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PSF Meeting Minutes for Dec. 11, 2024

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Title: 2024-12-11 PSF Board Meeting Minutes Encoding: utf-8 Author: psf at python.org Content-Type: text/x-rst

The Python Software Foundation
Minutes of a Regular Meeting of the Board of Directors

December 11, 2024

A regular meeting of the Python Software Foundation ("PSF") Board of Directors was held over Group Conference Call via phone and Internet Relay Chat/Slack beginning at 14:00 UTC, on December 11, 2024. Deb Nicholson took notes/minutes.

All votes are reported in the form "Y-N-A" (in favor-Y‚opposed-N‚abstentions-A; e.g. "5-1-2" means "5 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions").

1   Attendance

The following members of the Board of Directors (10 of 12) were present at the meeting: Cristián Maureira-Fredes, Tania Allard, Cheuk Ting Ho, Denny Perez, Christopher Neugebauer, KwonHan Bae, Deb Nicholson, Jannis Leidel, Georgi Ker, Simon Willison.

Phyllis Dobbs (Controller), Joe Carey (Accounting Manager), Ee Durbin (Director of Infrastructure), Loren Crary (Director of Resource Development), Seth Larson (Python Security Developer in Residence), Marie Nordin (Community Communications Manager), and Mike Fiedler (PyPI Safety and Security Engineer) were also in attendance.

2   Minutes of Past Meetings

Minutes from prior meeting November 13, 2024:

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation approve the minutes at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/psf-important@python.org/thread/I3EI2ZPFLE2IPVY36GNMNIE4DHBOV7E6/ as representing a true and accurate record of the November 13, 2024 meeting.

Approved, 8-0-2

3   Board and Staff Monthly Reports for December 2024

3.1   Deb Nicholson

December report not provided.

3.2   Oliva Sauls

  • Launched PyCon US 2025 Registration, Travel Grants & Community Booth applications
  • PyCon US Hatchery planning
  • Worked on PyCon US budget with Phyllis
  • PyCon US 2026 & 2027 hotel contract negotiations
  • Conducted screen interviews for the Community Event Manager role
  • PyCon US 2025 website design and updates
  • PyCon US CfP outreach and volunteer recruitment

3.3   Laura Graves

  • Ongoing accounting activities
  • Grants
    • Ongoing grants workgroup activities
    • Meetup Review - inviting new groups and removing inactive ones
    • Charter work with Marie
    • Quarterly GWG Call
  • Banking
    • Phone call with Truist about moving funds from investment account
    • Discussions with PNC about excessive fees on accounts

3.4   Joe Carey

December report not provided.

3.5   Ee Durbin

December report not provided.

3.6   Phyllis Dobbs

December report not provided.

3.7   Loren Crary

December report not provided.

3.8   Marie Nordin

  • PTO for US holidays
  • 2024 Python Developer Survey wrap up
  • Grants Program
    • Charter updates
    • GWG call
    • Onboarding new GWG member, Karo Ladino
    • Administration
  • End-of-year fundraiser, coordination of:
    • JetBrains collaboration
    • Civi & python.org pages
    • Communications & promotion
  • Social media strategy and planning for addition of BlueSky presence
  • Mini newsletter to promote end of year fundraiser & PyCon US 2025 announcements
  • PyCon US 2025
    • Assisting with promotion
    • Community booth coordination
  • Fellows WG administration

