PSF grant shutdown - PUBLISH FINANCIAL STATEMENTS SINCE 2022 NOW

PSF
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@tim.one , nice one, very subtle - in the same post you say “let’s not question peoples’ motivations”, yet you manage place a narrative about my own motivations, by implying that I am somehow misguided, or worse, out for proxy revenge (“believes he has good reasons”, “bad experience with org like PSF”)

I certainly agree he would be well served to show patience here

I think the time for patience is over, it is time for action.

Your suggestion of “patience” means allowing that international communities get significantly hurt.

Patience in this case is not mercy, but a mixture of complacency and indirect cruelty towards the Python communities of the world.

We need to fix the lopsided budget with multimillions spent on pycon Pittsburgh NOW, and not 2030. Patience can be had when those responsible no longer are.

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This is bad faith and manipulative quoting, my quote without the aside parenthesis says:

That you expect the board of a non-profit to answer your questions (…) within a few hours on the same day regardless of anyone’s prior commitments is wildly unrealistic.

You selectively edited it to make it sound like I am implying expecting your questions to be answered is unrealistic, rather than what I actually said which is that the timeline you are expecting is unrealistic.

I hope you appreciate why you might receive abrasive answers if you are going to engage in such bad faith communication by mischaracterizing what others have said.

You have also missed the other main point of my post, which is your new specific question to an organization about a large budget matter involving multiple parties, rather than just clarifying already existing statements and agreed actions, will in the best case scenario likely take time to respond to.

The question you pose is not a question I would expect to be answered off the cuff by anyone, and could involve a non-trivial amount of work to answer, making sure it is compliant with contracts, is factually correct, as well as other constraints we are likely unaware of. As well as what exactly is the expected transparency over such things, I don’t even know.

In my opinion, your assertiveness that your questions must be answered immediately is very ill placed. The fact you have received any engagement at all has been at the prerogative of those who have chosen to engage with you, there is no requirement for them to do so, and you have no kind of privilege, legal or otherwise, to such communication.

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@fkiraly, seriously, don’t reply to people who can’t answer your questions. That includes me. It only stirs up the pot, and that’s unwelcome in this forum. I’ll let your odd characterization of my intent slide; I think it’s dead obvious to everyone else that it was my intent to help you keep your voice intact here. Same as in early March, your questions just get forgotten when you get shut down.

Stick to addressing factual matters related to your questions? You will, of course, suit yourself in this, and should.. But the outcome if you continue as you have been should be obvious. When I started this reply, Discourse already popped up a box warning that your post had been flagged for hiding (not by me), and did I really want to continue?

Yes, I do. I want you to have every chance you can get to be heard. Whether you help yourself in this respect is up to you. There’s no need to reply to me. In fact, it’s probably better for you if you don’t. Not because I’ll fight you (I won’t), but because that would just be more “stirring the pot” with meta-complaints. Stick to your original issues, please.

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That’s very generous of you. Apologies for the insinuation. But it’s useful for the board to know.

You are indeed allowed an opinion. I myself just don’t feel this is any of my business.

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This forum seems to be full of censoring mechanisms like this - moderators delete threads, posts get hidden or edited, and also “social censoring” where yes-men, distractors, and noisemakers pop up like on command.

Stick to your original issues, please.

Good suggestion, Tim, so I’ll just repeat them:

where did the 2.5 million dollar go for pycon US 2024?

How much did pycon US 2025 cost? Which people or companies received the money? Did this single biggest expenditure impact (or even cause?) the grant shutdown?

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Shall we refocus on the questions?

Where did the 2.5 million dollar go? How much did pycon US 2025 cost? Who received the money? Did the cost of pycon US 2025 cause or impact the grant freeze?

But take your time, @Deb.

As multiple people say, there might be a non-trivial amount of work to do, or compliance questions, data protection reasons, internal multi-party alignment, etc.

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Out of curiosity, do you actually have estimates of what you think an event the size of PyCon “should” cost?

Do you have relevant experience planning and organizing and running events of that size?

Genuinely curious, because my own experience – with having been involved in large events in both the Python/Django world and in my personal hobbies – is that it’s generally far more expensive than even the highest estimates outsiders bring up.

And since your original assertion that the PSF’s tax filings were not available turned out to be a misunderstanding on your part, perhaps we should explore whether any other misunderstandings are motivating your behavior.

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Hi Franz,

Thank you for raising this.
Since you’re running for the Board, I think it will be helpful for you and others new to the PSF to know how roles in the PSF work.

