Python Software Foundation Session
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 132 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/44911 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
|
EuroPython 201894 / 132
2
3
7
8
10
14
15
19
22
27
29
30
31
34
35
41
44
54
55
56
58
59
61
66
74
77
78
80
81
85
87
91
93
96
98
103
104
105
109
110
111
113
115
116
118
120
121
122
123
125
127
128
129
130
131
132
00:00
SoftwareFormal languageComputer programmingEvent horizonOperations researchSlide ruleOpen sourceSelf-organizationCodeCore dumpVotingWhiteboardMultiplication signSoftware developerFormal languageBitElectronic mailing listCASE <Informatik>Term (mathematics)Event horizonDecision theoryQuicksortOperator (mathematics)MereologyGame controllerCategory of beingOrder (biology)Projective planeFlow separationCoordinate systemNumberProcess (computing)Analytic continuationTouch typingElement (mathematics)Mobile appComputer iconSlide ruleSoftware frameworkSound effectSource codeStability theoryStaff (military)Computer animation
07:02
Operations support systemVotingElement (mathematics)Group actionWhiteboardOperations researchData conversionVotingHash functionFormal grammarEmailWhiteboardLevel (video gaming)Element (mathematics)1 (number)Group actionStaff (military)BitProcess (computing)Different (Kate Ryan album)Multiplication signQuicksortThread (computing)System callPerspective (visual)CodeElectronic mailing listDependent and independent variablesOpen sourceAddress spaceLatent heatDirection (geometry)Source codeData managementInternetworkingPower (physics)Operator (mathematics)MereologyEqualiser (mathematics)Strategy gameLattice (order)Ocean currentTerm (mathematics)Generic programmingPosition operatorComputer animation
14:03
Formal languageSoftware repositoryHacker (term)Direction (geometry)DigitizingSelf-organizationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)EmailLocal ringDisk read-and-write headElectronic mailing listMaterialization (paranormal)BitMachine visionElectronic program guidePoint (geometry)WordEvent horizonProcess (computing)Group actionWhiteboardTouch typingShared memoryOpen setSpacetimeInternetworkingWave packetForm (programming)CollaborationismElement (mathematics)Strategy gameGoodness of fitFile formatMultiplication signAddress spaceRight angleConnected spaceMereologyoutputPiBlogPresentation of a groupKernel (computing)Computer animation
21:05
Group actionScheduling (computing)Element (mathematics)StatisticsProgrammer (hardware)NumberGoodness of fitCore dumpFormal grammarWhiteboardProcess (computing)Figurate numberMusical ensembleTouch typingSoftware developerPoint (geometry)Self-organizationComputer programmingAngleVotingQuicksortMultiplication signTerm (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Projective planeSet (mathematics)Reading (process)Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
Thank you. So hello, we're going to basically go through just a few things about the PSF, in case you don't know, and then we're going to open it up to questions. So that will give you a few minutes to think of a good question. So there will be a quiz later on.
00:23
So we'll do that. And we're going to be kind of dancing back and forth as we trade off on slides, so we'll see just how entertaining that is. So I'm going to turn it over to Eric to get us started here. Thank you all for coming. So we're just going to start off, yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about the PSF.
00:41
And then instead of just standing up here the whole time telling you, hopefully you have some questions that will kind of direct what else we can tell you about the PSF. So please, again, yeah, just think of if you have any questions or, you know, how does that whole Python thing exist in the world? We're happy to answer them. But really, the thing that the PSF does is fulfill the PSF's mission,
01:01
which is to promote Python. And so that is kind of advancing the development as well as the community and the ecosystem. So you think about the conferences around the world, all the open source code on PyPI, as well as the core language. We exist as a nonprofit to just help all of those things get better and
01:21
to make Python better for all of us as users. Yeah, and I think the thing I would add there is just that we ultimately are always driven into PSF by coming back to this. So there may be things that are good, there may be lots of things that are wonderful, if we as the PSF can't find them fitting in that sort of framework,
01:44
then we probably can't really support it because we're a nonprofit in the United States and they're pretty picky about those things. So that's where we're at. So specifically, what do we do? We'll talk about this more as it comes up, but the PSF does not tell the core developers what to do with the Python
02:03
language. They would be very unhappy with us if we tried to do that. Instead, we own the intellectual property because even though it's an open source project, somebody needs to own all of that code, the intellectual property, in order to even release it as an open source project.
