I don’t like how this has turned into a metaphysical debate about what it means for an individual or a group to make an endorsement. What matters is the weight one’s word carries. Respect translates into power. Power should always be exercised judiciously. And when a respected party’s trust is eroded, the community suffers.
Can we not forgo endorsements entirely? Why do we need them? Who are we pandering to? Is this not a community? Is the electorate not capable of exercising their judgment? Endorsements are partisan; they breed distrust - they have no place in a communal space. Endorsements aim to influence uninformed voters; voters in a community have a specialised interest - they ought to be equipped to judge candidates on their own merits.
Hey friends, I think this thread has done what it can do. Thank you all for engaging with this. It’s the first election where endorsements have come up and there’s no rulebook, so opinions are expected and welcome and to be clear I will not be asking anyone to stop disagreeing. It’s obvious everyone in this thread cares a lot about this community and about getting the first PPC election right, and that’s a good thing. It also means people feel strongly, which is fair.
We can disagree here without assuming anyone is coming at this in bad faith. Everyone in this thread cares about the project and about getting this first election right, and that’s exactly why it’s worth keeping the discussion productive rather than going round the same points.
Whether endorsements like this should be allowed at all is an interesting question, and I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to say about it. If people want to dig into that properly, it might be worth opening a separate topic that isn’t tied to this particular post or these particular nominees or raised with the Steering Council (whatever people prefer), so it can be discussed on its own terms.
(I’m not closing or slowing the thread but please keep the rest of it positive )
FWIW, I read the endorsement as being well-intentioned, but I am still uncomfortable with it.
I find other terms used, e.g., “distasteful”, to be much too strong for what I feel: I’m not sure what’s right. But I do intuitively feel that the political norms of the process are changing, and that makes me wary.
Do we want more endorsements or more information? I don’t think you were trying to draw a false equivalence, but I want to draw attention to this because I agree – strongly – that we should think about ways of making candidates recognizable to the voting community.
It’s notable how information-poor the landscape is. The AMAs were a great idea, but they aren’t a panacea. I haven’t had (or made, depending on how self-critical I feel!) the time to engage and ask good questions, and as such I haven’t asked any.
Beyond that, for the candidates who are unknown to me all I have to go on are a few paragraphs of text.
Realistically, we should take it as a given that most of us will outsource some of this thinking to trusting our peers. That’s to be expected and normal. But I still would prefer more ways to learn about the candidates other than endorsements.
I need to point out that you’re referring to the nominations that a nominee receives. (If we’re talking about the same thing here, the “Nomination Statements” section.) Obviously, this can be read as an “endorsement” but there’s an important difference: nominations are cut off before the nominated candidates are announced. It’s these nominations that are listed on the official nominee page.
I feel like the endorsements people are talking about are the ones happening after the candidates have been announced. Whether you think its appropriate for a company to endorse candidates on their corporate blog is a separate thing; but these endorsements don’t currently show up on the nominee page or anywhere else on the python.org website.
That said, my two cents are: listing the employer of candidates casts a certain light (or shadow) on a candidate, but I’ve never really thought of it as “Company X is trying to put one of their own on the board”. By default, I thought of the candidate as running for the board in a personal “my views do not reflect my employer” capacity. However, an endorsement on a corporate blog throws that out the window. Astral (and, necessarily, OpenAI) is trying to influence the Packaging Council election and people are going to ask why.
Next election we’ll probably start seeing a lot of “My views are my own. I testify that I am not running as an employee of Company X and they will not have influence over my decisions” as part of nominee statements… some kind of wording that can act as a leverage to remove the board member if they exhibit behavior that is a conflict of interest.
I have said this already, but will repeat it again. The endorsement reflects the views of a group of people working on open-source Python tooling and has nothing to do with OpenAI, nor any for-profit body. We care about the outcome of the election because we care about the future of Python packaging. We work on Python packaging every day and have a lot of exposure to users and their pain points. We want the council to succeed in improving the experience of every Python user.
I was surprised by the endorsement and appreciate the kind words!
It would have been nice to have their names as authors on the post. I personally value the opinion of these individuals a lot more than either of the companies listed.
(coming back after reading the rest of this thread) I guess it would’ve been better than “nice to have”, given how this thread has evolved between when I wrote the above and now. I feel that a lot of the bad-faith reading come from a (fairly understandable) place of distrust of corporation-motivated actions in a community space.
puts on election helper hat
FWIW, this is something already written down as “could be done better” for the next election[1].
I think, at the very least, we’ll have clearer communication so that such confusion can’t happen again on this topic.
