Not knowing CS appears to be an advantage in this case? A socially well adjusted 14 year old girl could glance at the text and say "yeah that is obvious".
The problem in open source is that programmers often accept tyranny by a couple of manipulators because they are conflict averse or don't even notice. CS does not help here.
The manipulators of course are the players and know the drill.
Van Rossum used organizations and people from the start at CWI. He set up the PSF to increase his power and that of his lieutenants. No other open source organization understand politics and bureaucracy as well as the PSF people.
Most of the real work is done by others. Initially the inner circle even merged the work of others and got credited in the SVN commits. That is why they have such high commit counts in the GitHub statistics. Being release manager helps, too.