Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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Board members of the PSF are not paid. We get to claim expenses on travel to PyCon and to the annual board retreat, but we're asked to see if our employer can foot the bill for those first (several do).

Officers who are also PSF staff members are paid because they're staff members - officers who are not staff members aren't paid.

Two of the current developers in residence are paid as PSF staff. One is paid as a contractor which I believe is because they don't live in the USA.

The Fastly sponsorsip is indeed crucial to continuing to offer PyPI as a free resource. Having an infrastructure company sponsor that kind of thing makes a lot of sense, because their underlying costs are significantly less than if the PSF were to pay market prices for that bandwidth.

The only direct PSF elections are for the board - different work groups have different governance structures, none of which involve elections as far as I know.

Python core / steering council members are also elected but that's entirely separate from the PSF, see https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/

$1.8m for a multi-day conference that supports 3,000+ attendees is pretty standard for North America.

We made some significant changes to how grants work based on the feedback from DjangoCon Africa - details of those changes are here: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2024/07/psf-board-update-on-imp...

>Officers who are also PSF staff members are paid because they're staff members - officers who are not staff members aren't paid. Two of the current developers in residence are paid as PSF staff. One is paid as a contractor which I believe is because they don't live in the USA.

Thanks for the clarification.

>Having an infrastructure company sponsor that kind of thing makes a lot of sense, because their underlying costs are significantly less than if the PSF were to pay market prices for that bandwidth.

Absolutely. But if I worked at Fastly I would not be particularly happy about seeing that good will squandered to such an extent.

>The only direct PSF elections are for the board - different work groups have different governance structures, none of which involve elections as far as I know.

Yes, and this is a clear problem if you expect work groups to have any actual power or influence. Especially the one making decisions about banning people.

>$1.8m for a multi-day conference that supports 3,000+ attendees is pretty standard for North America.

So I hear. At that rate you'd be looking at about $600 US in admission per attendee to break even. I've certainly heard of conferences charging more than that (certainly for the ones that have tiered admission).

But I'm accustomed to fandom conventions (still multi-day with tens of thousands of attendees) that charge about a tenth of that and still manage to raise money for charity. Why is it that much more expensive to run an event for computer programmers?

> $1.8m for a multi-day conference that supports 3,000+ attendees is pretty standard for North America.

Can you please elaborate (as was also asked in a sibling comment) about how comes that the costs are not covered by tickets / sponsors?

To clarify: the PSF did not lose $1.8m on PyCon. It spent $1.8m and made most of that money back in revenue from the event.

Most years the cost is fully covered by tickets and sponsors and the event makes a profit.

When PyCon runs at a loss it’s generally a sponsorship problem. The tech industry has seen a lot of layoffs recently, and companies that sponsor large conferences are often doing so for recruiting. If a company is laying people off they are likely to drop their sponsorship budget.

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