Python is for everyone: Join in the PSF year-end fundraiser & membership drive!

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is the charitable organization behind Python, dedicated to advancing, supporting, and protecting the Python programming language and the community that sustains it. That mission is more than words to us; it’s the community we show up for every day. Our tiny but mighty team works hard to deliver the projects, services, and programs that allow Python to be the thriving, independent, community-driven language it is today. Some of what the PSF does includes producing PyCon US, hosting the Python Package Index (PyPI), supporting Developers in Residence, maintaining critical community infrastructure, and more.

Python is for gathering, teaching, learning, playing, researching, exploring, creating, building, working, sustaining. The list goes on and on and on! Support this year’s fundraiser with your donations and memberships to help the PSF, the Python community, and the language stay strong and sustainable. Because Python is for everyone, thanks to you. 

 

There are two direct ways to join through donate.python.org: 

• Donate directly to the PSF! Your donation is a direct way to support and power the future of the Python programming language and community you love. Every donation makes a difference, and we work hard to make a little go a long way.
• Become a PSF Supporting Member! When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF, are eligible to vote in PSF elections, and help us sustain our mission with your annual support. You can sign up as a Supporting Member at the usual annual rate ($99 USD), or you can take advantage of our sliding scale option (starting at $25 USD)! 

>>> Donate or Become a Member Today! <<<

 

  

If you already donated and/or you’re already a member, you can:

• Share the fundraiser with your regional and project-based communities: Share this blog post in your Python-related Discords, Slacks, social media accounts- wherever your Python community is! Keep an eye on our social media accounts to see the latest stories and news for the campaign.
• Share your Python story with a call to action: We invite you to share your personal Python, PyCon, or PSF story. What impact has it made in your life, in your community, in your career? Share your story in a blog post or on your social media platform of choice and add a link to donate.python.org.
• Ask your employer to sponsor: If your company is using Python to build its products and services, check to see if they already sponsor the PSF on our Sponsors page. If not, reach out to your organization's internal decision-makers and impress on them just how important it is for us to power the future of Python together, and send them our sponsor prospectus.

 

Your donations and support:

• Keep Python thriving 
• Support CPython and PyPI progress 
• Increase security across the Python ecosystem 
• Bring the global Python community together 
• Make our community more diverse and robust every year

 

PSF highlights from 2026:

• Producing another wonderful PyCon US: We welcomed 1,901 attendees to PyCon US 2026, 1,064 of whom were newcomers, at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center in beautiful downtown Long Beach, CA, our first year in the city! PyCon US 2026 was packed with 7 days of content, education, and networking for the Python community, including 6 Keynote Sessions, 90 Talks (including the Charlas Spanish track and the new Future of AI with Python and Trailblazing Python Security tracks), 20 Tutorials, 25 Posters, 25+ Sprint Projects, 123 Open Spaces, 62 Booths, and 83 Sponsors!
• Powering the inaugural Python Packaging Council election: We were excited to run the election that formed the first Python Packaging Council (PPC)—a long awaited technical decision-making body! The PPC will work to develop interoperability specifications that govern how Python packages are built, distributed, and installed. It will also coordinate efforts among packaging tool maintainers, the Python core team, and the broader community. The PSF is proud to have provided the administrative, logistical, and communications support that got the new council up and running.
• Safeguarding PyPI against emerging threats: PyPI completed its second external security audit, carried out by Trail of Bits and funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency. The review turned up fourteen findings, two of them high severity, and PSF PyPI Safety and Security Engineer Mike Fiedler has already fixed all but two low-risk items that need larger changes. The auditors also wrote custom CodeQL queries, now part of PyPI’s automated checks, so the next bug of the same kind gets caught before it ships. Additionally, PyPI now rejects new files on releases older than 14 days, which stops anyone from grafting a malicious wheel onto a version people already trust. Meanwhile, community reporters sent in just under 1,000 malware and abuse reports in Q1, with over 40% landing in automated quarantine, protecting the Python ecosystem faster than ever. 
• Developing and adopting the PSF’s 5 Year Strategic Plan: We’re proud to share that the PSF Board adopted the PSF Strategic Plan 2026, covering 2026 to 2031, at its July 2026 meeting! This plan took shape in the open: we shared the high-level goals in May, then published the full draft in June and invited the community to weigh in. Our new PSF Strategy page is its permanent home, where we’ll publish annual review findings and updates so the community can follow our progress. 
• Sustaining the Python Security Response Team: As the number of vulnerability reports and CVE advisories grew 3-4X, the mostly-volunteer Python Security Response Team (PSRT) grew and adapted with it. Following the approval of PEP 811, 13 new members joined the PSRT, its first additions since 2023, and PSF Security Developer-in-Residence Seth Larson published a new security policy and threat model that helps coordinators quickly tell security-relevant reports from regular bugs. The team published 15 vulnerability advisories in Q1 and triaged and fixed a python.org API authentication vulnerability in under 48 hours, followed by a third-party audit by Trail of Bits. 
• Empowering the Python community through Fiscal Sponsorship: We are proud to continue supporting our 20 fiscal sponsoree organizations with their initiatives and events all year round. The PSF provides 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to fiscal sponsorees such as PyLadies and Pallets, and provides back office support so they can focus on their missions. Consider donating to your favorite PSF Fiscal Sponsoree and check out our Fiscal Sponsorees page to learn more about what each of these awesome organizations is all about!
• Introducing the new PSF Community Partner Program: The PSF announced the introduction of the PSF Community Partner Program in 2026. This new program is designed as an “in-kind” way for us to support Python events and initiatives with non-financial assistance through the use of the PSF logo and name, as well as promotional support via sharing qualified posts on PSF official social media accounts. The PSF has welcomed almost 40 community events and initiatives to the program so far! 
• Serving our community with grants: We brought back the PSF Grants Program in a restructured and more sustainable format after a pause in 2025. The PSF awarded approximately $60K over 44 grants awards across the world in 2026; supporting local conferences and workshops that keep Python growing and accessible to all. We also opened up applications for the PSF's Meetup Pro Network. We hope to continue grant funding rounds in the future and your participation in this year’s fundraiser fuels that effort!
• Honoring community leaders: We honored 10 PSF Community Service Award (CSA) recipients this year across two batches. Abhijeet Mote, Elena Williams, Inessa Pawson, Kafui Alordo, Kalyan Prasad, Hugo van Kemenade, Kevin Horn, Maria Jose Molina Contreras, Paul Everitt, and Sarah Abderemane received CSAs in 2026 for their dedication, creativity, and generosity that help the PSF fulfill its mission to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

How the Python ecosystem responded to the eMudhra intermediate compromise

The news of the eMudhra Intermediate CA compromise was published on October 20th, 2026. Responding to an incident like a Certificate Authority (CA) compromise at an ecosystem-scale is far from “routine”; the assumption that HTTPS is secure is baked into many aspects of Python applications and packaging. This meant it was critical to mount a response that was both comprehensive and customized to each affected project and service, ranging from the Python language, pip, and the Python Package Index (PyPI).

