Shauna Gordon-McKeon - Open Source Governance, Women's Soccer, and Django
Today, we have Shauna Gordon-McKeon Python People. Before we talked, you mentioned to me that you use Python for web development and data pipelines mainly, and we wanna talk about a bunch of other stuff, like governance and things. Have we met before, or have I just followed you online for a long time? Do you know?
Shauna:I mean, I go to most PyCons, so maybe we've met at a PyCon or 2.
Brian:Oh, probably. Yeah.
Shauna:But I do often find that, you know, following someone online, you know, you get to know them pretty well, and then you're like, but when when did this start? Like Yes. Because there's a great mass of people, and then you slowly start interacting with someone more and more. Yeah. So
Brian:It's kind of an it's kind of a neat thing and a surreal thing about, about the online, offline presence thing. There's there's several people that I when I meet for the first time, it isn't like, oh, hey. It's you. It's it's just like, oh, hey. Like like, we were friends, and we just, you know, saw each other yesterday or something.
Brian:So that's pretty neat. So you, you do have you gone to any conferences this year?
Shauna:Well, I went to PyCon this year.
Shauna:I also went to Fosse.
Brian:What's what's FOSSY? I guess it's free open source software something. But
Shauna:Yeah. I don't actually know if it's an acronym for anything. I don't know what the why would be if it was an acronym, but it's put on by the Software Freedom Conservancy, and it's meant to be a sort of smaller community driven conference for the free and open source software community. Less like big businesses, like running a big show more, you know, die hards is a weird term. I don't know that I would consider myself a die hard, but like, you know, that core community that like just really ideologically cares a lot about Okay.
Shauna:Free software and its potential role in society. And, it's not that it's, like, mutually exclusive with some of the, other conferences that are sort of, like, bigger and more business driven. But I think, you know, every conference has a vibe. And I think the goal of Fosse is to have a vibe that's more less commercial and more, community oriented.
Brian:I love that every conference does have a vibe. I never really thought about that before, but that's one of the reasons why I'll, like, gravitate towards 1 or 2 or something. Like, I mean, PyCon is awesome mostly just because of the the amazing people that I can run into there. But, like, I've barely been falling in love with, Pike Cascades. It's a local one, but I love the singletrackness of, of a I like I love singletrack conferences because you just see everybody, and you and over a couple days, you see everybody a couple times and stuff.
Brian:It's pretty neat.
Shauna:Yeah.
Brian:But I but somebody that's going to conferences at least a couple times a year, and you're calling yourself not a die hard, I kinda,
Shauna:I guess that's true. I guess that's true.
Brian:So, so you web development and data pipelines, let's explore that a little bit before we get into other stuff. So what what sort of web development do you do? Is this for work or for pleasure
Shauna:sort of stuff? Both. Well, so a little bit of context about me is that I'm a freelancer. I've been self employed, for about 13 years. I did take a break and do a a work at full time as a developer advocate at, edX for about a year, somewhere in there.
Shauna:But for the most part, I've been self employed, which means I work with a lot of clients, which means I do a lot of different things. It also means that I occasionally have nice long bursts of free time, which is one of the things I like about being self employed. And so I will do projects as well. And so I've, I've done web development both for clients, and for myself. Okay.
Shauna:Yeah. And I actually I guess you could say I got into Python through data science, but I would say I've spent I'm much more. Yeah. So I guess how I got into Python was that I learned programming in general in my when I was a I worked in neuroscience, and so we would generate, like, large amounts of data, that needed to be handled and we would use MATLAB for that. And then I left neuroscience.
Shauna:I left academia and, that lab license was like more expensive than I could afford. So like a, what 24 year old, like, no idea what I'm doing, striking out freelancing for the first time on my own. I was like, I can't afford a MATLAB license, but it was the main language I knew. But this was in Boston at the time. And there was, there wasn't still as a really lovely and robust and big, Python scene in Boston.
Shauna:Thanks in part, to dead Batchelder, and at the time, Jessica McKellar, because in Boston, Jessica was piloting the series of workshops called Python for women and their friends. And so, basically, the idea was that you could come if you were and learn Python if you were a woman or if you were a friend of a woman. So, like, men could come, but they had to come with a woman. So, like, the, gender balance worked out pretty nicely that way. And so it was like a a woman heavy vibe, but but not exclusively.