3.9   Seth Larson

3.10   Mike Fiedler

  • Malware
    • Inbound Malware Reports: 530
    • Resolution Time (average): 1h50m
    • Handle Time (average): >1m
    • A large uptick in November is largely due to a persistent attacker creating new accounts and re-publishing new packages of similar malware each time. These were caught by our community of volunteer reporters rather swiftly, and removed each time. There’s not a particularly obvious pattern with this user, making it harder to block at the outset, other than they started using Digital Ocean droplets to host a mail server, and pointed multiple domains at the same server to allow themselves to register for multiple accounts from a given domain, attempting to evade detection.
    • The previous work put into the Admin UI has helped make tracking these accounts down and disposing of them much faster - often within minutes of response.
    • Performed a deep-dive on a specific attack and wrote about it. Malware Package Analysis: aiocpa
  • Safety
    • Worked with the Fastly support team to try and figure out the cause of unexpected errors when using their WAF, and they appear to have been fixed. More evaluation is expected mid-December.
    • I also worked a bit on our inspector tool to make it a little more robust, and allow us to exclude some of the details from download logs.
    • Working with our Infra folks, we are now collecting more data on DMARC for emails sent from PyPI, with the intent to start enforcing a quarantine policy to prevent folks from being phished by emails looking to originate from PyPI.
    • After a researcher triggered a side effect attack from our helpdesk software, I added validation to the malware reporting input form to prevent injection attacks. It’s a low issue, but was important to close the hole quickly before someone else figured out a more nefarious usage.
  • Misc
    • Supported the rollout of PEP 639, so now projects can provide better license metadata.
    • Spent some time with the folks working on PEP 458 (The Update Framework aka TUF) to provide them more guidance on next steps.
    • I also removed 9-year-old CSS dependencies from the stack, replacing them with native CSS features.

3.11   Jacob Coffee

December report not provided.

3.12   Maria Ashna

December report not provided.

3.13   Dawn Wages

December report not provided.

3.14   Denny Perez

  • PSF: Monthly Discord Office hour
  • PSF: PyLadiesCon - Organizer Team
  • COMMUNITY - Python Chile - Meeting Organizer Team
  • COMMUNITY - PyCon Charlas - Contact reviewers and Social media outreach
  • COMMUNITY - PyCon Latam - Meeting organizer team Costa Rica
  • COMMUNITY - Python Panamá - Meeting with working group
  • COMMUNITY - Volunteering at meetup Python Montreal
  • COMMUNITY - PyCascades - Organizer Meetings / Social media outreach
  • COMMUNITY - PyLadies Mentoring group for New Chapter

3.15   Cristián Maureira-Fredes

  • PSF - Meetings and office hours.
  • Community - PyLadiesCon - Many hours for meetings, website, bots, discord and other conference details for the conference.
  • Community - Python Docs ES - Work around the migration to 3.13 including setting up events, streams, closing issues, reviews, and participation on the event.
  • Community - PyCon SE - Participation on the conference and giving a keynote
  • Community - EuroPython Society - General Assembly
  • Community - PyLadies Berlin - Final event of the year.

3.16   Simon Willison

  • Community: Published articles about PyPI digital attestations, uv, OpenAI Python features - November posts, December posts
  • PSF: Board meeting, Slack

3.17   Jannis Leidel

December report not provided.

3.18   Kushal Das

December report not provided.

3.19   Georgi Ker

  • Community: Organizing PyLadiesCon
  • Community: working on PyPodcats episode
  • Community: Call with PyCon Austria to provide advice for the conference.
  • Community: Setting up a PyLadies Asia Discord channel
  • PSF: Setting up onboarding for new D&I Workgroup’s members
  • PSF: Leading D&I WG meeting
  • PSF: PyCon US event assets design

3.20   KwonHan Bae

  • PSF - CoC WG
  • PSF - participated in board discussions via Slack and email
  • PSF - attended board meeting
  • COMMUNITY : PyCon APAC Organize
  • COMMUNITY : PyCon KR Organize ( Sponsor, Finance )

3.21   Tania Allard

December report not provided.

3.22   Cheuk Ting Ho

  • Serve the grants WG and conduct WG
  • Discuss with PSF staff about the grants WG charter changes
  • Preparation for Educational WG
  • Board office hours
  • Organising PyLadies Con
  • PyCon US CfP mentor
  • Giving Python support to the British Orthopaedic Association for their conference

3.23   Chris Neugebauer

(Includes November activities) - (November) [Community/PSF] Delivered keynote address at Seattle GNU/Linux (SeaGL) Conference - (Nov/Dec) Served on the grants WG and exec committee - (Nov) Participated in discussions with PSF Counsel in capacity as Vice Chair - (Dec) Participated in PyCon Australia, delivered PSF sponsor address, gave a talk, and some other volunteer tasks - (Nov/Dec) Participated in PyCon Australia Steering Committee Discussions; provided advice to other Python organisers in Australia

4   Work Group Reports

4.1   Code of Conduct

  • Nothing to report at this time.

4.2   Grants

  • See list of resolutions under “Votes Approved by Working Groups”

4.3   Sponsors

  • Nothing to report at this time.

4.4   Marketing

  • Nothing to report at this time.

