Who are you?
¡Hola mundo! I'm Karo Ladino-Puerto, though most of the community knows me as Karobot. I'm Colombian, a PSF Fellow since 2020, and I've spent the last eight years building Python community infrastructure in my country alongside a lot of amazing people. I've co-led PyLadies Colombia since 2018, supporting chapters in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Bucaramanga, Boyacá and Santa Marta. I co-organized PyCon Colombia from 2020 to 2025, and today I'm one of three women leading Python Colombia, with the objective of reconnecting the Python communities across the whole country. In 2025 I co-founded Fundación Átoma with Carolina Gómez and Nicole Franco, a Colombian non-profit that trains women in programming and helps local organizers keep their tech conferences free.
By trade I'm a project manager, which mostly means I'm the person who notices the task nobody was assigned, asks the awkward question early, and keeps the timeline honest. It's the same skill I use in community work. I over-communicate on purpose, I'm detail-oriented to a degree that occasionally annoys people, and I still believe most good things don't need a big budget, just organization and consistency.
What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?
I ran for the Board in 2024. I'm running again because the question in front of the PSF has changed, and I think I can be more useful this time.
In 2024 we were mostly talking about growth. Today the Grants Program is running on a capped budget after last year's pause, PyCon US has run at a loss for three years, and the Foundation is operating with less than twelve months of runway. That isn't a communications problem, and it isn't only a diversity problem. It's a sustainability problem: how do you keep serving a community that keeps growing, with less money than you had previously?
What I'd bring is experience with exactly that. Latin American organizers have never had a big budget. We learned to build events, chapters and workshops with sponsorship money that wouldn't cover a single line item at a larger conference. I'd like the Board to hear that experience from inside the room, from someone whose entire trajectory happened outside the funding centers of the world.
What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the board?
It comes down to sustainability, and it has two sides.
One is the community side. Most organizers I know work with very little money, or none. How do we help them keep their impact, and grow it, like that?
The other is the industry side. Open source holds up the whole industry, the AI boom included, and more of the tooling is becoming closed. The people who keep it running are rarely recognized and almost never paid. The companies profiting from Python need to give something back.
Money touches everything. A lot of this gets done for love, but communities still need money for the basics to keep existing.
Still, part of what organizers need was never money. The PSF started here with the Community Partner Program, and I'd like to see it grow: introductions, shared infrastructure, organizers helping other organizers.
The other part is communication. The PSF has been very open about its finances this year, and the Spanish-speaking community can help spread that. People can't defend what they don't understand. I want PSF updates and calls to action to arrive in Spanish, on time. That helps fundraising too: people give when they understand what is going on.
What areas of the Python community are you involved with?
PyLadies is where I started and where I've stayed. I've co-led PyLadies Colombia since 2018, supporting the chapters in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Bucaramanga, Boyacá and Santa Marta with events, workshops, sponsorships and job pipelines.
On the conference side, I co-organized PyCon Colombia from 2020 to 2025 and handed it over in September of that year. I've co-organized Django Girls and Humble Data Workshops in Colombia and Mexico, and PyDays in Cali and Pereira. I've keynoted PyLatam and PyCon Bolivia, and spoken at meetups across the region.
Since December 2025 I've been part of the three-person team leading Python Colombia, whose one job is to reconnect local communities that had drifted apart from each other. It's slow, unfunded work, and a labor of love.
Inside the PSF, I'm part of the Grants and the Diversity & Inclusion Work Groups. And through Fundación Átoma, the non-profit I co-founded in 2025, we've reached more than 5,000 women, supported 10+ communities and built a network of 30+ national partners funding that work.
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