Here are the roles I currently hold:
• Board of Directors (Treasurer and member) – volunteer, no salary.
• Chair, Diversity & Inclusion Workgroup – volunteer, no salary.
• Organizer, PyLadiesCon – volunteer. The conference received a $2,305 PSF grant in 2025, but that funding went to the event, not individuals.
• Contributor to PSF or Python - related projects (e.g. Hidden Figures of Python podcast, personal blog posts, PyLadies Slack moderation, membership stickers/design support) – all volunteer.
• Design work for PyCon US – contracted professional work, on a project basis, alongside other designers/illustrators. This is paid as a vendor contract, separate from my volunteer roles.

Like many others, I contribute to the Python community in both volunteer and professional capacities.

The PSF as a whole has only 12 paid staff. Everyone else — Board, Steering Council, and workgroups are volunteers. Staff salaries are benchmarked to nonprofit norms in the US.

For the grants program specifically, you can see where funding has gone globally in our transparency report: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/04/psf-grants-program-2024-transparency.html?m=1.
In fact, African events were among the top recipients in 2023, 2024 and I believe in 2025 as well.

I hope this provides context for your question. Wishing you the best with your election run.

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Excuse me, what? I’m not PSF staff but I can perform arithmetic.

Including tutorials and sprints Pycon US is 9 days long. Let’s be charitable and say it’s equivalent to five days of full attendance. That’s less than 200 USD per person per day which is neither a single night at a hotel nor any “5-star menu” meal, much less both. It’s an amount not at all out of line for per-person, per-day conference costs in North America. You make it pretty clear you looked up the venue rate sheet so you must have seen all the additional costs clearly listed there beyond catering [1]: Internet/Telephone, Utilities, Rigging, Security, All Labor, Ticketing, Booth/Aisle Cleaning. That’s not even getting to external costs such as promotion, speaker retention, staff travel and lodging, insurance, and travel scholarships, among others. It’s suspect that you hide mention of all these many obvious things and instead suggest everyone could be getting “centuries old wine” for the price.

You’ve also make it clear that you’ve read the PSF impact reports. Which means you have seen that program services turns a profit, to the tune of 200k in 2023 and 400k in 2022. Instead of “likely cannibalizing the grant budget”, it seems that PSF events in aggregate help to fund the grant budget.

All of your arguments are disingenuous from the start.

Maybe there are efficiencies to explore to make things even more profitable. There were reasonable ways to ask reasonable questions about these topics being polite, patient, and assuming good faith on the part of everyone involved, many of whom are volunteers. Instead, you poisoned the well with atrocious behaviour: rudeness, incessant demands for others’ time and effort at your beck and call, sarcasm, innuendo, and bad-faith arguments. Ironically, all of this on the heels of a documentary everyone was happy for extolling the friendly and genial nature of the Python community.

  1. And BTW it’s possible to look up catering rates for DLCC too, and there you’d see in small print “Please note that all food, beverage, and related items are subject to an 23% administrative charge plus 7% sales tax” so, you know, don’t forget add another 30 percent on top of the base numbers there. ↩︎

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@bryevdv, you imply:

  • pycon US has turned a profit
  • my argumentation is disingenious

I would suggest, do not handwave but do the legwork.

It looks like PSF is bleeding money, and pycon US is a loss generating exercise:

Besides that, what do you say about the 50% yearly salary increases for paid PSF staff?

PSF management could also help clearing up this discussion by providing the balance sheet for pycon US 2025 and 2024. Is it really “turning a profit”?

Why did costs increase from 1.8 million to 2.5 million between 2023 and 2024?

How exactly does the revenue sheet look like? The 2023 tax sheet lists only 1.1 million in revenue directly attributable to the “programme service expenses” that you are referring to.

good faith on the part of everyone involved, many of whom are volunteers

But not all of them, some people are more equal. @Deb received 158,905 USD of benefits in 2023, up from 104,077 in 2022, that is a pay raise of more than 50%.

All of your arguments are disingenuous from the start.

Yep, just trash everything with this blanket argument. There is no moral requirement anymore to engage with anything I say.

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@georgically , what you confirmed is textbook definition of conflict of interest!

you participated in a significant decision on behalf of PSF, which incurred a significant expenditure, and from which you also personally profited!

  • you were a decision making party about orgnaizing pycon US, including the 400.000 USD consultancy contract for Altitude/C related to pycon US (event design and planning)
  • you yourself receive money from events design related to pycon US

That is a textbook example of a conflict of interest.