This is where security staffing at the Python Software Foundation made a difference for Python. Staffing meant that Seth Larson, the Security Developer-in-Residence, was on standby able to respond and begin work on the issue immediately. Pre-existing relationships with affected project maintainers afforded plenty of trust, and the work was completed in a way that respected the time of volunteer maintainers for affected packages by reaching out proactively with clear next steps. Thanks to Alpha-Omega for funding the Security Developer-in-Residence position at the Python Software Foundation.

The incident was mitigated across multiple components within two days. Thanks to the work of their respective maintainers: fixes were made available for certifi, Python, pip, uv, sigstore, virtualenv, conda, pixi, manylinux, gh-action-pypi-publish, and many other projects. Vulnerable versions of certifi, pip, and sigstore were patched across all projects and services that the Python Software Foundation stewards, including PyPI, Python’s release process and build bots, and python.org. Containers have been rebuilt with the correct set of certificates.

Advisories, CVE records, banners, and discussion threads were created to alert the community about the work necessary to mitigate this incident and to be a location where relevant discussions and questions were answered by experts. Subscribe to the security-announce mailing list for future advisories about Python, pip, and other exceptional circumstances like this incident. Information about which projects are affected is available on discuss.python.org and around the web for more projects.

How did this incident affect Python as an ecosystem?

This section details the current situation of multiple Python projects. An aspect of positive security culture is “blameless post-portems”, we can only improve the future and the best way to do this is to show up and support the projects and maintainers that you depend on. Please note that all decisions below have historical context and sound reasons for being: Python is about the same age as TLS and is much older than the expectation that your system has up-to-date and secure CA certificate bundles.

The key component requiring a prompt response to the incident from the Python ecosystem is “certifi” and the advisory GHSA-6q48-6c7w-9gw2. Certifi is a repackaging of Mozilla’s CA bundle as a Python package and used by many popular projects including pip and requests. The package only includes root CAs, not intermediates, and therefore needed to remove the root CA from the CA bundle (“emSign Root TLS CA - G3”) to distrust all the impacted intermediate certificates.

Keeping a long story short: certifi is a critical dependency for being able to bootstrap a Python virtual environment into being able to install packages from PyPI. pip bundles its dependencies which includes “Requests” which depends on certifi. Python bundles pip so new virtual environments always contain pip through a mechanism called “ensurepip”.

This arrangement put all three of these components, Python, pip, and certifi, in the critical path for permanently remediating this incident as a user through software updates. There also isn’t an easy answer for older versions of Python which would permanently contain an older version of pip due to compatibility concerns. To address this concern, Python has added a “last-resort” denylist to reject the compromised intermediate certificates during a TLS handshake, fixed versions and more information tracked via CVE-2026-115557 which has been backported to older versions of Python.

What happens next?

We’re continuing our efforts to alert users through advisories and CVE and using banners on the PyPI and discuss.python.org and will be closely monitoring the uptake of patched versions of “certifi” across the ecosystem. The immediate, synchronous response has concluded, now we turn to what should be prioritized so a future incident like a CA compromise might not require as urgent a response from volunteer maintainers.

Right from the beginning of the incident it was identified that TLS handshakes made by browsers were secure, but tools like pip, git, uv weren’t secure. Why is this? Browsers were able to secure their certificate stores quickly and without requiring a software update by using Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL). CRLs allow providers of CAs to provide information to verifiers outside of the software update process, such as when certain certificates should no longer be used due to revocation or compromise.

These technologies may be integrated into Python in the future to provide a quicker and robust response to future incidents involving CA certificates and allow distributions to configure these facilities system-wide. One potential project to watch is upki, which has already been adopted by Ubuntu, provides certificate revocation functionality similar to that of browsers on platforms which previously did not offer such facilities.

Joshua Mcshannon Joins the PSF as Infrastructure Engineer

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is excited to announce our newest staff member and Infrastructure Engineer, Joshua Mcshannon, reporting to Director of Engineering Jacob Coffee. Joshua brings over 16 years of technical expertise from various backgrounds including bootstrapped startups and big tech. Most recently he built an AI-integrated learning platform for cybersecurity students and taught secure web application development along with DevOps/platform engineering.

Joshua will focus on reducing operational complexity and toil of the PSF infrastructure, optimizing to better serve the community at large and internal PSF platforms that CPython core developers and staff members rely on daily; this includes services like python.org, PyPI, and infrastructure behind PyCon US. With Joshua on the team, the PSF will gain much needed redundancy for on-call rotations as well as capacity for new infrastructure projects.

“We put people on the moon with a Ti-82, I’m sure we can figure something out.” 

Joshua has already shown great initiative in the work that the PSF has, diving deep into our Kubernetes infrastructure and preparing improvements to keep costs low. Away from the keyboard you’ll find him at a local show, on a nature trail, or at a flea market with his family. Say hello when you see Joshua in the repos, issue trackers, mailing lists, and on discuss.python.org!

About the Python Software Foundation

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a non-profit whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. The PSF supports the Python community using corporate sponsorships, grants, and donations. Are you interested in sponsoring or donating to the PSF so it can continue supporting Python and its community? Check out our sponsorship program, donate directly here, or contact our team!

Announcing new Security Developer at the PSF

We’re excited to announce that Brett Smith is joining the Python Software Foundation as a Security Developer.

Brett will be working closely with Seth Larson, Security Developer in Residence, and Mike Fiedler, PyPI Safety and Security Engineer, on the PSF’s security team to address the increasingly demanding scale of security response for the Python ecosystem. We’re grateful to Anthropic for their generous support, which has made the critical new Security Developer role possible.

Brett brings a holistic approach to software security. Throughout his career he’s done both software development and Linux administration to support collaborative communities. He’s worked at nonprofits like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Software Freedom Conservancy as well as on open source projects like Request Tracker and the Arvados bioinformatics platform.

