was completely on the ball and accomplished what needed to be done."

The thousands of dollars PyLadies raises from the annual auction is spent on scholarships to send women to PyCon. "It lowers the barrier for women to attend," says Kazil. "Not everybody has a company supporting them. I remember when I was working for the government there wasn't that money allocated for sending folks to conferences."

Jackie Kazil is a 2016 recipient of the Python Software Foundation Community Service Award. The Foundation recognizes her contribution to the PyCon PyLadies Auction, and her diligent volunteer effort as chair of the PSF Grants Work Group.

Jackie Kazil

The Grants Work Group ensures that small grant applications are processed promptly in the periods between PSF Board meetings. "We make sure that grants keep flowing," Kazil says. The group also provides diverse perspectives of applications. "Our members are from around the world, and that ensures we have input about cultural factors, costs that we wouldn't think of if we didn't have this global view."

According to Lynn Root, "Jackie is a very genuine and true person who really acts on her passions." Acting on her passions has paid off in a prestigious career: She is president of the board of the Presidential Innovation Fellows Foundation, wrote the Mesa agent-based modeling framework, is a Technical Fellow at Capital One, and recently co-authored with Katharine Jarmul the O'Reilly book Data Wrangling with Python. Kazil says, "Each feeds a different part of what I think is important. The book was created for data people or statisticians who want to learn how to code. The two authors and two editors and two target-audience reviewers were women which I think is kind of cool."

With her Mesa project, Kazil aims to consolidate agent-based modeling techniques in a reusable Python framework. "It's a type of modeling where you have so many independent variables in the system that it would take until the end of time to solve." Mesa also enables researchers to publish browser-based visualizations of their results. "It makes the models reproducible. For example economists and sociologists come from different schools of thought, but if they can 'pip install' something they can work with the same baseline model. Once that baseline is created and accepted, they have the same starting point."



In January Kazil joined Capital One as a member of the Technical Fellows program, where she mentors, teaches, and cultivates the company's engineering culture. She works with Jim Jagielski, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and a Distinguished Engineer in the Tech Fellows program, helping to open-source projects from the company. “There's increased focus on open source in the private sector," she says. "You might think, why would I want to go to a bank? But there's a lot of awesome things to work on here."

Despite her accomplishments as a software engineer, Kazil's enthusiasm for the PyLadies auction is undiminished. "I love love love the event. There was a joke going around about how I had found my secret calling. I should be an auctioneer."

PSF/NumFOCUS joint Working Group on Scientific Python

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 funding up to $100,000). 

Image credit: engineering.dartmouth.edu

In forming the Working Group, David reached out via the PSF members' list to call for volunteers. As he wrote,

This note is a call for volunteers … The work needed … [is] keeping in mind a finite budget, and evaluating and discussing requests that come in for grants or sponsorship relative to this budget. In the best case, people connected to scientific communities will also do some outreach to let groups know that funds are potentially available, but it’s also necessary just to weigh requests that come to us independently.

The call for volunteers led to an extremely impressive group representing a range of scientific expertise and interests. The PSF is confident in the group’s ability to make capable evaluations of grant requests that will ensure a judicious use of limited funds.

Here are the WG members' biographies:

David Mertz: Ph.D. in Political Philosophy, gone astray into computer theory, with a stint in computational biochemistry. He has been a Fellow of the PSF since 2008, and a Director since 2009. He is author of Text Processing in Python (Addison Wesley) and the series Charming Python (IBM developerWorks).

Tim Couper: Oxford D.Phil. in Mathematics. Python evangelist and consultant for 16 years, now based in Scotland. Extensive python experience with organisations of all sizes from startups to large retail, pharmaceuticals & finance (banking & hedge funds).

Anthony Scopatz: Computational Physicist and avid Python developer since 2002 and PSF Fellow since 2013. He is coauthor of Effective Computation in Physics (O'Reilly). He will be joining the University of South Carolina as a tenure-track faculty member in Mechanical Engineering in August 2015.

Stéfan van der Walt: Assistant Researcher at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been an active member of the scientific Python community since 2006, and frequently teaches Python at workshops and conferences. He is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy and dipy.

Travis Oliphant: Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Mayo Clinic; professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU 2001 to 2007 with research in inverse problems and biomedical imaging; creator of SciPy, author of NumPy; founder of Numba, PyData, NumFOCUS, and Continuum Analytics. Currently CEO of Continuum.

Leah Silen: Executive Director of NumFOCUS, Leah has been involved daily in the support of the Python scientific computing community since NumFOCUS began three years ago. She has worked with the board of directors to initiate and carry out fiscal sponsorship, fellowship and grant programs funding both projects and individuals. She has also worked through the organization of PyData events to further support the community as well as on scholarship review committees of multiple conferences.

Dana Bauer: Geographer, Pythonista, open data enthusiast, mom to a future robot programmer. Dana has over 54 repositories at GitHub and works as a developer at Rackspace. 

Kurt Kaiser is the Treasurer of the Python Software Foundation.

Congratulations to the organizers and members and best of luck in your important work. We look forward to hearing about your activities.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.