Cascadia Community Builder Award: Fourth Winner Announced!

The Cascadia Community Builder Award recognizes a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the free software movement in the Cascadia region and this year’s winner is Don Sheu. The award was presented in person on Saturday, November 10th at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference https://seagl.org/. Don founded PuPPy, a friendly user group dedicated to proliferating a diverse and talented Python community in the Puget Sound region. In a little over four years, he’s served PuPPy attendees about 20,000 tacos and taco equivalents.

With organizers from the PNW Python communities, he founded PyCascades in 2018. The first meeting was attended by 390 people including the creator of Python, Guido van Rossum. Guido delivered his last talk as BDFL at PyCascades. Because of the spectacularly inclusive community Sheu helped build, the talk schedule was majority women and non-binary speakers. Sheu is the first Cascadia Community Builder Award recipient based in Seattle, where the regional award is presented each year.

Sheu’s passion for seeding extremely welcoming communities is exactly what the Cascadia Community Builder Award was created to highlight. The award committee couldn’t be more pleased to highlight his impactful and timely work. The committee was especially struck by Sheu’s success in reaching out to traditionally under-represented groups. We hope that Sheu’s energy, vision and leadership inspire others to share their favorite tech with new people in their own regions.