[Linux-aus] Proposal: LA to donate to the Malcolm Tredinnick Memorial Prize

[Mary Gardiner]

Hi all,

The Django Software Foundation has announced the Malcolm Tredinnick
Memorial Prize, in honour of Malcolm and remembering his death in March:

"""
Malcolm Tredinnick joined the Django project as a core developer in
early 2006. He was deeply involved in many part of Django - most
notably, the ORM, but many other internals bear his fingerprints.
Django’s support for unicode, and autoescaping in templates can both be
almost entirely attributed to Malcolm.

But his contributions weren't just code. He was also a prolific
communicator. He logged thousands of messages in django-users, helping
people learn Django, sharing his expertise freely and openly. He also
logged thousands of messages in django-developers, helping shape the
framework we all use today[…]

With Malcolm’s memory in mind, the Django Software Foundation is proud
to announce that with this blessing of his family, we will be
establishing an award in Malcolm’s name.

The award will be a monetary prize, awarded annually, to the person who
best exemplifies the spirit of Malcolm’s work - someone who welcomes,
supports and nurtures newcomers; freely gives feedback and assistance to
others, and helps to grow the community. The hope is that the recipient
of the award will use the award stipend as a contribution to travel to a
community event -- a DjangoCon, a PyCon, a sprint -- and continue in
Malcolm’s footsteps.
"""

https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2013/sep/16/announcing-malcolm-tredinnick-memorial-prize/

Since Malcolm was a long-time Australian Free Software community member,
in particular attending and speaking at LCA several times as well as
PyCon AU, I'd like to propose that LA make a donation to this fund, of a
size that suits Council's budget.

This isn't really a grant request in the normal sense (
http://linux.org.au/projects/grants ) but I'm sending this to this list
for member feedback in the same spirit.

I guess the major negative I can see is that while Australians would be
eligible to receive the prize, realistically it's likely that the funds
would be awarded to someone elsewhere.

Note re conflicts of interest: I am not a member of the Django Software
Foundation, nor did the DSF ask me to make this request (in fact, they
don't know about it). I'm not a Django contributor or community member
and am therefore exceptionally unlikely to benefit personally from the
prize in the foreseeable future.

-Mary