02:22
If it were just floating around with no license, anybody in the world could do whatever they wanted with it and that's not exactly what we would like to have happen with the Python language. We also, you know, sort of try to support our members and continue to grow things as an inclusive organization.
02:42
And then a large part of what the PSF does has to do with money. So the PSF makes a fair profit on PyCon US, which we put on, and most of that money goes back to either running the PSF or a large part of it to supporting other Python events around the world.
03:02
So we will be granting in the order of a quarter million dollars to various organizations this year. Including the conference you're sitting at right now. So we actually gave EuroPython a grant to help, you know, build the Python community here in Europe. So, yeah, most PyCons around the world are helped out by the PSF.
03:23
I personally ran PyCascades for the first year and the grant we got from the PSF is really what let us put down a down payment on our venue. So we were a new first year conference and we had no money, we had no resources, and it was really that PSF money that let us kind of start the process of creating a PyCon.
03:41
So it was super important for us to be able to build that community that we were trying to build in the Pacific Northwest. So that's just one example. We're doing that for communities all around the world. So the way the PSF works is anyone who contributes about five hours a month is able to become a member. And the membership, who is, you know, probably anyone in this room could
04:02
become a member, votes for the board of directors. So we are both on that board of directors and we are the people that are responsible for guiding the Python Software Foundation. So we are kind of legally responsible for the PSF. And the really cool thing is that we are democratically elected. There is an election each year for the board by members of the community.
04:24
So it is really a community-run organization that is in control of the language and all of the decisions around kind of the legal entity that runs Python. So that's very unique in the world, right? A lot of the other languages out there are run by corporations.
04:41
Really Python itself is run by the community. So that's a pretty cool and special thing. And this is actually, we just had a board election a couple months ago. And this is the full list of people who are on the board this year. I'm not going to read all the names, but it's also on our website, if you're curious to look more into the folks that are on the board. Yeah, and just in case you may not remember, but we switched starting last year to three-year terms.
05:12
So everybody is elected now to a three-year term. So we had four new board members elected this past June.
05:22
And this gives us a little bit more continuity so that we, basically, to become an effective board member, it takes a few months. When we were having yearly elections, that meant that it's quite possible, by the time you learned what you were doing, you were not elected anymore. So we wanted a little bit more stability. So that's what was involved with that there.
05:45
And we also have a number of people that are on staff. So as the PSF has grown, we actually do have people whose job it is to do the day-to-day operations of the PSF, which is perhaps more work than you would think at first glance.
06:01
These people are incredibly busy. So we have Eva Yudliska, who's been our director of operations for several years. She makes sure that everything happens. And trust me, the woman is incredible. She does make sure that everything happens. We also have Betsy Woloshevsky, who is in charge of event coordination and sponsorship.
06:25
So in particular, if you have a company that wants to help support the PSF or whatever, we would put you in touch with Betsy to help work out the details there. We're very happy that we just hired, starting in June, Ernest Durbin to be a director of infrastructure.
06:41
So that means not only will the, like, PIPI hiccups get fixed faster. If you've been watching infrastructure now, Ernest usually knows what's going wrong almost before it happens, and issues are fixed usually within an hour or two. It's very good.
07:00
But he's also going to help us do things like bring our membership lists all together and make it less of a tangle to figure out how to do this and that and the other thing on, you know, python.org, stuff like that. We also have Phyllis Dobbs, who's an accountant and is going to be moving into the treasurer role as Kurt Kaiser, our current treasurer, sort of transitions out into retirement.
07:23
So those are the key people that we have now. There will be an, I hope, but I'm not in a position to say officially, I hope there will be an announcement about another person joining our staff in the next couple of months that will help us sort of keep all of these balls in the air.
07:44
And so this is what I touched on a little bit more. There are a few different levels of membership. The main ones that you need to care about are these two bottom ones, the managing or contributing member. They're basically just people who do work, like I said, in the Python community, whether it's working on the PSF, working on a meetup group, working on open source Python code.