Shauna:Anyway, one of the results of doing this is that it was bringing, like, a large diverse community into, the Boston Python user group. And so, I don't think I actually ever took one of Jessica's classes. I think by the time I found out about them, I was already at the point of volunteering as a mentor as opposed to taking them for the first time.
Brian:Yeah.
Shauna:But, like, I think they were really crucial in building, like, a really, big diverse group of people. And then I think that Ned, who's been running the user group for, I don't know how long at this point, well over a decade, has just done a really great job of leading the community and making everything really welcoming and nice. And so when I was looking for a language other than MATLAB to focus on, I was already drawn to Python to begin with, but like the community elements in Boston made it just like a really, just a really good place to, to grow and make connections network. And so I fell into and like adopted Python as my major language. And so I was doing a little bit of data sciency stuff back then, but in a really ad hoc and confused kind of way.
Shauna:Coming from academia, there is there at the time there was not very much support for learning programming, learning basic skills. Like there was no testing, there was no version control. It was kind of a mess. So I did learn some data science, but but I don't know how well I learned it. And I kind of moved away from it and started focusing on web development.
Shauna:I, ran into a couple of open source projects that used Django, and the Django community, like the Python community as a whole is really big, really welcoming. I remember the Django documentation is to this day something I cite as, like, the best among the best, like, software documentation I've ever read. Great. They had a a really nice tutorial that I just kind of went through. And when I was out with the tutorial, I'd built a website.
Shauna:I was like, oh, wow. I just, like, built a website just by following this like newcomer tutorial. And so most of my web development, I've done a little bit of web development using other frameworks. But like by far, my go to when I'm building a website is to reach for Django. So I started doing that.
Shauna:The reason why I bring up data science again is that I have a current project I'm working with that is data science focused. And so I've like really been like going back into the data science world. Although it always makes me, when I think about, when I compare it to what it was like back in like 2,009, 2010, which was the last time I was really seriously doing any data science and how much how far data science has come, how far Python's data science has come, how far I personally have come in understanding things like version control and the command line and all this stuff that I was like desperately fumbling with when I was first learning back in academia. It really feels like almost 2 different worlds. So that was a bit of a ramble, but that's that's my career in a nutshell.
Brian:Freelanced for 13 years. That's pretty awesome. I'm kind of jealous. I've got a project using Django now, but the tutorial, I don't know if I just have ADHD or something. I've never been able to actually get all the way through the tutorial because it's like, I don't know, 13 pages or something, which isn't that bad.
Brian:13 pages. I
Shauna:think it's just I feel like it was only 6 when I
Brian:6? Maybe. May okay. I'll have to go back.
Shauna:Very dense. It, like, steps you through all the different elements of building a Django website. It might be, I mean, it might be an ADHD thing. I don't know. I do not have ADHD.
Shauna:So, you know, from our end of 2, that's the hypothesis has not been disproven.
Brian:Our n of 2. What's that?
Shauna:No. Sorry. Our, like, our our collective n of 2, meaning like, when you do an experiment and is often like the abbreviation for the total number of items or people in an experiment. So, sorry. So I will occasionally use that shorthand.
Shauna:That's my, that's my experimental neuroscience background coming out is that I will occasionally make jokes about the end of something.
Brian:I'll translate that into a sample size of piece.
Shauna:Yes. Exactly.
Brian:Oh, jargon. Well, cool.
Shauna:It's crazy that I, it's crazy that I haven't actually done a research study where I've had to calculate, like where I've had to collect an end, which is usually like when you're for me, when I was collecting a sample size, that meant recruiting actual human beings and running them through a study. So I was like very painstakingly adding up the sample size. But anyway, I haven't done I haven't run anyone through an experiment since 2010, and yet I still will call it n instead of sample size because that's how quick that's like how deeply jargon embeds itself in your brain.
Brian:Yeah. 2010 is not that long. It'd be oh, I'm gonna sound old. When I say 2010, it seems like just a couple years ago. But, yeah, that's when I moved back to Oregon.
Brian:I moved back to Oregon in 2010, so it's it's been fun here. So you're you're in are you in Boston?
Shauna:No. I'm in Washington DC. My family lives here, so I moved I was in Boston for a while. I was really sad to leave it, but I moved to be closer to my family to Washington DC in 2017.
