PSF board nomination: AMA with Ben Manning

PSF PSF Board Elections
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Hello everyone,

I’m Benjamin Manning, and I’m honored to have been nominated as a candidate for the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors. With several candidates opening AMA threads, I thought this would be a great opportunity to introduce myself, share a little about what I hope to contribute, and, more importantly, hear from the Python community.

My relationship with Python has always been closely connected to education, technology, and creating opportunities for people to build things they might not otherwise have been able to build. Over the years, I’ve worked across industry and academia in areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, engineering, and computing education. Throughout that work, Python has consistently been more than a programming language. It has been an entry point into computing for students, researchers, engineers, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, and entire communities.

If elected to the Board, one area I would particularly like to explore is how the PSF can continue expanding those pathways into the Python community.

That includes education and educational resources, but I think the opportunity is broader than simply teaching more people how to write Python. I’m interested in how we help people move from learning Python to participating in the Python community by contributing to projects, attending or organizing events, mentoring others, becoming PSF members, and eventually taking leadership roles themselves.

I also care deeply about accessibility. I believe accessibility is most effective when it is treated as part of good design rather than something added after the fact. As the Python community continues to grow globally, I would like to see us continue thinking about how our documentation, educational resources, community infrastructure, events, and participation models can remove unnecessary barriers to involvement.

Another area I’m particularly interested in is the rapidly changing relationship between Python and artificial intelligence. Python sits at the center of much of the modern AI ecosystem. That creates tremendous opportunities for the language and its community, but it also raises important questions about education, open source sustainability, responsible development, security, and what AI-assisted software development means for the next generation of Python developers.

I certainly don’t expect to arrive on the Board with all the answers. One of the reasons I wanted to open this AMA is because I think serving on the PSF Board requires listening just as much as advocating.

So please ask me anything about my candidacy, education, accessibility, AI, open source, community growth, the PSF, where I think Python is headed, what I would prioritize as a Board member, or anything else you think a candidate for the Board should be willing to answer.

I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Ben Manning

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With the formation of the Packaging Python Council (PPC) today to vote in this election you need to be a PSF voting member. This requires one of the 3 paths documented here Become a Member of the PSF | Python Software Foundation. Going ahead how do you think the PSF board and the PPC should work together? Do you think the 3 required paths sufficient to make sure no one feels excluded from the packaging story? If not, how would you improve on it? Thanks and best of luck Ben!

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Bernát, thank you! How we build governance structures that provide clear accountability without unintentionally making participation harder is something I care quite a bit about.

I see the PSF Board and the PPC as having complementary, but importantly distinct, responsibilities. My background is in engineering, and I tend to think about organizations somewhat like systems: components work best when responsibilities and interfaces are clear. The PPC should have meaningful autonomy over the technical direction, standards, and interoperability of Python packaging. I don’t think the Board should become another technical approval layer above it.

Where I do see an important role for the Board is in helping create the conditions in which the PPC can succeed. Conditions such as organizational support, resources, governance infrastructure, and connection to the broader Python community. There should also be a healthy communication channel between the two, particularly when packaging decisions intersect with things like infrastructure, security, funding, education, or the broader Python user experience.

On the membership question, I’m probably less interested in asking whether the three existing paths are theoretically sufficient and more interested in asking whether they are working in practice.

A lot of my career has been spent in education and building technical communities, and one thing I’ve learned is that participation doesn’t always look the way we expect it to. Someone can be enormously valuable to a community without fitting neatly into the categories we originally designed to recognize contribution.

I’ve seen that firsthand in communities I’ve helped build. Some people lead projects, while some mentor others. Some organize and some answer questions. Some participate quietly for months before eventually becoming significant contributors. If our definition of participation only recognizes a subset of those activities, we can unintentionally leave good people outside the process.

So I think the three current paths are a reasonable starting point, but I wouldn’t treat them as permanently sufficient. I’d want us to look at the evidence: Who participates in PPC elections? Who wants to participate but can’t? Are particular groups of packaging contributors consistently falling outside the voting membership structure? If so, why?

That also leads to a distinction I think is important: having a vote and having a voice aren’t necessarily the same thing.

