Mark Your Calendars! PSF Board Office Hours for the Year Ahead

Greetings, Pythonistas- thank you so much for supporting the work of the PSF and the Python community! The newest PSF Board has decided to continue investing in connecting with the global Python community by running the PSF Board Office Hour sessions on the PSF Discord into 2027. 

We began running these sessions in September 2024, and they have proven to be a great method for the community to connect with the board and vice versa. This venue has been invaluable to the PSF as we work on critical areas over the last year such as the PSF Strategic Plan, elections, and the recent PSF Grants Program Funding Round. The sessions have also provided the PSF Board and Staff the opportunity to hear what our community is up to and what challenges they are facing.

What are the PSF Board Office Hours?

During the PSF Board Office Hours, you can participate in a text-based live chat with PSF Board Directors. This is a chance to connect, share, and collaborate with the PSF Board and Staff to improve our community together. Occasionally, we will have dedicated topics such as PyCon US and the PSF Board Elections for the office hour sessions. 

Here is some of the work that we collaborate with staff and volunteers on:

• Promotion and outreach for the Python programming language
• Supporting local Python communities
• Organizing PyCon US
• Diversity and Inclusion in our community
• Support handling Code of Conduct issues within our communities
• Support regional Python communities via the PSF Grants Program
• Furthering the mission of the PSF

Unless we have a dedicated topic for a session, you are not limited to talking with us about the above topics, although the discussions should be focused on Python, the PSF, and our community. If you think there’s something we can help with or we should know, we welcome you to come and talk to us!

Joining the office hours

The office hour sessions will take place on the PSF Discord server in the #psf-board channel. If you are new to Discord, make sure to check out a tutorial on how you can download the app and sign up for free– then join us on the PSF Discord! To make the office hours more accessible, the office hours will be scheduled at alternating times, so no matter where you are based, you can find a time that is most convenient for you! Here is a list of the dates and times:

• November 10th, 2 pm UTC
• December 8th, 9 pm UTC
• January 12th, 2 pm UTC 
• February 10th, 9 pm UTC
• March 9th, 1 pm UTC 
• April 13th, 9 pm UTC
• May 11th, 1 pm UTC 
• June 8th, 9 pm UTC
• July 13th, 1 pm UTC 
• August 10th, 9 pm UTC
• September 8th, 1 pm UTC 
• October 12th, 9 pm UTC

Each session lasts for an hour. Sessions after October 2027 will be announced in the future.

Who will be at the office hours?

Some board members of the PSF will be attending each office hour, as well as members of the PSF Staff. The list of the PSF Board Directors can be found on our website. We are passionate Python community members who are excited to listen, help, and provide support to you. We are happy to follow up with you if there are any issues we cannot address immediately during the office hour sessions. As always, you can email us at psf-board@python.org with inquiries, feedback, or comments any time.

Wikis: Relaunched!

In February 2026, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) made the PSF, Python, and Jython wikis read-only due to excessive automated traffic and security concerns on outdated infrastructure. This sudden change was disruptive to the many community members who rely on and contribute to these wikis. We are pleased to share that we have stood up new wikis through GitHub Pages that address the automated traffic and security concerns. The new wikis will have a more modern front-end, as well as a permissions-based content management system (CMS) for community members to make updates.

Find the new wikis here:

• PSF Wiki
• Python Wiki
• Jython Wiki

More details and context

Excessive automated traffic

With the old wiki structure, we received a large volume of alerts at all hours, each serious enough to page and wake our on-call infrastructure staff, which is very limited (just one person currently, although this will be changing soon!). The quantity of scraping overloaded our servers, causing outages, which happened often enough that these issues required a significant amount of effort for the PSF staff to manage. On review back in February, that traffic turned out to be almost entirely AI bots that were trying to scrape the entire internet.

Security

Additionally, some portions of the wikis were still built with Python 2. Python 2 reached end of life on January 1, 2020, and no longer receives upstream security fixes. Moving to a static site makes it very fast and reduces security risks, while also having the benefit of a more modern user interface.

Impact

The PSF acknowledges that retiring the old wikis without notice was frustrating to the overall community and especially so to those community members who have spent a lot of time contributing to the wikis over the years. The abrupt nature of this change did not reflect the care and respect that our contributors deserve, and we recognize the frustration this caused. We built the new wikis with the guiding principle of how to best serve the community, and we hope they will continue to be a valuable community resource, and hopefully improve on the experience. The new CMS means you can even create pull requests in your code editor if you prefer!

Platform

GitHub was chosen for the home of the new wikis as this is where CPython, python.org, and other properties the PSF hosts currently live. The hope is to continue to streamline the PSF's hosting and stewardship of services to simplify for both PSF staff and the community folks who contribute to them.

How to Contribute

Previously, the Python and Jython wikis were user-editable by invitation of an existing editor and the PSF wiki was permissions based. Moving forward, all three of the wikis will be permissions based via the GitHub repository they are hosted on, and changes can be requested through pull requests by anyone in the community.

We realize that moving to GitHub, with an entirely permissions based process, is a big change from the previous form. As stewards of Python's web presence, we've opted to provide a more modern interface, relying on GitHub, the platform that already powers CPython development. GitHub allows us to distribute granular control, review changes through pull requests, and maintain the uptime this service deserves. Also, since the site is now generated statically, it removes any worry about AI bots overwhelming the hosts that the wikis were previously hosted on.

Please review the repository's README file to learn more about contributing. We welcome the community to come join in on updating, cleaning up, and adding pages to the new wiki! We will happily grant write access to the Python wiki to contributors who are known stewards of the previous wiki, and look forward to bringing on more contributors in the future.