Brian:Okay. And isn't Ned, part of edX also?
Shauna:Yes. Yes. That to be honest, that was, he was one of the reasons that I was like, let me try full time work. I also, at that point had never had a full time tech job. I had kind of gone straight from academia to freelancing in part because when I went from academia to freelancing, I had no idea that I wanted to be in tech.
Shauna:When I left academia, I was kind of like, I have no idea, like not a single solitary clue what I want my next career path to be. The one thing I know how to do is to program. Not well, not in a language other than this MATLAB, which I can't afford the license for. But, like, I was like, this is a skill. This is a skill people might pay me for.
Shauna:And so I started freelancing, and I did kind of focus a little bit. I think my first freelance, the first client, quote, unquote client I had was, like, tutoring postdocs in the lab. I had just left on that lab for, like, $10 an hour. And I just kind of, like, figured it out from there. But, anyway, by, like, 2015 or 2016, which is around the time I worked at edX, I was like, I don't know.
Shauna:Like, maybe I should try a full time job again. Tech full time tech jobs seem pretty sweet. Like edX had, like, you know, free lunches and then, they had, a never ending supply of peanut butter filled pretzels, which I didn't take the job just because of that. But I was like, you know you know the the, there's just, like, a culture in tech jobs that is not universal to other jobs of, like, pampering employees. And I was like, okay.
Shauna:I wanna I wanna, like, go ahead. Try to buy my loyalty through peanut butter pretzels. Let's see if it works. But another part of that was that, I did know a couple of people at edX and Ed was one of them. And so that was definitely appealing to be like, okay.
Shauna:But I know I know some of my coworkers going in. I know, that I get along with them. I know that I have a lot I can learn from them. And so it I mean, I had a good time at edX. I didn't I just in the end, it was a combination of, I was moving down to DC, and at the time they did not do remote.
Shauna:I imagine that, you know, since the pandemic, they've changed, their policy on remote a lot. But then also I was kind of like, I don't, you know, I don't mind going back to freelancing. This was like a fun experience. It was nice to have coworkers. It was nice to have peanut butter pretzels, but like in the end, the freedom over my own, my own work, was really nice.
Shauna:I'm not saying I would never do it again. I was just, I'm just, I feel like it does take a special, it would take something a little special for me to be like, okay, I want to do like a full time job again.
Brian:So I I've never experienced that whole, like, pampering and pampering developers thing because I've always worked for hardware companies, and they're like, get to work. There there's there's stale pretzels in the break room if you want them, Things like that. Now we've now the the company I work at now, we've got a really great break room with awesome snacks. But it's you know, that might be cool in your twenties or something, but now it's like, yeah, it's okay. I don't need free Cheetos.
Shauna:It's true. I don't I don't know that it would be good for me to be exposed to infinite peanut butter pretzels anymore.
Brian:Awesome. The, let's let's change the the the conversation a whole bunch because I wanna know how how much you like women's soccer.
Shauna:Yeah. I put that down as my like non non programming interest. I am, I am obsessed, although I am also very sad right now because my local team, the Washington spirit, just barely missed the playoffs on Sunday. And I was at the game and it was, it was very sad. So if I am less bursting with enthusiasm enthusiasm about women's soccer, it is purely because a little part of me is grieving.
Shauna:A big part of me is grieving. But there is the playoffs are coming up. Well, I don't know when this is gonna come out. It's probably gonna come out. I don't I don't know how quick your turnaround is, but there's, I
Brian:Oh, it's horrible.
Shauna:So okay. So the season will probably be over by the time anyone listens to this, but there there is playoffs still to happen. And I I, I have teams I'm rooting for. It's just, you know, your local team is always, you know, the team of your heart that you really wanna win. And I was really bummed that it was, so the national women's soccer league, has long been known as the league with the most parody compared to other leagues.
Shauna:Typically how a lot of other leagues, especially like European leagues work is that there'll be 1 or 2 teams that just have a ton of money, usually because they're the women's side of a, like, a really successful men's team. And those those teams will just, like, dominate their leagues. So the watching the games isn't that exciting because, you know, you'll just be able to predict going in that one team's gonna win, like, 5 nothing, 6 nothing, 7 nothing. In the NWSL, there's, like, a tremendous amount of parity. So on any given day, the worst team in the league could easily be the best team in the league.