08:05
As long as you work on five hours a month, something in the Python community, you're able to kind of become a voting member of the PSF. The other way you can become a member is to give us money. So we are also happy to have, you know, more money from our kind of individual members. So the supporting membership, I believe it's $100 a year.
08:23
Yeah, 99. 99 a year, and so you can also give money to become a member. There's a few other ones there, but those are the kind of important ones that I think most people need to know about to kind of become a member. Yeah, and should I say, I think to put this into perspective a little bit,
08:43
if you are contributing time that contributes to the community, this is a self-certification process. So if you're doing it and you tell us we trust you, we don't call, we don't check, whatever, we're not built to work that way. So that's something that you just self-certify and then you're in.
09:03
The supporting membership, $99 a year. To put that into perspective, if we can get 10 supporting members, that means we can probably do a Django Girls in Africa or something like that. So in fact, that sort of membership does have a very direct impact,
09:20
and we actually need more of that kind of membership so that we sort of have our sources of income spread out a little bit, and we're not so reliant on did PyCon have a good year. If for some horrible reason PyCon has a bad year, we can't do any of our grants, that would be horrible. So we're trying to encourage other things to go on.
09:42
I did put in a few places where you can contact the PSF. The generic address to contact the PSF is PSF at python.org. Pretty easy to remember. That goes to the board and the staff. Everybody sees that, and again, it's kind of busy,
10:02
so you may not get an instant response, but you will get a response, and the people who need to see it will probably be there. If there's something you want to know about specifically, Eva is our director of operations, so that's all of the making sure stuff happens.
10:21
Betsy, as I mentioned, does sponsorship, so if you want to put people in your company in charge so that they can do a corporate sponsorship, she's the one that would work out the details there. And of course, if you want to get to me, my address is there as well, and I will do whatever I can to get your request to the right place.
10:43
And you don't need to contact me, so it's all good. Yeah, he wouldn't let me put his address there, so... No, I'm easy to find on the internet as well, but I have no formal power, so it wouldn't be very useful to talk to me. Yeah, so I think that is all the formalities that we wanted to talk about.
11:03
Obviously, the PSF does a whole lot more. There's a lot of specific operations that we do, and so if there's any questions, comments, interesting things, ideas that you all have for what the PSF could be doing, if you have questions about who does something in the Python community, anything like that, we're happy to talk a little bit more about details, in-depth stuff.
11:28
This is the part where you now ask questions. Is there any more questions? Yeah, please stand up and come here. What does the board do exactly, and how often do you meet?
11:45
So, the meeting part is easy. We have an hour-long meeting every month, since we have people around the world. This is done both by Slack or IRC, so that we have a text channel,
12:01
and by phone, so that we also have a voice channel. What do we do? We mainly are concerned with making sure that things go the right way, so we're worried about if we have special grant requests, the board would have to then meet and discuss to see does this grant request fall within our mission.
12:22
So, a large part of it is actually meant to be making sure that basically oversight of what's going on for other things that we have going on. So, are the working groups doing what they're supposed to do? As we have been hiring these people, of course, the board has been involved in
12:41
do we have enough money? How are we going to follow through? What's the process for hiring? Where are we in that process? So, there are a lot of those kind of management and oversight things that we do. The one thing that we are trying to do more of is then discussing strategy, and we had a discussion about strategy just a few minutes ago,
13:01
before we came up here, in terms of what should the board strategy be. And then finally, the big thing is resources. That is, how are we going to fund all of this? So, thinking about ways that we can do sponsorship, actually having board members involved in making at least initial contact with sponsors.
13:20
So, I don't know, anything else? Yeah, and I think the day-to-day is really email. So, we have this one monthly board meeting, but oftentimes that's very much a formality. We have some conversations. We vote on things. At least half of it is a lot of required legal kind of formalities, but I think a lot of the work is done over email.
