Complimentary tickets to PyCon US: what about other conferences?

PSF
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Dear PSF, @PSF-Board

You have decided to offer me a complimentary ticket to PyCon US 2025 and I appreciate the attention.

However, being a French resident and citizen, I would be more likely to benefit from this offer if you allowed for a choice of regional conferences. There are several reasons (for me and other people, I believe) not to go to PyCon US:

  1. Promoting a more decentralized community;
  2. Keeping our carbon footprint in control. It’s not sustainable for the wealthy class
    [1] to keep traveling the world in plane while poor people suffer more and more from climate change.
  3. Avoiding visiting a country where the newly-elected president is a far-right imperialist who threatens to annex other countries [2].

Therefore I think it would be good if the PSF partnered with a few regional conferences covering populated areas of the world [3], so as to offer a choice of complimentary tickets. .

(I realize the PSF is, currently, a US entity but, you know, baby steps)

  1. Not all readers might think of themselves as “wealthy”, but statistically they probably are. ↩︎

  2. I hope stating this crude fact is not seen as contentious. ↩︎

  3. Such as Europe, the various regions of Asia, Africa, Oceania, South America… and, why not, Canada? :wink: ↩︎

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This doesn’t take away from your question to the PSF, but to add: as a core developer you are eligible to a complimentary ticket to EuroPython under the Guido van Rossum Core Developer Grant.

https://www.europython-society.org/core-grant/

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I had no idea, thanks!

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See also @Mariatta’s Perks of Being a Python Core Developer.

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I’m not involved with this, but AFAIK: the PSF is happy to sponsor regional Python conferences, and the relevant organizers can use that money for grants (like EuroPython does).
As I see it, the ticket you got is also from organizers of this particular conference – it just so happens that PSF organizes PyCon US directly.

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Just to clarify: the EuroPython Society (EPS) does not use PSF money for giving out the GvR grant to core devs. This is the EPS spending its own money.

The EPS members decided to issue these grants a long while back, and before the PSF started issuing similar grants, to give something back - after all, we wouldn’t have a EuroPython conference without the core dev team.

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My understanding is that CPython has its own budgeting and funds, separate from conference-related funds, and that The Python Steering Council members have been the ones approving the expenses for Core Devs (eg expenses for cpython sprint and CPython Dev in Residences).

Perhaps, we could also ask The Steering Council to allocate some budget each year for core devs who want to attend conferences, eg providing free ticket to a Python conference of interest.

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I can’t speak for the current SC/this year, but for previous years that’s not quite true. The SC made budget available for travel support, but the free ticket offer came from PyCon US/the PSF itself.

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