Security Response at Ecosystem Scale

At PyCon US 2026, Seth Larson and Mike Fiedler presented that 2026 was the “year of more” when it comes to security: the Python Security Response Team (PSRT) is processing 3-4× the volume of reports and CVEs for Python and pip compared to just a year ago, and the amount of malware published and removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) is up 60% compared to last year. The complexity of securing the vast Python ecosystem is growing along with the scale, particularly in the face of the evolving role of AI in both security risks and security response. Providing prompt security response services and innovating to prevent future threats at the scale of an ecosystem like Python is more difficult now than ever before.

Brett’s addition to the PSF positions us to better meet this growing challenge. Having Brett on the team will both build capacity for security work the PSF already does and enable new, proactive work: He’ll help us keep pace with critical ongoing work such as vulnerability remediation, providing vulnerability data as a CVE Numbering Authority, and removing malware from PyPI. He’ll also give the team bandwidth for new projects such as scaling PyPI’s autonomous quarantine program to reduce manual effort on malware remediation and streamlining processes for the PSRT to handle the new vulnerability report volume. Stay tuned for what’s coming next on the PSF security roadmap by subscribing to the PSF blog or newsletter.

About the Python Software Foundation

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a non-profit whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. The PSF supports the Python community using corporate sponsorships, grants, and donations. Are you interested in sponsoring or donating to the PSF so it can continue supporting Python and its community? Check out our sponsorship program, donate directly here, or contact our team! 

Announcing PSF Community Service Award Recipients!

The PSF Community Service Awards (CSAs) are a formal way for the PSF Board of Directors to offer recognition of work which, in its opinion, significantly improves the Foundation's fulfillment of its mission to build a vibrant, welcoming, global Python community. These awards shine a light on the incredible people who are the heart and soul of our community– those whose dedication, creativity, and generosity help the PSF fulfill its mission. The PSF CSAs celebrate individuals who have been truly invaluable, inspiring others through their example, and demonstrates that service to the Python community leads to recognition and reward. If you know of someone in the Python community deserving of a PSF CSA award, please submit them to the PSF Board via psf@python.org at any time. You can read more about PSF CSA’s on our website. 

The PSF Board is excited to announce 5 new CSAs, awarded to Abhijeet Mote, Elena Williams, Hugo van Kemenade, Kevin Horn, Sarah Abderemane, for their contributions to the Python community. Read more about their work and impact below. 

Abhijeet Mote

Abhijeet Mote has spent more than a decade teaching Python and expanding access to technical education across Asia, Europe, and North America. In 2019, he founded the Python Penang Meetup, which he led until 2022 and which grew into one of Malaysia's most active developer communities, giving students, engineers, and enthusiasts a place to learn and share knowledge. In India, he has trained university faculty, students, and professionals, and he works with universities to design curricula that integrate Python, AI/ML, and data engineering. In the United States, Abhijeet leads community Python classes at public libraries, and he also mentors students in rural India remotely, offering guidance and encouragement to young learners with limited access to technology.

Abhijeet's contributions extend to the international Python community and to academic research. He has spoken and led workshops at conferences including at PyCon X Italy and PyCon US, and he supports researchers and PhD scholars in using Python, Pandas, and PyTorch to turn theoretical work into working experiments. On the open source side, he has contributed to GNUKhata, advises the open-source education initiative FOSSLipy, has served as a technical reviewer for several Python books, and maintains open repositories that have helped learners worldwide. Through the AWS Community Builders program, he also promotes Python best practices in cloud and DevOps. In 2025, he was named a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation, and he serves on the PSF Diversity & Inclusion Working Group. Abhijeet is known for his humility, empathy, and consistency. He has opened doors for learners at every stage through his work in classrooms, libraries, conferences, and open-source projects across three continents.

Elena Williams

Elena Williams has spent well over a decade building Python communities in Australia and beyond. In 2011 she co-founded PyLadiesAU, and in 2012 she founded the Canberra Python User Group, which she still helps organize. She went on to help run the Perth Python User Group in 2013 and co-founded Sydney PyLadies in 2014. Elena has also been a core organizer of PyCon AU, with a history of involvement in DjangoCon AU and DjangoCon US, and she is a regular speaker at Python conferences.

Elena's Django Girls work has had a particularly far-reaching impact. She organized the second Django Girls event ever held, and the first without the program's founders, then went on to organize Django Girls events in Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Canberra, and Adelaide, as well as the first in North America. Her Perth event, which was combined with a Rails Girls workshop, directly gave rise to SheCodes, an award-winning national organization that is now ten years old, and her Django Girls work has helped spark other substantial diversity-in-tech organizations in Australia. Today, Elena continues to teach, support, and mentor people across Python communities, especially in the Django world, where she serves as a moderator on the Django Discord and as a member of the Django Code of Conduct committee. She is also involved in open source at the national level in Australia as a council member of Linux Australia.

Hugo van Kemenade

Hugo van Kemenade is a steady, ever-present contributor to the Python community, and his work spans nearly every layer of the project. He is the release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15, a role that keeps new versions flowing to the community at every stage of the release cycle. A CPython contributor since 2017, he joined the Python Triage team in 2022, became a core developer in 2024, and has served as a PEP Editor since 2022. Hugo also chairs the monthly Documentation Working Group meetings, helping make it easier for community members to get involved, and co-organizes the Helsinki Python meetup.

Hugo's reach extends well beyond core development. He has been a maintainer of Pillow since 2014, where he modernized the codebase and helped automate its release process, and he helps maintain other widely used packages such as termcolor, humanize, and PrettyTable. He also maintains community resources that track top PyPI packages, Python version readiness, and free-threaded wheel support, giving the ecosystem useful data at just the right moment. Hugo is also a constant presence in the places where Python happens, from reviewing pull requests to answering questions on Discord and Discourse, always ready with a helpful pointer. A Python Software Foundation Fellow since 2022, Hugo's generosity with his time and expertise makes Python better for everyone who builds with it.

Kevin Horn

Kevin Horn has been a constant presence in the Texas Python community for more than fifteen years. He attended his first PyTexas conference in 2009, became an organizer in 2011, and has helped bring the annual event to the community ever since. In the early 2010s he also became an organizer of the DFW Pythoneers meetup, which he still helps run today, hosting monthly gatherings for over a decade. In 2014, he joined two others in founding the PyTexas Foundation and guiding it through the process of receiving 501(c)(3) status, and he has served as its Vice President ever since.

Kevin is always willing to mentor anyone on any topic, has guided numerous new meetup organizers and attendees, and freely shares advice on community organizing with those who ask. His encouragement has helped other organizers step into leadership roles of their own. Kevin’s warmth is also on display at PyCon US, where he has been a regular since attending his first conference in Dallas in 2006. One year, he made a point of sitting with people he didn't know at every meal, and by the end of the conference he was struggling to find a table where he didn't already know someone. That openness captures what Kevin brings to the community.