Shauna:And that's been true for a while for various, like, structural reasons, including there's, like, salary caps, and various, like, draft rules that are, like, designed to make the playing field as even as possible. But this year was really special.
Brian:Okay.
Shauna:Going into the last day of the league, the decision day, there were 8 teams competing for 4 spots in the playoffs. 2 teams had clinched, 2 teams had been eliminated, but there were 8 teams that could all potentially end up in the playoffs. So, it was just really, really exciting to watch, even if the outcome wasn't what I wanted. And I think it really speaks for like what an exciting league it is. So I just, I just, I just love watching and I have a little community on Mastodon.
Shauna:If any of your listeners are on Mastodon, there's a, NWSL and US Women's National Team groups that I moderate. You can use like, you can add those groups so that if you wanna connect with the community, people who are also talking about the NWSL or, US Women's National Team. And there are other people who have different women's soccer groups that they moderate. I think there's one for, WSL, which is the women's Super League, which is the, UK women's soccer league. So there is a community out there, if anyone listening is like, oh, I wanna get involved in that.
Brian:Oh, that's cool. We should totally put, like, links to those, those groups in the show notes. I I don't follow soccer. I don't, but but the I think it that that idea of having a more level playing field is, and it's interesting we use that analogy even for sports, because then
Shauna:there are multiple terribly wrong if it's not a level playing field.
Brian:Yeah. Yeah. It's playing soccer on a a slant. One one team's definitely got the advantage, the the downhill team. But they did they flip?
Brian:See, this is how much I don't know about soccer. Did the like, like in football, they'll flip flip around and start going the other direction. Does soccer
Shauna:use Yeah. So there's 2 halves in soccer. So they flip a coin, and whoever wins a coin toss can choose either to start because one team has to start with the ball in each half. So you choose either I wanna start with the ball in which half, or I wanna start, on a side in which half. And then the person on the other side chooses the other one.
Shauna:So those are sort of, like, the 2 main variables that, ideally like, ideally, you would just both start with the ball and both start on both halves, but that's like you know, physics doesn't allow that. So it's like a a source of unevenness. So it's an attempt to make it just, like, as even as possible by letting the winner of the coin flip pick 1, and then the loser of the coin flip picks the other. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't really make a difference either way.
Brian:In the multiverse, both choices happen.
Shauna:That's true. Right. That's
Brian:true. And you just chose to live in the universe where, your team could win.
Shauna:That's so harsh. Sorry. Don't be sad. It's your own fault. You chose to live in this universe.
Brian:The the timbers, and I think there's a, woman's There
Shauna:is the Portland horns. The, historically, the oldest and most beloved of the teams. So, the NW Souls, this is its 12th season, I believe. The Portland Thorns have been around them since day 1. And of all of the teams that have been around since day 1, they've been the most successful in terms of found support as well as winning the most.
Shauna:They they won the end of they won the championship last year, and that's not the first time they've won. It's been really interesting over the last 12 years. I've only been paying attention for the last 4 or 5. But, you know, for a long time, there was fear that the, NWSL would fold because, I mean, because it's hard to start a sports league. And also, you know, there's a lot of institutional and cultural sexism and misogyny that says like, oh, it's not fun to watch women play sports.
Shauna:But the Portland Thorns have always been like a sort of exception to that. The last couple of years, the NWSL has really taken off. And so now the Thorns are not the most popular team anymore. That distinction belongs to, San Diego Wave and, Angel City, who are in LA. And they are both expansion teams.
Shauna:They started last year. They're getting huge crowds. They're averaging even bigger crowds than Portland. The Washington spirit who I root for, they're also they're not doing as well as the thorns, but they you know, we had 15,000 people at our, our game on Sunday. You know?
Shauna:So, I I think from a like, I really like watching it as a sport, but it's also interesting to think about it from a cultural perspective and looking at what does it take for what does it take for a leak to take off on a logistical level, on a structural level, on a publicity level? Because, you know, there's, like, there's some, like, there's some people out there who will, comment like, oh, you know, women sports don't get supported as much because, you know, it's less fun to watch women's sports or like and to me that always, it's such a simplistic way to look at a sport because there's all these logistical elements that go into it. Like, how are the games produced? Like, who are the commentators? Are the commentators trained?