13:41
So, we have conversations kind of before the votes, which is where we kind of hash out a lot of the conversation. So, I'd say, you know, there's two or three active email threads each day that are happening on the board list that have a decent amount of kind of conversation going on, and that feels like the bulk of the work is kind of coming to a consensus as a board
14:01
on specific direction within the PSF. Yeah, and then hopefully more and more we're going to be doing more kind of budget setting, priority setting, a little bit of vision for the community, but as we've kind of talked about, it's really difficult to do that. All the different board members have different priorities, and Python is a big crazy global community that is very multifaceted,
14:24
and it's really hard to kind of wrap our heads around everything that's going on. So, yeah, it's really just trying to kind of steer the ship a little bit, but the day-to-day is just kind of having input on the direction of how we're spending money and kind of ways that we want to have the community kind of work.
14:42
So, I don't know if that answered the question explicitly, but I think, did you have a question? Hello, first of all, thank you for all the well done job and this conference, it was great.
15:00
And my question is, I'm running meetup groups in two cities in Romania, in Yashin, Bucharest, and I want to know what is the support that I can receive from PSF community to expand my group
15:27
to make more presentations, to add new members, and so on. Okay, so first of all, I mean, I think this may sound silly, but it does matter,
15:46
is that if you want things like PSF stickers, just ask, we can send those to you. Why not? So, the other thing, though, is if you're using meetup.com to get the word out,
16:01
we will pay your meetup fees. We're working on tightening that policy a little bit. We want to be sure we get the receipts and pay for it in a timely manner. So, it's not like, yeah, two years ago we used meetup, please get, no, it has to be pretty current,
16:21
but that's something that we will do for you. If you want to have like, say, a day-long training and you need some support for the vital parts of that, then you can, of course, apply for a grant as well. So, those are things that we can do. We don't tend to support paying for a
16:45
weekly meetup or something like that because we couldn't afford to do that for the world, but if there's something special, we tend to, we have a grants working group that decides these things and they are becoming more careful so that people say, yes, give us money for swag,
17:03
and we say, no, we'd much rather give you money so that you could actually have the training, food, maybe you need to have an internet connection, things like that. So, if you do that, there is a process you can go on and fill out a form and they get back to you and ask questions or whatever. All of that we will do, it just needs to have a certain amount of
17:22
lead time. They need six weeks so that they can ask those questions and get you the money. It's, again, not good to say, yes, I have a meetup or I have a workshop next Tuesday, can you please give us, it won't work. So, but those things we will do and if there's something else, like you need, maybe you would like your event tweeted from the PSF account or
17:44
things like that, then you can ask us. I mean, that would be the address for Betsy that I showed you there. She would be a person that could do that so that we can support that way. I don't know if you have anything else? Yeah, like the PSF is very much, we have money and we can spend money on things that are useful, but yeah, we don't have a lot of
18:05
contact in local communities and that kind of stuff. It's harder for us to, you know, we're a global organization so we don't have those local contacts, but we can definitely help you do things that will promote your own meetup if money is an issue.
18:28
I believe that there are some things, so you might check out even the Django Girls has a
18:41
a handbook and they've got some good funding tips that would apply not just to Django Girls, but generally funding and publicity. PyLadies used to have, they have an import PyLadies, there's a GitHub repo and they have a lot of materials on organization and doing things like that. And I think that Lorena Mesa, who's a board member and Mario Corcher, I think they're
19:04
talking about working on an organizer's guide from, you know, particularly like doing a a conference, but then there's also been some talk about just local organizers guides too. So I don't have a specific thing to point to there, but we can certainly put you in touch
19:23
with people if you want. And I know, I think earlier this week there was also like a meetup organizers open space here and I know at PyCon as well in the US there's usually one just where the other meetup organizers get together and kind of share ideas for formats and, you know, cooperation. Like if there's a another, you know, like a UX or a API meetup or something
19:43
you can kind of do cross collaborations with them to get both of your memberships to show up. And so I do think there's some other strategies on, yeah, kind of tactics for meetups to get a little bit more publicity and knowledge, but I don't think we have like a formal space for that. A lot of the conferences have those kind of spaces, but I don't have like a
20:02
mailing list or something to send you to, but there might, I would not be surprised if there was like a Python meetup mailing list somewhere where you could also do that digitally. There's a Python organizers. Sure. And there is actually, there is a Slack channel, so with Python organizers, so I think maybe you need to be sent an invite. If you
20:21
see me today, I think I can get you set up with that. Any other questions? Do you handle press relationship? If not, who does? Like with like press journalists?