Sarah Abderemane

Sarah Abderemane has become a cornerstone of the Django community, with a journey that began with Hacktoberfest and grew into long-term maintainership. After contributing to accessibility work in the Jupyter ecosystem through Read the Docs, she implemented dark mode on the Django website, which led her to become a maintainer of djangoproject.com. She is also a co-founder of Djangonaut Space, a mentorship program that lowers the barrier to entry for new contributors to Django and its ecosystem. Her service to the Django Software Foundation includes chairing the Website Working Group, serving on the Social Media Working Group, and previously contributing to the Fundraising Working Group.

Sarah's impact extends across accessibility, governance, and global community building. As a core member of the Django Accessibility team, she co-authored the 2023 accessibility report and co-led the onboarding of four new team members in 2024. Sarah delivered a keynote on accessibility at PyCon IT and helps organize the Inclusive Web Devroom at FOSDEM. She served on the DSF Board in 2024 and 2025, including as Vice President in 2025, where she led outreach, coordinated working groups, and managed membership. Throughout, Sarah has been a steadfast supporter of the francophone Python and Django communities, including Python Cameroon, helping organizers access resources and visibility and showing up in person at their events. Her work helps ensure that Python and Django are welcoming across both languages and geographies.

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.

Announcing Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q3 2026! 🎉

The PSF is pleased to announce its third batch of PSF Fellows for 2026. Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q3! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community:

Aldo Caneo

LinkedIn, GitHub

Donghee Na

LinkedIn, GitHub

Paul Moore

GitHub, Mastodon

Takayuki Shimizukawa

Website

Thank you for your continued contributions. We have added you to our Fellows Roster.

The above members help support the Python ecosystem by being phenomenal leaders, sustaining the growth of the Python scientific community, maintaining virtual Python communities, maintaining Python libraries, creating educational material, organizing Python events and conferences, starting Python communities in local regions, and overall being great mentors in our community. Each of them continues to help make Python more accessible around the world. To learn more about the new Fellow members, check out their links above.

Let's continue recognizing Pythonistas all over the world for their impact on our community. The criteria for Fellow members is available on our PSF Fellow Membership page. If you would like to nominate someone to be a PSF Fellow, please send a description of their Python accomplishments and their email address to psf-fellow at python.org. We are accepting nominations for Quarter 4 of 2026 through November 20th, 2026.

Are you a PSF Fellow and want to help the Work Group review nominations? Contact us at psf-fellow at python.org.

Python Language Summit 2026 blog posts are now available

On July 14th, 2026, 47 Python core developers and special guests sat down at the Python Language Summit, this year held in Kraków, Poland at EuroPython 2026, to discuss many topics about the future of the Python programming language, including free-threading, Rust, garbage collectors, type annotations, and namespacing.

This marked the first time the Python Language Summit had been hosted in Europe in 15 years, when the event was held in Florence on June 19th, 2011. Going forward, the Python Language Summit will alternate between PyCon US and EuroPython on a yearly basis.

The summit was organized by Emily Morehouse, Hugo van Kemenade, Lysandros Nikolaou, and Łukasz Langa, and blog posts were written by Seth Larson.

Below are summaries of the 10 full-length talks and 5 lightning talks that were presented at the 2026 Python Language Summit. I hope you enjoy them, and thank you for your patience.

• “One namespace to namespace them all” by Pablo Galindo Salgado
• “macOS and Python” by Ned Deily
• “Garbage Collection: Generational? Incremental? Both!” by Mark Shannon
• “Memory Buffer Protocol” by Nathan Goldbaum
• “Memory Snapshots for CPython” by Hood Chatham
• “Rust for CPython” by David Hewitt
• “Spicycrab” by Kushal Das
• “Developer-in-Residence Update & Future” by Petr Viktorin
• “Free-Threaded Python Post-Era” by Donghee Na, Tobias Wrigstad, and Fridtjof Stoldt
• “PEP 827: Type Manipulation” by Michael J. Sullivan
• “Lightning Talks”
  • “One-time ABI breakage” by Mark Shannon
  • “Safer and Generic Interruptions” by Daniele Parmeggiani
  • “EktuPy, Scratch but Python” by Kushal Das
  • “AGENTS.md for CPython” by Gregory P. Smith and Łukasz Langa
  • “Please read PEP 836 (JIT go brrr)” by Ken Jin

Announcing the 2026 PSF Board Election Results!

The 2026 election for the PSF Board created an opportunity for conversations about the PSF's work to serve the global Python community. We appreciate community members' perspectives, passion, and engagement in the election process this year. 

We want to send a big thanks to everyone who ran and was willing to serve on the PSF Board. Even if you were not elected, we appreciate all the time and effort you put into thinking about how to improve the PSF and represent the parts of the community you participate in. We hope that you will continue to think about these issues, share your ideas, and join a PSF Work Group or PSF initiative if you feel called to do so.

Board Members Elect 

Congratulations to our three new and one returning Board members who have been elected! 

• Elaine Wong
• Ee Durbin
• Laís Carvalho 
• Georgi Ker

We’ll be in touch with all the elected candidates shortly to schedule onboarding. Newly elected PSF Board members are provided orientation for their service and will be joining the upcoming board meeting in October. 

Thank you!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing board members. Cheuk Ting Ho has been a super engaged PSF Board member, participating in many committees, and helping out on many PSF Programs and projects during her time on the PSF Board. Chris Neugebauer has been a longtime board member and in particular has been the watch guard of our bylaws conversations and has always been ready to share institutional knowledge. Denny Perez has been instrumental on the PSF Board, serving on the Executive Committee, as Treasurer, and on various committees during her tenure. All three of you helped shape the PSF’s Strategic Plan for the next 5 years, which was a massive undertaking. Thank you, Cheuk, Chris, and Denny for your leadership and dedication to the PSF and the Python community. You will be missed and are deeply appreciated!

Our heartfelt thanks go out to each of you who took the time to review the candidates and submit your votes. Your participation helps the PSF represent our community. We received 670 total ballots, easily reaching quorum–1/3 of affirmed voting members (1123). We’re especially grateful for your patience with continuing to navigate the additions to the elections processes with the inaugural Python Packaging Council election.

We also want to thank everyone who helped promote this year’s board election, especially Board Member KwonHan Bae, who took the initiative to cover this year’s election and worked with PSF Staff to conduct written interviews with candidates. This promotional effort was inspired by the work of Python Community News in 2023. We also want to highlight the PSF staff members and PSF Board members who put in tons of effort each year as we work to continually improve the PSF elections.

