Inaugural Winners of the Outstanding PyLady Award
Lynn Root
May 28, 2024 | Tag: » Global, Outstanding PyLady Award
Announcing the first recipients of the Outstanding PyLady Awards (🎉 OPA 🎉)!
Many remarkable members and volunteers make up the PyLadies community and make significant contributions to bettering the Python community.
To celebrate that, Cheuk Ting Ho saw many folks doing amazing things for the community and proposed establishing the Outstanding PyLady Award to the PyLadies Global Council. This new Outstanding PyLady Award recognizes diverse Pythonistas doing extraordinary community-elevating things, highlights their achievements, and thanks them for all the work they’ve contributed.
Moving forward, every year the PyLadies Global Council will be selecting a handful of folks from nominations from the Python community at large (anyone in the Python community is encouraged to nominate!). Award winners are recognized at PyCon US, and receive their choice of either free registration & travel assistance to PyCon US, or a cash award of $1,000. Its intention is to demonstrate that their service and contributions to the PyLadies community does lead to recognition and reward. They also get a cute little pin to wear on their lanyards for all PyCons to come, if they wish.
This is the first year of the Outstanding PyLady awards, and we got a whopping 84 submissions for nominations. Unfortunately, we do not have the capacity to award all nominees, although all of them clearly deserve it.
The PyLadies Global Council has selected 3 women to receive the inaugural award, and we are all so very excited to celebrate them. In alphabetical order by last name:
Abigail Mesrenyame Dogbe
Abigail (X, LinkedIn) hails from the 🇬🇭 Ghana 🇬🇭 chapter of PyLadies (X, Instagram, GitHub), which she helped found in 2017. She and the Ghana chapter has in one way or another inspired at least 8 other chapters around the world to start up, including Liberia, Ethiopia, Zambia, Kenya, Finland, Cameroon, and two in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In her copious amounts of spare time, besides organizing PyLadies events, she co-organizes PyCon Africa, has keynoted for the first PyLadies Conference and others like DjangoCon US 2023, and has founded and is running an entire organization, Mesrenyame & Friends, whose sole purpose is to inspire & support young girls in STEM. All in a day’s work, right? 👩🏿💻
Read more about Abigail in PyDev of the Week.
Jessica Greene
Jessica Greene (X, LinkedIn, Mastodon) comes to us from 🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany 🇩🇪 - a PyLadies chapter (X, Instagram, Meetup) that has some awesome stickers of their own. She has been the organizer for the Berlin chapter for over 6 years. You might have caught her from this year’s PyCon US’s Diversity & Inclusion panel talk - she’s a part of the PSF’s Code of Conduct Committee, which is a lot of unnoticed and important work. It’s been said that Jessica has a penchant for automating the administrative tasks for her and her chapter organizers. But naturally, who wouldn’t! And when she’s not organizing PyLadies events, or participating in committees, or writing Python code, she helps put on the Python Pizza Hamburg, a micro conference that combines Python talks and eating pizza (🍕 sign me up! 🍕).
Check out Jessica’s many insightful blog posts!
Maaya Ishida
Maaya Ishida (X, LinkedIn, Facebook) joins us from our 🇯🇵 Tokyo PyLadies chapter 🇯🇵 (connpass, Facebook, X, GitHub), which she has been involved with for 10 years. Of course, that is not all that she’s done; no PyLadies organizer can sit still. Maaya organizes the PyLadies Caravan 🚐, which is a series of events over the last 5 years, with the purpose of connecting with other PyLadies around the entire country of Japan. And she, too, was one of the inaugural speakers of the first PyLadies Conference, and a keynoter at PyCon HongKong last year. Of course she can’t get enough, because she also volunteers for the PyCon JP Association (english site).
Be sure to check out Maaya’s impressive blog.
Nominate Someone! or Yourself!
To read more information about the award, have a look over at our award docs. If you would like to nominate someone or yourself for an Outstanding PyLady Award, head over to the nomination form. Nominations are accepted year-round, and award winners will be recognized at the nearest upcoming PyCon US.