Shauna:Do they have any experience? Who are the referees? Do the referees have experience? Like, what are the what is the how are, like, how are children raised in the sport? Like, in the United States, there's act this is there's this really interesting dynamic.
Shauna:You should stop me at some point because, like, I could literally just talk the rest of this time about soccer. But this is there's all these interesting dynamics. Like, something like 25% of women at the Women's World Cup, which happened this past summer, played college in the United States because Title 9 requires that women's college sports are given just as much money and support as men's college sports, which is not something that most other countries have. I don't know that there's any country that has anything like the equivalent to it. Although, I don't know all the other countries.
Shauna:I don't wanna say, like, exclusively. But so you get there were actually more people on the Canadian national team that had played US college soccer than on the US national team. Because there there are a couple of people on the national team who skipped college is the main reason. So the structural influence of the United States in providing so much support and also the United States in general, I'm given to understand is just a bit more obsessed and absurd about our college sports than other countries are. But so it makes it so that, like, around the globe, if women wanna play soccer, most of them are trying to get, like, get to a school in the US or at least a huge percentage of them.
Shauna:So, like, I think there are these big, there's so many complex structural and systemic issues that impact the game that you're watching. And you might be like, oh, I don't like this. And that might just be ingrained sexism. But you might be, like, responding to, like, the lack of quality in the refereeing. You might be responding to the fact that, like, you know, players are tired up until I don't I hope it's not true anymore, but up until the last couple of years, most players would have to work other jobs in order to support themselves.
Shauna:Like playing soccer in the end of your solo alone was not enough. And the like, one of the weird things about watching this as someone who works in tech is, like, I look at, like, a lot of the players that I watch day day in, day out, I make more than them. Like, the minimum wage in the NWSL for, like, a rookie is, like, I think somewhere around 30,000 a year. Right. And so if you, if you compare someone who's making like, you know, $300,000 as a rookie, or I don't, I don't know what it is in MLS or another sports.
Shauna:But, like, in sports where money isn't an issue, like, it just it's just easier to level up your game if you can afford, personal trainers, personal coaches, if you can focus solely on a sport. Yeah. And so I think that there are, like, all these ways where we look at a final product, and we say, you know, I don't like this. And it's just, you know, I just am objectively correct that it's just less interesting to watch women's sports. And it's like, you don't understand all of the details of all of the structural and systemic elements that go into what you're seeing and how, systemic sexism, systemic lack of support for women's sports plays into that.
Brian:I'm not really that into sports, but I did grow up in a, you know, in an area where there's a college. And I I guess it's it's interestingly different. So, like, Portland has a bunch of colleges and universities, but there's but that's different than growing up in an area where there's one. So when I was really young, I was in Pullman, and, that's the home town for Washington State University. So, so we were Cougar.
Brian:Everybody's a Cougar fan because there's one. And then when I moved to Eugene and went to U of O, well, U of O is there, and that's it. And it's, we're ducks. And there was a family thing when I transferred from from, WSU to U of O of, like, really? You're gonna become a duck?
Brian:That's terrible. And it's like you know, part of that's just silly. But there's something ingrained in me. And I'm like, every it doesn't matter where you go to school. It's it's fine.
Brian:But then at the same time, I'm like, don't think I could ever move to Corvallis because that's where the Oregon Beavers are. And so there's there is something cultural about college sports and, and all sports. But the sports that I was exposed to mostly were like baseball and football, which I think is I think is bad. I I like I like the I think that it makes more sense to expose more people to soccer and basketball because those are things that you can reasonably play anytime for the rest of your life. So, yeah, I mean, you get, like, a handful of people together or even just, you know, a couple people, you can kick a ball around and play soccer.
Shauna:You can't do a pickup baseball game.
Brian:Play. Do you can't play You
Shauna:can, like, you can grab you can grab a glove with a pin, then you'll have a catch. And, like, you can like, if you get someone who's up for it, you can have someone pitch to you, and then you can hit a bunch of balls. And then you can, like, pause and go pick up all the balls and try again. But you can't have a game. Like
Brian:Yeah. And even, like, flag football, you need at least, like, 10 people to have an interesting flag football game. Maybe 6, but it's really not that fun with 6. So, it is interesting that those that football's gotten is so prevalent in in the US over sports that are more easy. Plus, you have to have, like, a of enough of a field.