You are the treasurere of PSF, so you should know about conflicts of interest, and why this is not ok!

Given that pycon US cost 1.8 million in 2023, 2.5 million in 2024, and an undisclosed (likely higher) amount in 2025, I think this is pretty serious.

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Looks like my comment with concrete fiscal projections and numbers got hidden, interesting.

Here is the link again:

It was claimed above in this thread, for instance, that pycons US are turning a profit - already for 2023 that is definitely a false statement (according to the 990 tax form draft), and for 2024 and the very recent 2025 iteration we would need PSF to share a more complete sheet of data.

(@bryevdv claimed that “program service” is turning a profit, not true: according to the draft 990 form - program service revenue was 1,128,603 in 2023, part VIII 2g, and program service expenses were 3,601,479, part IX B, that would be a loss from program service of 2,472,876 USD, i.e., approx 2.5 million dollar)

Costs for pycon US and salaries (e.g., Deb Nicholson´s at 158.906 USD in 2023) were also on a trajectory of increase.

These should be indisputable facts, not sure why this got flagged.

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It’s not “interesting” from a technical, moderation perspective. There were multiple flags raised about it due to its tone and the moderators – which includes me – agreed with those flags. Feel free to tweak the post so that it follows our conduct guidelines and you can repost it without issue.

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  • The Altitude/C engagement is not “event design and planning.” They are a logistics and production vendor providing audio/visual, staging, and on-site support for PyCon US. I have no involvement with that contract.

  • My role with PyCon US has been limited to visual design deliverables (branding, website graphics, print materials) under a separate vendor contract. Vendor selection and contracting are handled by PSF staff and the PyConUS Committee.

As a Board member and Treasurer, I follow the PSF’s Conflict of Interest (COI) policy. Every Director signs a legal COI disclosure at the start of their term and updates if any financial relationship exists.
In practice, that means disclosing potential conflicts and recusing from related discussions or decisions. I have done so with respect to the design work.

There has been no instance where I influenced or voted on awarding my own contract. Processes are documented in Board minutes and filings, which are public.

PyCon US is a large professional event that engages multiple external vendors including design, AV, logistics, etc.
Engaging vendors is standard nonprofit practice, managed through disclosure and recusal.
Once again, let’s stick to the facts.

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Thanks so much to all the community members who have jumped in providing history, context, and information about the PSF and PyCon US. Your time in responding is appreciated. I won’t make this thread even longer by repeating everything folks have shared, but I can add the following:

  • PyCon US 2025 Expenses: $2.34M

  • PyCon US 2025 Revenue: $2.14M

  • Resulting in a loss of approximately $200K

We’re continuing to make changes that cut costs and increase revenue. It takes about three years to change anything major about the event. See our previous announcements here and here. You can check out this PyCon US blog post about the changes we made for 2025.

In Long Beach (our venue for 2026/2027), we’re cutting down the number of onsite sprint days, trimming food and beverage costs, keeping onsite staffing costs as low as we can, and actively working to increase domestic attendance. We’re also exploring more ways to engage with companies and organizations that use Python and might want to be part of PyCon US or otherwise support the Python community.

We will continue to run PyCon US as the best possible event for the Python community members who live in the US. We will also continue to celebrate, promote and collaborate with other PyCons around the world. We look forward to retooling and unpausing the Grants Program and financially supporting worldwide Python events again soon. If you want to help promote PyCon US, or help your regional Python event with time or money, or help the PSF fundraise and connect with sponsors, please get in touch so we can get you plugged in: deb@python.org

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Fiscal projection: PSF will default by 2027 - 50% salary increases, salaries >170.000, multimillion pycon US losses, costly consultancy contracts
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I shared some information and numbers in the other thread in case people are just following one of these.

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My understanding is the cost of running PyCon US is effectively paid for from the revenue of running PyCon US, and the numbers from @Deb seem to support this.

In theory, the PSF could choose to allocate that 2.3M (or whatever number) to funding additional conferences elsewhere. I suspect the outcome of that would be that the next year, there is significantly less than 2.3M available, as it’s unlikely that the revenue from running all of those conferences would make up for it [1].

I believe historically the profit from PyCon US has also been part of what has allowed the PSF to run programs to give out grants (although not completely, as there are direct donations as well as I understand it).

