Congratulating Leonard for his Community Service Award

Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

03 Jun 2025, 11:30 a.m.

PyCon
Python

Twenty-one years ago, Leonard Richardson created the now-popular open source tool Beautiful Soup. He's maintained it ever since. In 2024, the Python Software Foundation recognized his contributions with two service awards, naming him a PSF Fellow and honoring him with a Community Service Award.

“The Q2 2024 Community Service Award was given to Leonard Richardson for his work as the founder and maintainer of the web-scraping library Beautiful Soup, his zine "Tool Safety” as well as his work as an architect and leader on the open source Library Simplified project which makes borrowing ebooks from a public library as easy as buying them from an online bookstore.”

— June 2024 list of PSF Community Service Awards.

(Tool Safety, Library Simplified.)

During the closing ceremonies at PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Leonard and several other Community Service Award recipients from the past year received their awards on stage.

PSF head Deb Nicholson next to a row of award-holding people on a stage, below a caption screen reading "...contributions, for ... a key role in organizes Python pizza and PyData and meetups. [Applause and cheers] This is the whole cohort of CSAs for"

I scurried from my seat to take approximately eighteen not-very-good photos as Leonard rose and walked to the stage, heard PSF's Executive Director Deb Nicholson read his praises, received the physical award, shook hands with her and other winners, and withstood cheers and applause.

Onstage: PSF head Deb Nicholson shaking Leonard's hand. On screen at left: "Leonard Richardson: Q2 2024 Community Service Award". On captioning screen: "for his work -- [Applause and cheers] -- this is the his work as the founder and maintainer of the library, Beautiful Soup. Tool safety, as we as his work as an architect. Which means borrowing library as easy as buying them from an"

I'm pretty proud of him.

Leonard on stage at PyCon US 2025, holding up his glass Community Service Award

He's not a boastful guy. When he writes about these decades of work it's usually to share lessons that others might find useful, as with his PyCon US Maintainers' Summit talk from last year, "How to maintain a popular Python library for most of your life ~~without~~ with burning out".

If there's someone you appreciate for their contributions to the world, and their service intersects with Python in some significant way, you can nominate them for an award, and I encourage you to do that. And you can nominate yourself.

(And anyone who's doing that much service also ought to put June 21st on their calendar for Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day, to inventory their obligations and pause or stop any that aren't working for them anymore. Follow Seth Larson's lead.)

I'm still working on some followups from my conversations in Pittsburgh, and feel free to email me if you're waiting for something. But I at least wanted to get this tribute up now.

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Comments

MKK
03 Jun 2025, 21:49 p.m.

Go Leonard! 💖