20:43
Doing like PR kind of stuff? Yeah, kind of stuff. We have a blog. Yes. It's very ad hoc, so we don't have a, other than the person from, is it Hacker News that covers the kernel,
21:01
the language summits? The LWM. Yes, that's it, that's it, yes. But we do have that. Not that we really need that on, but otherwise we don't have an official thing with the press, but we are contacted from time to time by the press, so I know that I've occasionally given
21:24
interviews and other board members have given interviews that way, so if you know of somebody who wants to contact the PSF from that angle, like we are X Magazine and we want to have official commentary on Python or whatever, then you would just contact the PSF generally and we
21:43
would find a board member who would be willing to do that. I'm not sure if that's where your question was going, but that's mercifully little. We don't, and we debated whether or
22:12
not we were even going to put this in as a slide, we don't control the core developers, so we're not really controlling that process, so we haven't actually, we don't have a lot to say
22:25
on that other than, yeah, we think they'll figure it out, just hang with them. And I do think that kind of tangentially that also touches on the fact that most of the board members and most of the people involved with the PSF are developers, given the background,
22:42
so if there are people that have those kind of auxiliary skills that nonprofits need, like PR, marketing, sales, sponsorship, there are working groups that we have, we have like a marketing working group and other places where you can come in and really, you don't need to be like a board member to come in and really help the PSF, especially if you have those, like we have
23:00
lots of Python programmers, like we're good with Python programming, but all the other skills that you need to run a successful nonprofit are definitely much more lacking in our membership, just given that we are the PSF. And so right, if you do have kind of a background in marketing, PR, that kind of stuff, that is somewhere where you can have a huge impact by volunteering, because that is a skill set that we don't have a lot of. So that's another place
23:26
you can definitely join our marketing working group, that kind of stuff, where you can really have an impact with those skill sets that is outsized within the organization. So that's definitely another thing to note. Anything else? Yes, sir. Is Guido still the president of the
23:49
PSF? Guido is the president of the PSF. He got to design his role there, so he does not have, let's say, a heavy schedule in terms of being president of the PSF, but that has not changed.
24:07
He has not stepped away from that. We did ask, by the way, so we know. So in terms of like membership globally, you've got your different kind of sets of membership.
24:24
Could you give like a picture of how dispersed all of the different kind of layers are? Like, if you've got like a basic member, are they kind of dispersed all over the globe, and then it kind of ends up the board members are all Americans, or is it kind of like... We have been working hard to get that more diverse. Our board is, we have two people who
24:49
are Australian, we have two people who are European, and we have one person who is African, and that's out of 11 at-large members. So, and we did have somebody from South America,
25:05
it's something that we continue to need to work on, but, you know, in terms of the overall membership, I don't have that at my fingertips. We have about a thousand voting members,
25:20
I can tell you that, and I think you're right that they skew heavily towards sort of Northern Western Europe and the US, because that's where the core developers and most of the development has been historically. But we're trying to move that, so I know that Brazil, for example, we have a number of members from Brazil because they have a very active Python community. So, yeah, we're working on it. I was talking to Noah about this just
26:03
the other day, they're number three, and we don't know much about that. Yes, indeed. It is, it's very striking, but in fact we have very little official contact with them, so we're working to change that. And just another, kind of another data point,
26:24
wearing my Read the Docs hat, it is the second largest market for Read the Docs. I know it was, I think, PyPI, where the stats, the keynote the other day for PyPI, it was China's number two there. So, yeah, these large kind of core infrastructure projects, yeah, the whole world is using Python, and China is huge, Japan, a lot of these places
26:45
where we have a lot less membership, a lot less contact, a lot less marketing of the PSF. And so that's definitely one of the questions that we have, is how do we get more contact, how do we get more people there that care and want to have kind of a voice in what we're doing. So,
27:01
it's definitely kind of, as Naomi said, something we're thinking a lot about. Well, maybe this is the end of our kind of formal Q&A, but we're both here, I know, at least for the rest of the day, and I'm here at least in the morning for the sprints tomorrow. So, if you see us around or just after the talk and want to ask questions that
27:23
aren't in front of a microphone, definitely feel free to come up and chat with us as well. Okay, yes. Yes, so thank you very much.