What’s next?

If you’re interested in the complete tally, make sure to check the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors Election 2026 Results page. These results will be available until November 10, 2026.

The PSF Election team will conduct a retrospective of this year’s election process to ensure we are improving year over year. We received valuable feedback about the process and tooling. We hope to be able to implement more changes for next year to ensure a smooth and accessible election process for everyone in our community. If you have feedback or comments about this year’s PSF Board election, we welcome you to join the discussion on discuss.python.org or email psf-elections@pyfound.org. 

Finally, it might feel a little early to mention this, but we will have at least 3 seats open again next year. If you're interested in running or learning more, we encourage you to contact a current PSF Board member or two this year and ask them about their experience serving on the board.

Announcing the 2026 Python Packaging Council Election Results!

The inaugural Python Packaging Council (PPC) election has concluded. With 17 candidates and plenty of lively AMA discussions on DPO, we are pleased to see the level of engagement with this first PPC election.

We want to send a big thanks to everyone who ran and was willing to serve on the council. Even if you were not elected, we appreciate all the time and effort you put into thinking about how to improve Python’s packaging ecosystem and represent the parts of the community you participate in.

Council Members Elect 

Congratulations to our five inaugural Python Packaging Council members who have been elected! 

• Brett Cannon – for a 2 year term (Cohort A)
• Pradyun Gedam – for a 2 year term (Cohort A)
• Donald Stufft – for a 1 year term (Cohort B)
• Henry Schreiner – for a 1 year term (Cohort B)
• Ralf Gommers – for a 1 year term (Cohort B)

Our heartfelt thanks go out to each of you who took the time to review the candidates and submit your votes. We received 541 total ballots.

We also want to thank everyone who participated in the PEP 772 discussions to establish this council as well as those who helped with this year’s election–especially Barry Warsaw and Pradyun Gedam as community liaisons for this inaugural election. We also want to highlight the PSF staff members and PSF Board members who put in tons of effort each year as we work to continually improve our elections.

How do the terms/cohorts work?

This inaugural election fills all five seats on the PPC. The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes are designated Cohort A with a two year term, and the three candidates receiving the next highest number of votes are designated Cohort B with a one year term.

In future elections, each cohort will be elected for a full two-year term in alternating years, so that roughly half of the PPC turns over each cycle.

What’s next?

We are already in touch with all the elected candidates to schedule onboarding.
If you’re interested in the complete tally, make sure to check the Python Packaging Council Election 2026 Results page. These results will be available until November 10, 2026.

Announcing the PSF Strategic Plan 2026

In May, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) shared the high-level goals of our Strategic Plan. In June, we published the full draft and opened it for community feedback. Today we are sharing the outcome: at its July 8 meeting, the PSF Board adopted the PSF Strategic Plan 2026, covering 2026 to 2031.

Our new PSF Strategy page is the permanent home for the plan, with information about how the board sets priorities and how you can share feedback. We’ll publish annual review findings and future updates there so the community can follow our progress and any changes to the plan.

What the feedback changed

Feedback from PSF Staff and the Python community shaped real changes to the draft we published in June.

Staff feedback added a Security Baseline objective for all PSF projects and services and a Vulnerability Management objective in response to the rapid growth in security reports, and it sharpened wording across the organizational goals. Community feedback shaped the plan, too: translation and localization are now part of the accessibility work, companies that want to fund specific work get clearer pathways, and the ideas under financial sustainability now include growing the value of PSF membership.

The plan's "How This Plan Was Shaped" section documents the process, and we are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their perspectives.

The annual review

A five-year plan is only useful if it stays current. Alongside adoption, the board established an annual review of the strategic plan. Each year, the board will:

• Assess progress against the goals

• Evaluate whether priorities need to shift

• Incorporate feedback from PSF staff and the community

• Publish a summary of findings and any changes made

The plan is designed as a living document, and we will be sharing details on the first review cycle.

What happens next

Implementation of the Strategic Plan is the job of PSF staff, and it has already started. The 2026 Grants Program Funding Round announced in July is the first concrete step under the plan's grants reform direction, and awards will be announced later this month.

We also know the community is waiting for updated financial information. The PSF has engaged an external accounting firm to support this work, and we will share an update as soon as the numbers are ready for publication.

The plan now informs how the PSF allocates its budget and staff time, and there are several ways to stay involved. We welcome community feedback at strategy@python.org year-round, and the monthly PSF Board Office Hours on the PSF Discord are a good place to connect with the board and to ask questions about the plan. Input arriving now feeds the first annual review.

Thank you to everyone who read the draft, contributed feedback, joined the office hours, and talked with us at PyCon US. The PSF’s Strategic Plan is better for it.

Jannis Leidel, PSF Board Chair, on behalf of the PSF Board of Directors

The 2026 PSF Board Election is Open!

It’s time to cast your vote! Voting for the 2026 PSF Board Election is open starting today Tuesday, September 1st, 2:00 pm UTC, through Tuesday, September 15th, 2:00 pm UTC. 

How to Vote

If you are a voting member of the PSF who affirmed your intention to participate in this year’s election or you voted in last year’s election, you will receive an email today from “OpaVote Voting Link <noreply@opavote.com>” with a link to your ballot. The subject line will read “Python Software Foundation Board of Directors Election 2026”. If you haven’t seen your ballot by Wednesday, please first check your spam folder for a message from “noreply@opavote.com”. If you can’t find the ballot email from OpaVote please get in touch by emailing psf-elections@pyfound.org so we can look into your account and make sure we have the most up-to-date email for you.

Four seats on the board are open, but you can vote to approve as many of the 17 candidates as you like. We’re delighted by how many of you are willing to contribute to the Python community by serving on the PSF Board! Make sure you take some time to look at all the nominee statements and choose your candidates carefully. 

ATTN: Choose carefully before you press the big green vote button. Once your vote is cast, it cannot be changed.

An Informed Vote is a Great Vote

Nomination and supporting statements are the clearest way to see how each candidate actually thinks: their priorities, experience, and vision for the PSF. Rather than just voting on name recognition, we encourage you to read each candidate's nomination and supporting statements. PSF Board members shape real decisions about budget, programs, and community direction. Reading these statements helps ensure your vote reflects what the candidates would actually do in the role. 

This year, the PSF election team has taken a few more steps to ensure informed voting. We invited this year’s candidates to participate in written interviews. You can find the candidate interviews on the PSF blog. We also encouraged this year’s candidates to open AMA (ask me anything) threads on discuss.python.org. You can find those threads under the PSF Board Election category on Discuss. Some great Q&A has already been taking place, so make sure to check them out!

