Nominated by: self after encouragement by Brett.
I am nominating myself to the Steering Council. I became a core developer in
2014, and worked on different aspects of the standard library, including
unittest and mock. I am also the author of the draft “Local Packages
Directory” PEP (PEP 582) along with many other community members.
From 2008, I also maintain a free online book to help new programmers with Python.
Affiliations
I work as a public interest technologist in a non-profit called Freedom of
the Press Foundation, where we work to preserve and
strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights guaranteed to the press through a
variety of avenues, including the development of encryption tools,
documentation of attacks on the press, training newsrooms on digital security
practices, and advocating for the public’s right to know.
My main day job is to maintain SecureDrop project.
SecureDrop is an open source whistleblower submission system that media
organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources.
It is written in Python. My day job allows me to continue contributing to the
various upstream communities. All the work I do are also free and open source
software.
Background:
I’ve helped out many free and open source software projects as a volunteer for
around 15 years. A major portion of that time I also worked on many free
software projects as my day job. Back in 2004 I started a Linux Users’ Group in
Durgapur, India, and through the same I am organizing an online training to get
more upstream contributors for 12 years. Enabling others to contribute to larger
projects and also see the viewpoints of different groups of users, are the big
motivations for contributing to various projects.
I am also part of the core team of the Tor Project and a long time contributor
to the Fedora Project.
From 2014 (except 2015 when random module decided not to choose me) I have also
served as a Director of the Python Software Foundation, and helped out as a staff
volunteer in PyCon US. I am also the co-chair for the PSF grants working
group. There are various other conferences all across the world where I take active part.
In 2017 I chaired PyCon Pune, with a special goal to increase contributor base
outside of the normal US/EU zone. The dedicated devsprint served that purpose,
and slowly more local Conferences are picking up the trend of focusing on
actively participating in the community design & development process, rather
than being passive consumers of open source technology. This is a long term
process, but, it will help to increase the geographic diversity of our
contributor base.
Online Presence
Blog: https://kushaldas.in
Github: https://github.com/kushaldas/
Mastodon: https://toots.dgplug.org/@kushaldas