The Frank Willison Award was given to me on February 6th, 2002, the
second day of the tenth Python Conference. The picture at right shows
me proudly displaying the certificate, and links to a close-up of the
certificate's text.
The full title of the award is "The Frank Willison Award for Contributions to the Python Community", and "is given to a person judged to have made an outstanding contribution to the Python community." The winner of this year's award was selected by the PythonLabs group at Zope Corporation.
At the presentation I didn't make any sort of acceptance speech, though I had fuzzily outlined one in my head just in case. If I had delivered a speech, it would have gone something like this, with a last line stolen from Robertson Davies:
I'd like to thank various people. Thanks to Guido, first, for writing a language that's both fun to hack in, and fun to hack on. And thanks to Greg Ward, who's frequently the sounding board for my ideas and always offers much helpful design and implementation advice, combined with a nitpicking eye for the documentation. And, finally, thanks to the whole python-dev crew, all 30-odd people: a smart, funny, at times prickly and contentious but more often friendly bunch. In our diversity lies our strength; thanks for everything.
The actual presentation of the award narrowly avoided disaster. After tripping all through a talk I gave earlier that day, I surpassed that by almost tripping in a spectacular way when going up to get the award. The award was given after the keynote speech by Tim Berners-Lee, so this was the largest room at the conference, and speakers were on a little podium, with a two-step stepladder for ascending to the podium. A rather frail, bendy stepladder, as it turned out. Now, anyone who knows me will realize that I don't so much walk up stairs as bounce up them. I came up the side aisle, strode toward the podium, and bounced directly from the ground onto the second, topmost, step, causing the ladder to buckle under me. I thank my lucky star that I didn't pitch forward and collide with the O'Reilly editor presenting the award, but instead managed to remain stable.
The award is named after Frank Willison, who was the much-beloved editor-in-chief at O'Reilly until his untimely death in 2001. I only ever met him once, at the ninth Python Conference in Long Beach, California. Willison and I were two of the nine people sitting at the same table for lunch. I don't recall much about the conversation around the table, but I do remember that the person sitting next to Frank was a webmaster for a commercial pornography site, and expounded on how useful it would be if there were a standard package -- Python-based, of course -- that would handle billing and access control and security for adult Web sites. Frank was amused by the idea, and suggested that if someone were to write such a thing, a book about it would make a great O'Reilly title.
The idea for the award was originally suggested by Laura Lewin, an O'Reilly editor who was a protégé of Frank's. Ms. Lewin left O'Reilly for Manning some months before the conference, so the arrangements for the prize were completed by Betsy Waliszewski and Paula Ferguson.
O'Reilly issued a press release about the award.
For more information on Frank Willison, see the memorial page, collecting reminiscences of him, a collection of representative quotations, and the archive of his column "Frankly Speaking". Cyclists will particularly enjoy his account of commuting to work on a bicycle, written for Bike-to-Work Week.