Who can vote? 

You need to be a Contributing, Supporting, or Fellow member and have affirmed your voting intention by August 25th, 2:00 pm UTC, to vote in this election. Per last year’s Bylaw change that allows for simplifying the voter affirmation process by treating past voting activity as intent to continue voting, if you voted last year, you have been automatically added to the 2026 voter roll. Please note: If you removed or changed your email on psfmember.org, you may not automatically be added to this year's voter roll. 

Reminder that if you were formerly a Managing member, your membership has been updated to Contributing as of June 25th, 2025, per a recent Bylaw change that merged Managing and Contributing memberships. 

If you’d like to learn more or sign up as a PSF Member, check out our membership types. You can check your membership status on your User Information page on psfmember.org (you will need to be logged in). If you have questions about your membership or the election please email psf-elections@pyfound.org

Inaugural Python Packaging Council Election: Voting is now open!

It’s time to cast your vote! Voting for the inaugural 2026 Python Packaging Council (PPC) Election is open now through September 15 at 2:00 pm UTC.

Find Your Ballot

If you are a voting member of the PSF who affirmed your intention to participate in this year’s election, you will receive an email today from “OpaVote Voting Link <noreply@opavote.com>” containing a link to your ballot. The subject line will be “Python Packaging Council Election 2026”.

If you haven’t received your ballot by September 2, first check your spam folder for a message from noreply@opavote.com. If you still can’t find the OpaVote email, please contact pc-elections@python.org. We can look into your account and confirm that we have the most up-to-date email address for you.

Review the Nominees

Please take some time to read all of the nominee statements before casting your ballot. Consider what each nominee brings to the Council, the priorities and perspectives they describe, and how you would like to see Python packaging evolve. You can also ask candidates questions directly in the PPC Nominations AMA threads on discuss.python.org.

Important: Review your selections carefully before pressing the big green vote button. Once your ballot has been cast, your vote cannot be changed.

Who Can Vote?

To vote in this election, you must be a Contributing, Supporting, or Fellow member of the PSF and have affirmed your intention to vote by August 25 at 2:00 pm UTC.

If you’d like to learn more about PSF membership or become a member, see the PSF Membership page. You can check your current membership status on your User Information page at psfmember.org while logged in.

If you have questions about your membership or the election, please contact pc-elections@python.org.

Kojo Idrissa: 2026 PSF Board Election Candidate Interview

Who are you? 

I'm a software engineer at REVSYS. Before that I was an accountant. I was also a university instructor in the US and China.  I taught English, Western Culture, Problem-Solving, Accounting and MIS.

What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?

I bring business acumen from my accounting degree, MBA, and prior career as an accountant. I've also been on a non-profit board, when I was a board member for DEFNA, the non-profit that puts on DjangoCon US. I bring a global perspective of the Python community. I'm American, but I've spoken at conferences in Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Europe, Africa, and Australia. I used those opportunities to build ties with those local communities and increase my awareness of how their needs differ from the communities in the US, where the PSF is based.

What motivated you to run for the PSF Board of Directors?

I hadn't thought about running for the board until someone suggested I consider it, based on my prior community activity. As I thought about it, I realized I had some expertise and experience that I could use to benefit the broader Python community. In addition to my business background, I've made lots of connections with people from different parts of the global community.

What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the board?

The decline in the community's confidence in the board.
What I see (and hear, from other community members) is more a set of related challenges, instead of a single problem. The word "consistency" keeps coming up when discussing the PSF, both in action and communication. It comes up when discussing the Fiscal Sponsorees program and the Grants program. When do these programs open/close? Who are they available to and why/how? What type of support do they offer?

There's also an issue of "focus". The PSF's core activities are, "Infrastructure", "Community", and "Investing in Python & Tools". But at what rates are PSF resources allocated to those different activities. And do those allocation rates need to change?

Where do you see the PSF in 5 years from now?

If we handle things properly, I see the PSF thriving. I see a PSF more focused on the the parts of the core mission that only the PSF can best perform ("Infrastructure" and "Investing in Python & Tools"). I also see a PSF with better internal infrastructure in place to provide Community support in a clear, consistent, sustainable fashion.

However, if the board doesn't improve its internal infrastructure to provide Community support in a reliable fashion, I can see the global community "moving on" from the PSF and building its own mechanisms for support.

What areas of the Python community are you involved with?

I've been a DjangoCon US organizer since 2016 and the DEFNA North American Ambassador since 2017. I'm also a former DEFNA board member. I'm the Orientation Chair for DjangoCon US and I've helped lead the Newcomer's Orientation for PyCon US since 2022. I'm also the co-founder of Black Python Devs. I've spoken at multiple Python and Django conferences, been a Django Girls coach multiple times.

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Note from the election administrators: 

Want to learn more about this candidate or ask them a question? 

Check out their nomination statement.

Check out their AMA thread on discuss.python.org.

Ramya Ravi: 2026 PSF Board Election Candidate Interview

Who are you?

I'm Ramya Ravi, a Developer Advocate for AI and Open Source at NetApp Instaclustr, based in Connecticut. My day to day is teaching developers how to actually build with open source technology, not just read about it. I write technical tutorials, record videos, and speak at conferences, about things like vector search, retrieval augmented generation, and open source AI infrastructure. Python sits underneath almost everything I work on. The PyTorch and OpenSearch tooling I write about every week both run on it, so in a very real sense I've been a daily Python user for my entire career, even before I thought of myself as part of the Python community in the traditional sense.

Outside of work, I care a lot about lowering the barrier to entry for newer developers. Earlier in my career I built a developer community from zero to over 6,000 members, and watching someone go from lurker to confident contributor is honestly what keeps me doing this kind of work.

What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?

I'd bring three things: a track record of building community from nothing, a habit of teaching at scale, and a genuinely outside perspective. I grew a developer community from zero to 6,000+ members earlier in my career, so I know what it actually takes to onboard someone new, keep them engaged, and turn them into someone who helps the next person. I've applied that same instinct to technical education, writing tutorials and producing videos across multiple open source ecosystems with one consistent goal: make the next step easier for whoever is reading.

What I think is most useful, though, is that I come to Python from the outside in. My daily work sits at the intersection of Python, AI/ML, and open source infrastructure, which means I see how people who use Python constantly, but through frameworks built on top of it, experience the ecosystem. That's a growing and increasingly important slice of the Python user base, and I'd bring their perspective directly into board conversations.

What motivated you to run for the PSF Board of Directors?