4.5   Jobs

  • Of the 357 Job submissions created in December 2024:
    • 90 have status approved
    • 3 have status archived
    • 19 have status draft
    • 105 have status expired
    • 85 have status rejected
    • 48 have status removed
    • 7 have status review

4.6   Trademarks

  • Nothing to report

4.7   Fellows

  • Nothing to report

4.8   Packaging

  • Nothing to report

4.9   Infrastructure

  • Nothing to report

4.10   Scientific Python

  • Nothing to report

6   Votes Approved by Working Groups

6.1   Grants

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Grants Work Group grant $2,500 USD to the Montreal Python community for six months of meetup events in Montreal, Canada, during 2024 & 2025.

Approved; 7-0-0, 2024-12-02

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Grants Work Group grant $3500 USD to the fourth annual PyCon Chile taking place in Santiago, Chile, on November 30-December 1st, 2024.

Approved; 8-0-0, 2024-11-14

RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Grants Work Group grant $5000 USD to Julien Palard for the Genepy: Python Exercises development work taking place in 2025.

Approved; 7-0-0, 2024-12-04

6.2   Sponsors

  • None at this time.

6.3   Scientific Python

  • None at this time.

8   New Business

  • The PSF discussed the PyCon Korea grant request and and voted on the following resolution:

    RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors grant $10,000 USD to PyCon Korea 2024 conference that took place in Suwon, South Korea, on October 26-27, 2024.

    Declined; 0-9-1, 2024-12-11

  • The PSF discussed the Distinguished Service Awards nominations and voted on the following resolutions:

    RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation wishes to recognize Ewa Jodlowska with a Distinguished Service Award. Her exemplary and sustained efforts for more than a decade were key to the PSF’s transformation from a volunteer-led and operated organization to a full-fledged Foundation with paid staff and funding that supports the global Python community. The Foundation is now set up to hire coders, to administrate a critical grants program and handle the infrastructure that ensures that Python and its vast repository of libraries is available to everyone in the world at no cost.

    Ewa’s many years of service fundamentally changed the PSF’s history and set our community up to meet the future in ways that we could not have imagined when she started.

    Approved; 10-0-0, 2024-12-11

    RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation wishes to recognize Van Lindberg with a Distinguished Service Award. Van served as a Board member for over a decade, 2012-2023 and as chair from 2012-2016. During that time, he acted as the organizational anchor for legal topics and brought in his experience from other areas of the open source community to help the Python Software Foundation grow and remain at the cutting edge of what is possible for open source non-profits. He saw the Foundation through phenomenal growth, pitching on many topics from licensing to hiring to fundraising.

    Van’s deep knowledge of open source communities and his expertise as a lawyer helped the Python Software Foundation move boldly to meet the needs of the global Python community during a period of immense growth.

    Approved; 10-0-0, 2024-12-11

    RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation wishes to recognize Thomas Wouters with a Distinguished Service Award. He has served as a Board member for three separate terms, 2001-2004, 2017-2019, 2020-2023, and as Board chair for the final year. He also served as the General Manager, leading our staff for 6 months while the Foundation searched for our new Executive Director. Thomas also served on the Steering Council for five years. He has been a steadying and welcoming presence in the Python community for twenty-five years.

    We’d like to recognize Thomas’s many years of largely “behind the scenes” service to make every meeting run smoothly, to make sure critical administrative tasks were handled, to pitch in wherever needed, and to act as a historian for the PSF’s work and the Python programming language’s technical decisions.

    Approved; 10-0-0, 2024-12-11

  • The PSF discussed putting Grant priorities & budget alignment into workflow and policy for the Grants Working Group and voted on the following resolution:

    RESOLVED, that the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors approve updates to the Grants Working Group charter, as written at https://wiki.python.org/psf/GrantsWG/Charter.

    Approved; 10-0-0, 2024-12-11

9   Discussions

  • The board discussed the 2024 Python Developers Survey results.
  • The board discussed the annual fundraiser including donations, new memberships and recurring memberships.
  • The board discussed an update on the Education charter.
  • The board discussed an update on the Steering Council.
  • The board discussed updates from the Infrastructure Work Group.
  • The board discussed updates from the Diversity and Inclusion Work Group and the nine new members onboard.

Meeting adjourned at 15:36 UTC