Welcome to the Maintainer Summit website

Welcome to the PyCon US Maintainer Summit!

Everything about the Summit now has a home here: what to look forward to at next year’s event, an archive of past Summits, guides for attendees and speakers, and this news section.

Here’s why we built it, and what you can expect to find.

Where we started

The Maintainer Summit began as the Hatchery Program at PyCon US 2019. Since then, our “site” has been a single page under the PyCon US website.

That made sense. The summit happens at PyCon US, and the conference site is where people already go to register and learn what’s happening during the week. We are grateful that page exists. It’s how a lot of people first finds us.

As our community grew and the organizing team evolved, we kept coming back to the same conversation: a page on the us.pycon.org does one job really well, but the Summit needs a space that could support our work on the event throughout the year.

A lot of what the Summit is about doesn’t fit on that single page. Guides for attendees, resources for speakers, and especially our organizing docs were never going to belong there. Those documents did exist, but they lived as private notes on personal Google Drives, in chat threads, and emails. And because of that every year started a little from scratch.

And once a year wraps, the conference page for that year becomes essentially read-only. That’s reasonable for an archived event, but it meant the Summit had no place to publish recaps, or share related news between events.

What a home of our own gives us

Having our own website addresses all of these challenges in one move. There is room for everything. It is maintained by us, in the open, so others can see how we work, learn from it, and contribute.

That last part matters most. The Maintainer Summit is a gathering of people passionate about open source. It feels right that the Summit itself works the open source way too.

None of this changes our relationship with PyCon US. We’re still very much part of it, and the Maintainer Summit page remains the place to find info about each year’s logistics. We simply needed a space that could keep the Summit going for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. This is that space.

What to expect here

• Announcements: calls for proposals, other info related to an upcoming Summit.
• Event content and resources: highlights from each Summit, with links to speakers’ slides and related resources, blog posts with reflections and ideas from maintainers and for maintainers.
• Organizer documentation: attendee guides, speaker resources, and even our organizing docs.

Contribute

The site is open source, and we’d love your help keeping it useful. If you spot a typo, want to improve a guide, or have an idea for the Summit, take a look at our GitHub repository. Feel free to open an issue or send a pull request. Contributions of every size are welcome.