Feel free to move this comment if it’s considered off-topic, but: is that discord channel open to the public or just core devs? The SC used to post meeting summaries on its repo and Discourse but hasn’t in a long while.
Moved to a new topic as requested (also since the SC election posts are per-message moderated and that can make replying more annoying).
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It’s private: it’s only open to core devs, bug triagers, a few other people.
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Sidenote: it always saddens me when open source projects choose closed source, proprietary solutions like Discord when very competent open source alternatives exist such as Zulip exist. Discord doesn’t even seem to have the same social or technical advantages that, say, GitHub has or used to have.
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Except we tried Zulip, and it languished for years. We switched to Discord, and it thrives. There definitely are social advantages.
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I think that’s very much contextual. Zulip was tried at a time when there was much less demand or perceived need for real-time communication among Python core devs (the #python-dev channel on IRC was similarly relatively idle).
For reference, here is the 2021 poll/vote for a core dev chat choice. For some reason the stated result (“82% of us have voted for a Discord Server”) doesn’t match the poll results in the thread (where Discord arrives third after IRC and Slack, while Zulip wasn’t explicitly considered), but I might be misreading that part.
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Until 2024, this information was public. Is there a particular reason why this has been changed?
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It would definitely be in everyone’s best interest to post SC summaries as publicly and timely as possible. It takes a lot of time to distill our contemporaneous meeting notes into digestible summaries suitable for posting. We tried utilizing a communications liaison for a while but that didn’t work out for too long. I’d be in favor of posting those to DPO, say in a dedicated category.
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Or a dedicated tag 
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Perhaps, but to move off of Discord will require someone to drive that change, and so until someone steps forward to put the work in then I don’t see it changing (and to say more is going to take this as off-topic and require a new topic).
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Definitely, and I’m not willing to do that work given how inactive I am currently. But I think approaching past decisions with a critical mind is important even though we may not want to do anything about them in the short term.
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Agreed, and this is what I was saying in my nomination post, e.g. the PEP process.
I think we’ve generally made the best decisions at the time and with the knowledge we had available. As always, things and times change.
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To what extent can the conversations themselves be open for core devs to join? Guido had raised this idea at the language summit earlier this year, and I think it has a lot of merit. There are surely some topics that need a private or small-group discussion, but many topics would benefit from being public. Core devs could hear directly with the SC is thinking without waiting for a summary to be distilled and shared.
I suspect a significant challenge for SC members would be thinking about how they provide feedback. It would be easier for a stray comment to be taken as strong direction. That is, SC members intends to say “I wonder if X would be possible.” (they are genuinely curious about it) and it gets interpreted as “X is a requirement.” Despite this risk, I think it’s worth trying.
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I think this is something the incoming SC should strongly consider. I would be hesitant to open the entire meeting because there are sensitive topics that I think the SC needs to have freedom to discuss in private, but I’m sure there’s a balance to be struck here. I also think that the SC should promote office hours more, and encourage folks to come to the SC early in “the process”, whether that be in PEP discussions, conflicts, or disagreements between devs, uncertainty in a technical directions, etc.
TL;DR: the SC should be more open and welcoming, while balancing its needs to have some private discussions.
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I’m a bit confused: so the updates are not posted publicly because of a lack of time writing them up, or they are written up but posted only on a private Discord?
If it’s the latter, it seems like a major change, and I couldn’t find either an announcement nor a justification for such a move. Could anyone explain the reasoning?
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It’s mostly time and expediency. For some historical perspective:
- When the SC was original formed, the PSF ED at the time graciously joined the meetings, took notes, created and posted summaries. This can be a time consuming process because it requires a fair bit of editorial oversight, and review and approval from SC members. Let me stress that this is not in the ED job description, so it was completely volunteered time.
- When the new PSF ED took over, they understandably had way more real job duties, so didn’t have the bandwidth to volunteer this time. Which is of course, totally reasonable!
- A while back the SC hired a communications liaison through the PSF, to help with this task, serving in a greater communication capacity than just note taker and summarizer, although this was of immediate benefit to the SC. For various reasons, the liaison could not continue and the role remained unfilled.
- Since then, we sort of communally take contemporaneous notes while the discussion is ongoing. This is not ideal because it’s very difficult to both take notes and participate meaningfully in the meetings.
- After the meeting we try to make sense of our notes and generally assign the distillation of a summary into postable form to one member. That member writes up a summary (we’ve used Notion for all of this), we all review and approve asynchronously, and then it gets posted to Discord.
As you can hopefully see, it takes time and effort to accurately reflect the summary of a meeting, all while participating in the meetings, reading PEPs, asynchronously writing up pronouncements, reviewing, and gaining consensus on the wording, etc. Posting to Discord is the last step in the process and it’s just they way it’s been done so far.
The current SC does recognize that it’s not ideal. Doing better is a priority of all of the returning nominees, and I’m sure that whoever ends up on the 2026 council will make improved communications one of the first things to figure out. I’m not sure we can solve the note taking and summary creation bits of that immediately though.
I’ve been collecting other ideas for what we can improve, and whether or not I’m on the 2026 council, I plan on putting a consideration of these ideas on the agenda. So keep 'em coming!
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I do understand how difficult it is to produce a document accurately reflecting the summary of a meeting. It is very far from an easy task and takes a considerable effort from multiple people, which I deeply appreciate. But from your reply I can only surmise that despite the difficulty, delays and a lack of a designated person for the task, (some of) the summaries since October 2024 have been produced, but kept accessible only to the members of a core-dev-only Discord. Is this correct?
So I might be dense but I still don’t understand from your reply why this decision of making them private has been made and why was it not publicly announced. If the summaries do exist, why are they now considered to be no longer fit for public consumption?
I’m also confused by the tiptoeing around the answer. Maybe there is now some sensitive data in the summaries, or the quality of the material produced on Notion through the process you’ve described has not been formal enough to be read by the public? That would be understandable. I struggle to think of other reasons. Surely it can’t be just time and expediency as copy-pasting a summary from Discord to DPO would only take one minute once a few months.
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