Hi folks! I, along with PSF Board members Denny Perez and Sheena O’Connell, organized an Open Space at PyCon US 2026 to talk about the future of the Python Developers Survey.
Who was in the room: A sizable group showed up (20-25 people or so) who were interested and engaged in the discussion. The folks in the room were a mix of PSF Board/Staff, folks from JetBrains, community managers, developers, and people from the broader ecosystem.
The core issues identified: The survey has a structural identity problem. We currently do not have shared answers to the questions “who is this for?” and “what are the objectives?” These unresolved questions, along with lack of capacity on both the PSF & JetBrains sides, are the root of most of the frustrations with the survey.
Frustrations discussed during the session:
- Due to the required processing time, results go stale fast; by publication they’re already outdated
- Too many forced-choice questions with no good answer for some respondents
- AI questions feel overweighted and steered
- The community doesn’t see itself in the questions
- Categorical groupings are technically imprecise; tools are missing or misplaced
- Currently, JetBrains stewards the design of the survey and the PSF promotes; that structure doesn’t always feel clear, and to some respondents and community members, feels uncomfortable
- As it stands, the survey is too long and broad to serve any single purpose well
- Prior feedback received on Discuss and through social media has felt ignored; the reality is that the PSF & JetBrains are under resourced for this project
What the room was most excited about:
- Defining objectives for the survey, and working to answer the “who is this for?” question
- A Working Group to drive question design with broader community input
- Filtering/branching so respondents only answer what’s relevant to them
- Aligning the survey more explicitly with PSF strategy
- Pursuing a better understanding of how the results data is used and by whom
The biggest issue to overcome: Folks from JetBrains plainly stated that they are understaffed for this project as a whole and don’t want to own the questions–they really want the PSF and community to design the survey. The PSF doesn’t currently have spare capacity (nor an abundance of survey writing expertise) for survey design without reprioritization of staff time.
Next steps & timeline: I will bring the feedback and ideas from the open space session to the PSF board for review.
I am sharing this summary here to:
- Make sure we are keeping the community up to date on the discussion
- Gauge interest in future participation in a Survey WG
- Gauge interest in contributing thoughts and ideas for a survey rewrite without formally joining a WG
Your comments and feedback are welcome–if you’re excited about working on the survey design, please drop a comment saying so 