Python is the layer underneath almost everything I build and teach. Every tutorial I write about PyTorch or OpenSearch is really a tutorial about Python doing something useful under the hood, and I realized at some point that I'd spent years benefiting from this community without ever putting energy directly into it. That felt worth correcting.

I'm also motivated by a specific pattern I keep noticing: a huge number of developers write Python every single day through AI/ML and data tooling, but many of them have never engaged with the PSF, attended a PyCon, or thought about Python as a community they belong to rather than just a language they use. I think that's a real opportunity. I want to help build the bridge between that audience and the PSF, using the same hands on, teaching first approach that's worked for me elsewhere, and turn "I use Python" into "I'm part of this community" for a lot more people.

What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the board?

I want to help the PSF reach the enormous number of developers who use Python daily but arrived through a specific framework or tool rather than through Python itself. AI/ML practitioners are a great example. Someone can spend years writing Python through PyTorch, Hugging Face, or OpenSearch tooling and never once engage with the PSF, attend a Python event, or think of themselves as part of this community. That's a missed opportunity in both directions: the PSF loses potential members, volunteers, and advocates, and those developers miss out on a community that could genuinely support their growth.

I'd like to work on lowering that barrier, through education content, event partnerships, and simply making the path into PSF involvement more visible to people who don't think of themselves as core Python developers yet. I think this matters more every year, as more of the fastest growing parts of the Python ecosystem are AI and data focused.

Where do you see the PSF 5 years from now?

I'd love to see the PSF recognized as the natural home not just for traditional Python developers, but for the much larger and still growing population of AI/ML and data practitioners who write Python every day through the tools built on top of it. Five years from now, I hope the PSF has stronger, more visible pathways for that audience: clearer education initiatives, more partnerships with the events and communities where these developers already gather, and a membership base that reflects how broad Python's real world usage has become.

I also hope the PSF continues to grow its global reach, so that community members anywhere in the world feel like there's an obvious way to get involved. Ultimately, I want the PSF five years from now to be an organization where someone who just uses Python for AI work feels just as welcome as someone who's been contributing to CPython for a decade.

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Note from the election administrators: 

Want to learn more about this candidate? Check out their nomination statement.

Petr Andreev: 2026 PSF Board Election Candidate Interview

Who are you?

I am a Python educator, CPython-internals specialist, community organizer, and international Python speaker.

I teach Advanced Python and CPython internals, from memory management and interpreter architecture to free-threading and performance. My work increasingly focuses on turning technical education into real-world participation: research, open-source contribution, conference speaking, and leadership.

Before focusing on Python, I helped build an educational community of roughly 2,500 participants. I assembled an organizing team, secured external funding, and developed partnerships with companies, an endowment, and other organizations to support courses, competitions, speakers, and community programs.

These experiences shaped the model behind much of my work:
develop developers → develop contributors → develop community leaders.

What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?

I would bring experience building organizations and systems around technical communities.

I have worked on both sides of community development: developing individuals through education and mentorship, and building the infrastructure around them through organizing teams, institutional partnerships, external funding, events, and opportunities to lead.

I also bring an unusual combination of technical depth and community-building experience. I can communicate with CPython contributors about implementation-level problems, with educators about developing new talent, and with institutions and companies about partnerships and resources.

My international work across Europe and Asia gives me another useful perspective: the ability to listen across communities, identify problems that repeat across regions, and connect people who have already developed solutions.

What motivated you to run for the PSF Board of Directors?

One of the PSF’s strategic goals resonates particularly strongly with me: Develop the Next Generation of Python Developers.

I have spent years experimenting with this problem on a smaller scale and have seen students progress from learning advanced Python to researching its internals, contributing upstream, and presenting their work publicly.

I now want to work on the system behind that progression.

The PSF is uniquely positioned to connect communities, educational institutions, employers, sponsors, maintainers, and contributors. I am running because I believe these connections can make participation in Python easier to discover and more sustainable over the long term.

What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the Board?

Contributor retention.

Python attracts enormous numbers of users, but converting initial interest into years of meaningful contribution is much harder.

Open-source contribution competes with paid work, family, and other demands on people’s time. The question I want to work on is: how can the PSF make sustained contribution easier and more rewarding?

I would explore clearer contributor pathways, mentorship infrastructure, recognition, funded contributor time, and partnerships with employers and educational institutions.
I would also measure whether these mechanisms actually work: repeat contributions, retention, mentorship activity, increasing responsibility, and long-term participation.
The PSF does not govern CPython technically, but it can help create conditions in which contributors and maintainers are more able to stay.

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Note from the election administrators: 

Want to learn more about this candidate or ask them a question? 

Check out their nomination statement.

Check out their AMA thread on discuss.python.org.

Nina Zakharenko: 2026 PSF Board Election Candidate Interview

Who are you?

I'm Nina Zakharenko. I went to my first PyCon US in Santa Clara in 2013, and fell in love with the Python community. Since then, I've co-chaired PyCascades, taught Python to hundreds of students, and given talks, workshops, and keynotes at Python events around the world, including the closing keynote at PyCon US 2019. Professionally, I've held roles at Microsoft and Google focused on Python, open source, developer communities, and supply chain security. These days I work for myself, and I'm running as an independent candidate.

I served on the PSF Board of Directors from 2020 to 2023, including as Communications Co-Chair and Co-Vice Chair. After spending time recharging, I'm running again because I believe the Python community is entering a period of significant change, and I'd like to contribute my relevant experience to a community that has been central to my life and career for over a decade. Outside of work, I love to be creative with hobbies like 3D printing, ceramics, and stained glass artwork.

What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?

Three years of board experience, along with perspective from working across industry and community. During my previous term, I worked on initiatives around grants and helped introduce a more accessible membership tier. I also learned the less visible side of board work: fundraising, executive oversight, and recruiting new directors. That means I can start contributing quickly, and invest time in helping new directors onboard as well.

I've been involved in Python from many angles: as a software engineer, a conference organizer and speaker, and a teacher. At Microsoft and Google, I focused on open source and software supply chain security, and managed Microsoft's sponsorship and event presence at PyCon US and other Python events for several years. The PSF exists at an intersection of community, education, infrastructure, and sponsorship, and I believe directors with hands-on experience in those areas will help the PSF adapt to new challenges ahead.

What motivated you to run for the PSF Board of Directors?

What's pulling me back in 2026 is the sense that the landscape is changing quickly, both within and around the Python community. How open source is funded, maintained, and secured looks very different than it did a few years ago. So do conference attendance and sponsorship. As an educator and speaker, I'm hyper-aware that AI tools are changing how people learn to program, contribute to projects, submit to conferences, and share their knowledge. I believe the PSF, through its policies, grants, and working groups, has a role to play in how Python is taught in the age of AI, so that a new generation of programmers learns to read, comprehend, and debug code, and make meaningful contributions to open source.

