Welcome to the new Maintainer Summit website

Welcome to the new home of the PyCon US Maintainer Summit.

Everything about the summit now lives together in one place: details on the event, an archive of past years, guides for attendees and speakers, and this news section.

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

Where we started

The Maintainer Summit began as a hatchery program for 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 find out what’s happening. We’re grateful that page existed. It’s how a lot of people found us.

But over the years, as our community grew and our organizing team grew and changed hands, the same thing kept coming up: a conference website is built to do one job really well, and it’s not quite the job the summit needs the rest of the year.

A conference site is built around one event a year

PyCon US runs once a year, and its website is organized around that. This year’s venue, this year’s schedule, this year’s registration. That’s exactly what a conference site should be. The side effect is that the summit was tied to the conference’s timeline: when we wanted to publish something, we were often waiting on the broader schedule to come together first.

It’s also, understandably, focused on attendee and event information. A lot of what the summit is about doesn’t fit there. Guides for attendees, resources for speakers, and especially our organizing docs, the how-we-actually-run-this material, were never going to belong on a single event page. Those documents did exist, but they lived as private notes scattered across personal drives, chat threads, and emails.

There was nowhere to publish news or blogs

There was also simply no place to publish ongoing news or blog posts. No feed, no spot for announcements between events, nowhere for a recap or a post like this one to live. If we wanted to say something in the months between summits, there was no channel for it.

And it goes quiet after the event

The part that finally tipped it: once a year wraps, the conference page for that year becomes essentially static and read-only. That’s reasonable for an archived event, but it meant the summit had no living, continuous record. Every year started a little from scratch, and the threads between years were hard to follow.

What a home of our own gives us

Running our own site fixes all of that in one move. It’s continuous, so docs and recaps live on between summits instead of resetting each year. It’s ours to update, so we can publish on our own schedule rather than waiting on the conference calendar. It has room for everything: attendee docs, speaker docs, organizing docs, an archive, and a blog. And it’s openly maintained, so people can read how we work, learn from it, and contribute improvements.

That last point matters most. The Maintainer Summit is a gathering of open source people. It feels right to run it the open source way: in the open, documented, and contributable.

None of this is a knock on PyCon US. We’re still part of it, and the event page still does its job as the place for a particular year’s logistics. We just needed something that keeps living the other fifty-one weeks of the year. This is that.

What to expect here

This is where we’ll keep the summit’s living documentation and share what’s happening with the community around it:

• Announcements: calls for proposals, registration, schedules, and other summit news as the year unfolds.
• Recaps: write-ups and highlights from each summit, with links to slides and recordings as speakers share them.
• Blog posts: reflections, lessons, and ideas from maintainers, in between summits.
• Open docs: attendee guides, speaker resources, and even our organizing docs, maintained in the open so others can learn from them and contribute.

Contribute

This whole 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 browse it, fork it, open an issue, or send a pull request. Contributions of every size are welcome.