Running conferences in different jurisdictions altogether would mean starting from scratch. Building an attendee base is hard. People won’t come just because the PSF organises it. And, don’t forget, there are already lots of PyCons all over the world. How, exactly, would it be to anyone’s benefit for the PSF to blunder in, colonial-like, and try to run a bigger and better conference?
@thomas, what I am suggesting is exactly the opposite.
Enable the local organizations to be truly independent. They already operate in the respective jurisdictions and have an attendee base.
give them the legal assets and the monetary assets! Don’t run everything through PSF USA - if something is “colonial-like”, then this is.
You’re seriously asking why PyCon US is in the US? I think that would be obvious.
what a strawman argument. I am asking why 50% of the yearly budget of the PSF regularly goes to a single conference in the US.
Where the PSF purports to be the steward of Python world-wide.
Or are you asking why the PSF staff isn’t organizing those PyCons and/or making them as big as PyCon US? Well, that would be because it would be horrendously expensive to try, and it would likely fail.
So, instead everything gets spent on python US, and the remaining conferences are in a begger / supplicant position, where they have to rely on the goodwill of PSF to maybe get some scraps - and they have to fear that if they do not fall in line it even gets worse.
Example: pycon Africa 2023 open letter after funding denial
With colonialist undertones
“A PSF Board member once openly expressed the opinion that Anglo cultures always seem to be the ones that take the moral lead around the world, leaving others to follow their example. From any non-western perspective, this is an astounding idea to receive.”
Not my words.
$100k listed on the 2022 tax return. That would be a ridiculously low salary for an Executive Director of a non-profit
Tell that not to me, but to the average conference that gets the rug pulled from out of them because 1.000, 5.000, etc USD are denied to them in the grant freeze and/or that had already planned budgets after informal comimtments.
And are the 2.5 milliion dollar for pycon US also ridiculously low?
There has to be some reason(s) for why Board candidates’ position statements aren’t posted on Discourse,
I think the reasons are purely political:
- a climate of fear
- suppression of dissenting voices, regularly by a mob of supporters that jump on any dissent
- censoring by moderators and getting shouted at by powerful people
2. the less discussion there is, the easier it is for the current powers to entrench their position, to get their candidates through.
Hence discussion is discouraged through soft (not prompt it) and hard (censoring) measures. For instance, a number of cases where people got banned or censored on much less relevant topics can be seen as a show of force what happens to dissenters.
But they shall not break us.