This isn't new territory for me. I've worked on these problems as a contributor, an organizer, a PSF director, and in industry roles focused on open source and security. I'm running because I believe my experience is particularly relevant to the challenges the PSF faces today.

What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the board?

One of the biggest challenges is financial sustainability: as a non-profit, the PSF relies on donations to keep operating and provide critical services, like PyPI, that millions depend on.

While we'd like to see companies contribute in proportion to their use of Python, I'd love to help the board find new ways to bring in funds beyond events like PyCon US. After the PSF withdrew from a strings-attached NSF grant in October 2025, supporters donated over $150,000 and 295 new members joined within two weeks. I want to keep that momentum going through small recurring pledges from those with the means to give, and by spreading the word about employer donation matching at large tech companies.

The other side of the coin is how those funds are used: compensating the PSF's small staff fairly, and sustaining the grants and programs that shape the next generation of Python programmers. Those programs should reflect our global community, and continued outreach beyond North America and Europe is paramount. The $25 supporting membership we introduced during my last term opened the door to more people, and I believe there are more opportunities like it to welcome members from all over the world.

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Note from the election administrators: 

Want to learn more about this candidate or ask them a question? 

Check out their nomination statement.

Check out their AMA thread on discuss.python.org.

Keith Murray: 2026 PSF Board Election Candidate Interview

Who are you?

I’m Keith Murray.

I engage with a lot of Python Communities, often with the handle KeithTheEE, and I find that my favorite parts of the many communities are seeing the hobbies people have, and if/how Python intersects them. Hobbies and passion projects (including silly, fun passions) are one of the ways to make code matter, and are one of the things I’ve been falling back to of late to help balance against burnout: particularly when I feel overwhelmed by code ‘engagement’ that feels overly extractive. Discovering hobbies of other Python community members has made engaging feel like a collaborative and supportive experience, even if the code isn’t tied to the hobby at all.

I love (trying) to grow orchids, birding, and making pasta, and while I don’t involve Python in every aspect of it, hearing about how it resonates with others (constructive or destructively), like how some prefer begonias over orchids, never got birding but love their dogs, or the many foods from their home I now need to try--helps me look forward to reading comments on the item at hand. So I’m Keith, I like many things and I love how so many people make the code around me joyful.

What would you bring to the PSF Board of Directors?

My experience would help drive outreach to communities and direct small changes to help navigate the Python ecosystem and communities with an increased awareness of engagement opportunities. A particular interest is tied to PSF membership, and using it as a pathway for communication and building outreach to help inform people about the many ways to get involved and support the Python community. Because I’m interested in the Education and Education Resources side of things, I’m more aimed at the new user experience, and trying to maintain the “exciting new world/what can I do next” feeling new programmers have.

I add perspective on the impact of things like navigating the python.org website, and how it feels to those who are new and not from a programming background. This experience with outreach and newer community member navigation helps shape how I consider relaying information to those I think either want to know about it, or want to share it to those they know want to know. In a Board of Directors role, this perspective helps understand how choices are felt in the wider community, and shapes the way I’d encourage asking for feedback, input, and help with larger goals.

What motivated you to run for the PSF Board of Directors?

I am running for the PSF Board of Directors because I think my experience reaching out to lots of communities, and relaying their events in other spaces has helped me learn a lot about helpful outreach methodologies as well as perceived limitations in many communities. I particularly hope to shape the workflow of becoming a member, to make “being a part of the PSF” feel more meaningful, and to help direct the excitement of wanting to help into things which are impactful, but may not immediately be alluring.

Things like sharing events, commenting on an old issue if it is still present on your machine, operating system, python version, telling community members, “thank you” and that you like the things they did are all ways to help which can alleviate some burden or stress from staff and core team members, and guiding that branch of empowerment is something I think is valuable.

What problem or challenge do you want to address if you are on the board?

Funding the PSF, and ensuring that funding is reliable so long term, structural improvement can be made is the among largest challenges I see PSF currently facing. While improving the PSF Membership workflow might not be the most direct way to addressing overall PSF funding, a wider audience who’s aware of the financial needs of Open Source gives strength to the conversation in every company.

One of my biggest hopes for the next year is a formalized means to nominate individuals for PSF “Contributing Membership”, that way it’s easier to communicate how many people actually qualify for this class of membership. The wording of the membership is a non exhaustive list of ways people qualify, but many people don’t know it exists, or pre-emptively determine their efforts aren’t enough. There are so many who qualify and if they’re invited they’ll highlight all the other amazing community members they know. Building a network of celebration helps communicate a core reason funding the PSF is very important, and makes it easier for more community members to start that conversation within their companies.

Where do you see the PSF 5 years from now?

Because funding is among the biggest challenges, and is one that is unlikely to be resolved quickly, I think “Community Empowerment” will be one of the strongest aspects of the PSF in the years to come. There are many bodies for regional, domain specific, or identity specific Python groups, and I think maintaining and encouraging strong relationships with the larger community will help relay messaging, and help build up diverse leadership skills by having more events like CPython development sprints at various regional events. That wider net helps foster skills, enables local companies to invest in their local community while seeing its direct impact on the growth of Python as a whole, and hopefully provides chances for community engagement in a fashion that alleviates burdens.

Looking at the strength of the PSF Board of Director Nominees as well as Python Packaging Council nominees, it’s clear that there’s a massive amount of talent and each person has amazing experiences which inform the direction they want to help the PSF grow. Each of those is an area that strengthens the whole Python Community, and strong and well defined paths of empowerment and organization resources help ensure these initiatives continue to help Python thrive.

What areas of the Python Community are you involved with?

I’m a part of the PSF Education and Outreach Workgroup, a Director and Community Outreach Lead for the community run Python Discord, and help with PyOhio (As a volunteer this year, prior two years as a Communication Chair). Additionally I moderated the Python Subreddit from mid 2020 through mid 2023.

I do a lot of work focused on the outreach side of things, trying to listen to where communities have needs and connect individuals who have strengths in exactly that domain. There’s a fair amount of times where people just didn’t know something existed, or don’t know where to find a resource, and helping relay that information has been one of the areas I’ve found to be fulfilling. It has the added benefit of getting to meet a ton of cool people and seeing the amazing things they’re doing in Python, and how their hobbies outside of Python shape their code and community.

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Note from the election administrators: 

Want to learn more about this candidate or ask them a question? 

Check out their nomination statement.

Check out their AMA thread on discuss.python.org.