This is why having nominations on the PSF website directly feels appropriate to me. It gives us curation which is useful for moderation and giving candidates the ability to refuse a particular nomination listed next to themselves. It also shares the infrastructure with the PSF board elections – which is kinda nice, using a mature process in an inaugural election!
Thanks for mentioning the endorsement ↔ nomination mixup that’s been consistently happening in this thread. I had a difficult time phrasing how to describe this.
If nothing else, this has been informative of how the electorate engages with this election system.
puts on voter hat
Logistically, I kinda like not having to navigate to multiple pages to see details about the candidates. AMA threads are probably at the limit for me, with the redeeming quality being that they’re interactive – unlike the blog posts / elections’ nominations page – even though they do have moderation risks.
I share this sentiment. It does feel a bit uncomfortable to have active efforts to apply political influence from companies on an electorate[2] – even though I’m not really concerned about this particular instance on that front.
I hope this thread is possibly sufficient to dissuade future attempts?
I’m glad I’m not the only one.
The sort of post I was thinking of was along the lines of How I'm voting in the 2026 DSF Board Elections - Jacob Kaplan-Moss (listing how I’m evaluating candidates, rather than specific per-candidate voting suggestions) – though I ended up deciding not to, given that I was also authoring election communication posts.
puts on PEP 772 author hat
A strong +1 to this as well.
The PPC has protections in place against that kind of corporate capture[3].
Don’t give them ideas!!!
More seriously, IIRC this was discussed when PEP 772 was being drafted and we landed on “we can rely on more structural options if we see something like that happening”. The PPC has broad authority over a lot of things and has a lot of checks on that authority even outside the PPC election cycle.
I do want to reiterate that this is the inaugural election. We haven’t done this before, so it’s very much expected to have notes/suggestions for doing things differently for everyone involved.
If this blog post midway through the voting period is the most “election drama” we have, I’ll personally be very comfortable calling this a smooth election.
I’d added that a while ago, and this thread has basically guaranteed it’ll be discussed with the election administrators. ↩︎
At most 2 employees from one org, as well as council vote majorities needing more than one employer. And, those are separate from the structural “rogue PPC” protections in place between the PSF, PSC, as well as individual projects. ↩︎
Is there a meaningful distinction between nomination and endorsement?
Procedurally sure, nominations have to come first because that’s how someone becomes a nominee, but it’s hard for me to imagine a nomination that isn’t also inherently an endorsement (why would someone be willing to nominate someone that they wouldn’t also endorse? and if you read the nominee statements all of them are basically worded similarly to how you’d word an endorsement).
Likewise it’s hard for me to imagine someone being willing to endorse someone, but being unwilling to nominate them (and @zanie mentioned they originally wanted their statements to be nominations, but decided to do it too late for it to happen).
So I dunno, trying to differentiate between nomination statements and endorsements feels like trying to split hairs on a technical ground, and I suspect to the electorate there is no real distinction.
Or to put another way, I have a hard time trying to come up with a real meaningful difference between an endorsement that happened between July 28th and August 11th in one specific location, and one that happened after that date, other than the former gets much more prominent billing (and thus has more likelihood to influence the election).
I think the distinction is the other way round – there are absolutely going to be endorsements that people don’t want associated with themselves. This happened with the last PSF board elections, where multiple candidates explicitly stated that they did not want to be associated with a candidate who had endorsed them.
We can clearly detach nominations thanks to the platform, but endorsements are… uhm… messier on that front.
Yea, that’s what I’m realizing – I think it’s meaningfully different, but evidently very few other people here do!
Yeah, I think the underlying confusion here is that the official platform’s third-person nomination statements read (at least to me) as de facto endorsements, since they go beyond just “I nominate this person” and include value statements about the person’s perceived experience, character, etc.
The endorsement was entirely motivated and written by Astral team members in our capacity as open source maintainers in the Python ecosystem, not the interests or needs of OpenAI. There’s not really more to say. Yes, in a technical sense they own that blog, but it does not go through their communications team and continues to be a platform for the Astral team to share open source focused content in our own voices.
These days, it’s not clear to most people (including me) what “Astral” means. It used to be a company, but now it’s not. It’s a group of people who all work for OpenAI?
The title here says “from Astral / the uv team”. Does that slash mean two different groups of people combined? Or they are an alias for each other? Are there people on the uv team who are not part of Astral? Are some people part of Astral but not part of the uv team?
How would these endorsements be different if the title had been “endorsements from a number of OpenAI employees”?
My questions here are rhetorical. I’m not asking you to add more to what you’ve already said. But I think it’s understandable that people are confused.
Closing at authors’ request. Mods and authors feel that relevant feedback has been given and received, but that things are beginning to go in circles by now.
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