There can be reasonable qualifications for voting while still making it very easy for someone to contribute ideas, challenge assumptions, participate in discussions, comment on proposals, and raise concerns. I would want the PPC to have as wide a front door as reasonably possible, even if formal voting has additional requirements.

If we eventually discover that the existing membership paths are systematically keeping meaningful packaging contributors outside that door, then I think good governance requires us to be willing to change them.

I don’t think governance structures should be designed once and defended forever. We should design them, observe how people actually interact with them, measure where friction or exclusion occurs, and improve them accordingly.

Thanks for asking this, Bernát. With the PPC just getting started, I think this is exactly the kind of question we should be asking now rather than several years from now.

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For anyone that might be interested in learning more about me; here is my nomination statement.

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Hello Ben,

Aside from your professional engineering and management experience, have you had organizational experiences with other technical groups such as the PSF, Python working groups, DSF, PyLadies, or any of the PyCon conferences?

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Hi Al,

Thanks for the question. The short answer is that I haven’t yet held a formal organizational role within the PSF, a Python working group, PyLadies, the DSF, or PyCon, and I think it’s important to be transparent about that.

Most of my community-building and organizational experience has come through academia, industry, education, and technical organizations rather than through the formal governance structures of the Python ecosystem.

That said, Python has been a significant part of my professional and academic life for many years. I’ve taught Python and data science, used it extensively in AI/ML and engineering work, developed technical curriculum, participated in technical and research communities, and worked with students and professionals ranging from people writing their first Python programs to experienced engineers.

One experience that has particularly shaped how I think about technical communities was founding the AI Club within Georgia Tech’s OMSCS community. What began as an effort to create a place for people interested in AI to connect quickly grew into a community of hundreds of students. That experience reinforced something I’ve seen repeatedly throughout my career: healthy technical communities aren’t built solely around the people who already have titles or established reputations. They’re built by creating opportunities for people to contribute, learn from one another, take ownership, and eventually become leaders themselves.

Another significant part of my work has been building relationships between academia and industry. I’ve worked on efforts to make those relationships more intentional and sustainable, particularly around course and program development, workforce preparation, and capstone projects. I think there is tremendous value when industry doesn’t simply arrive at the end of an educational program looking for graduates, but instead develops genuine partnerships with academic institutions; bringing real problems into classrooms, supporting experiential learning, informing curriculum without controlling it, and creating pathways from education into meaningful technical careers.

I’ve also become increasingly interested in how we create those pathways for communities that have historically had much narrower access to technical careers. One area particularly important to me is the severely injured spinal cord injury community.

For someone living with a significant physical disability, software and technology can offer something relatively unusual: a career in which intellectual capability can matter far more than physical capability, but that opportunity doesn’t automatically translate into a career. There is still a substantial gap between “this work can theoretically be done by anyone” and actually providing someone with the education, mentorship, professional networks, accommodations, experience, and first opportunity necessary to enter the field.

I’d like to see stronger relationships between technical communities, universities, rehabilitation organizations, and employers that create genuine pathways into software, data, AI, cybersecurity, and other technology careers. That’s an area where I think organizations like the PSF can have an enormous impact, not by trying to become a workforce-development organization, but by helping connect communities that already have the pieces needed to create those opportunities.

So I would come to the Board with a somewhat different organizational background. I wouldn’t pretend to have years of experience inside PSF governance that I don’t have. Instead, I’d bring experience building technical communities, developing academic-industry partnerships, creating educational programs, and thinking about how we build pathways that allow more people to participate in technical careers.

I think some combination of institutional knowledge and outside perspective is healthy for a board. The PSF absolutely needs people who deeply understand its history, processes, conferences, working groups, and community, but I also think there is value in having people willing to ask, “Who aren’t we reaching?”, “What partnerships haven’t we built yet?”, and “Where can Python create opportunities that don’t exist today?”

If elected, one of my priorities would be to spend a lot of my early time listening and learning from the working groups, PyCon organizers, maintainers, regional communities, and volunteers who already make the Python community function, while also looking for opportunities to connect that community with educational institutions, industry partners, and communities that could benefit tremendously from a pathway into Python.

Thanks again for asking, Al.

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