In effect, I believe the idea of taking that 2.3M and spreading it out would likely be a one time event, and after that the PSF would no longer have the funds to run any major events and would be severely limited in it’s ability to provide any funding for any event.

I’m not an expert though :slight_smile: That’s just always been my understanding of the situation at hand.

  1. Part of what allows PyCon US to have such large revenues is that it has large expenditures that allows it to attract a large number of people and sponsors, and I suspect there’s costs that would go up from spreading the conferences out. ↩︎

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@Deb, I would like to see a drill down on the expenditure/revenue numbers.

As @dstufft says, the key counterfactual is, how much income (currently attributed to pycon US) would there be if the money were spent elsewhere?

Question: are you attributing any donations to the pycon US revenue which would flow anyway, pycon US or not? If so, then “accounting magic” would mask the real losses that pycon US is incurring. (in an extreme case, 1 million dollar)

Looking at the 2023 tax form, about 1 million of the 2 million revenue attributed to pycon US seem to be grants and donations.

Many of these are regular donors which probably have earmarked the donations in their yearly budgets. So, would this not flow reliably, even if pycon US would not happen?

More generally, are the donations correctly attributed to pycon US revenue?

If you look at the 2023 tax form, you have:

  • 1,13 million revenue from “program services”, that would be things like ticket sales (part I, 9)
  • 2,14 million expenses for pycon US (part III, 4a)
  • 2,08 million revenie for pycon US claimed (part III, 4a)

Overall, this means that ca 0,9 million are (most likely) donations - and attributed to pycon US in the 2023 calculation, and most likely also in Deb’s 2025 calculation.

If they are not correctly attributed, even partly, the balance for pycon US be much worse than claimed by Deb.

Counterfactual: not running pycon US

In effect, I believe the idea of taking that 2.3M and spreading it out would likely be a one time event,

The correct counterfactual to consider is not “spending the entire expenditure”, but "spending the loss”.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, pycon US is making losses - so, not running it would leave 200.000 dollar more in the purse (2025 counterfactual). Which could be spent on, e.g., not having a total grant freeze. Or one more staff member at 200.000 yearly salary.

And the more of the revenue in grants/donations is not caused by pycon US, the more surplus there would be. In the most extreme case, this could be all 1m of the donations/grants attributed to pycon US revenue, so a total of 1.200.000 million USD surplus to spend.

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I think it’s impossible to determine whether a donation would occur with or without PyCon US, but it appears the bulk of these donations come from US companies [1], I suspect they would be significantly less likely to donate directly to a conference elsewhere [2].

As mentioned above, I suspect many of these donations are made to get the benefits at PyCon US that come with donating (getting “free” tickets, booth space, advertising etc).

This reads to me like this idea would rely on those companies just never reviewing their own expenses to determine if those expenses still make sense. Hoping that companies forget they are paying the PSF does not seem like a sound fundraising strategy to me.

My understanding is that historically PyCon US has not operated at a loss, but at small or modest profit. It seems unreasonable to me to assume that a relatively small loss for a year or two will continue into the future [3], particularly given @Deb and others have already noted steps that are being made to rectify the situation.

  1. Likely, at least in part, due to the benefits they get at PyCon US for doing so. ↩︎

  2. Just like I assume an Indian company is less likely to donate to a conference in the US. ↩︎

  3. Particularly given the fact the loss years came shortly after a global pandemic and PyCon US had to move to online only the previous years. ↩︎

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Once again, let’s stick to the facts.

Ok, let’s do some fact checking together!

The Altitude/C engagement is not “event design and planning.”

This seems to contradict what Altitude/c have on their webpage.

The page https://www.altitudec.com/en/lp/pycon-us-2025 - which now interestingly 404s, but which has snapshots on internet archives - lists these areas of work:

  • strategic event planning
  • audiovisual & technical production
  • communication & ** branding **
  • ** creative direction & concept design **
  • content & speaker management
  • onsite coordination & logistics

Question: are you saying that Altitude/C did not have anything to do with branding and design at pycon US? That the contractual remits of your contract, and that of Altitude/C were disjoint and non-overlapping?

Or, were the contracts overlapping in the sense of deliverable areas?

For example (but not necessarily exactly like) in a scenario like this: in many of their contracts, Altitude/C cover conference organisation including design and branding, taking the lead on these topics. The design work you did hence became functionally part of the higher-level conference package that Altitude/C were delivering? So even though you were not a subcontractor formally, you still did part of the work in their larger remit?

Which of the two is the case, according to you, @georgically ?