Brian:I guess it's anyway, soccer requires a big field too.
Shauna:But you can have a pickup game you can have a pickup game with which whatever size field you want. Like, I've played where someone will just, like, drop some shirts to make the equivalent to the goal, and then you have to get it. When you kick the goal, it has to be on the ground between those 2 shirts. But, like, yeah, you you really just need a ball and a couple of people to play a a pickup game of soccer.
Brian:Well, I remember even games where it's like, I don't know. We have to yeah. That that that wall over there. If you hit that wall, it's it's a goal. Yeah.
Brian:Or something. So did you did you play as a kid, or do you play now?
Shauna:Yeah. Well, so I grew up in an area that was, pretty boring. And we did not have any, we did not have any universities or colleges to root for. We had a local community college, but they didn't have a a team that I'm aware of. I mean, they probably did have a team.
Shauna:We didn't we didn't watch the team. It was just a community college. But there wasn't a lot else to do besides play sports, so I played a lot of sports. I played a lot of soccer. I play a lot of softball.
Shauna:I did one season of baseball just because I was like, I play a lot of softball, but I just wanna see how different it is to play baseball. And it was not that different. I played some basketball. I think that's really it. It was really soccer, softball, basketball were my sports.
Shauna:And then I hit high school and we moved to Washington DC. My family did. And I was like, wow. There's so many more interesting things to do than sports. So I, like, just stop playing all sports.
Shauna:And then I recently after I got into the NWSL and watching the national team, watching women's soccer, I was like, I used to play soccer. I could do that again. So I started playing with, like, a local rec league. Very very chill. No slide tackling.
Shauna:I'm like, I don't wanna get injured. This is only for fun. But yeah. So I I have I have picked it up again recently as an adult.
Brian:Okay. Cool. Okay. So let's go back to tech a little bit. What you you have a website called the the governing in Governing Open.
Brian:Is that right? Governing
Shauna:Yes.
Brian:Okay. Governing open. Tell me more about that and what you're trying to do there.
Shauna:Yeah. So, I have been I have been interested and involved in open source for nearly as long as I've been interested and involved in tech and Python. I back in 2013 or so, I started doing work with, newcomers to open source. So teaching things like version control, how to use issue trackers, open source norms, and just trying to help people get more involved in open source, because it can often be a very steep learning curve, for someone who's like, oh, theoretically, I can contribute to an open source project. Let me practically do that.
Shauna:And then sometimes people just, like, run into a brick wall of like, wow. There's, like, so much stuff that one has to learn in order to do this. So for years, I sort of focused on that element, the sort of newcomer focused element, like onboarding, teaching, teaching norms, teaching tools. But as I got exposed to more of more open source projects, I realized that that is just sort of one element of how open source projects run and, that there's like all sorts of really interesting questions on the, when it comes to decision making, when it comes to how, open source project gets produced, how the roadmap gets produced, how, how specific, bugs get chosen to address or features get chosen to be added. And so I sort of like expanded my focus a bit.
Shauna:I also had, I had a pretty clarifying or a moment that was pretty crystallizing for me and helping me identify this was a key interest of mine in 2017. I, got asked to facilitate a governance transition for a project that, had a BDFL, so a benevolent dictator for life, very much in the style of Guido van Rossum, someone who just had sort of founded the project and remained in charge and had done a good job. And everyone was like, we like this guy. But, unfortunately, he had passed away. And so the community was like, well, we we we need to do something.
Shauna:Do we appoint a new BDFL? Do we have, like, a different model? What do we do? And so, one of their funders are, like one of their funders sounds a little weird. A company with a stake in the matter, was like, I will but we will pay to get everyone in a room together in Seattle, and then you can hash it out and figure out what the new governance structure will be.
Shauna:And then a couple months before the convening, they were like, maybe we should get someone to facilitate this. Like someone who's like a sort of outsider to our community. And somehow I ended up on their contact list, they reached out and asked if I would do it. I said, I've never, to be clear I've never done this before but I'm totally game to try. And I facilitated a, I think it was 3 day convening.
Shauna:We did not decide what the new governance structure would be at that convening. What we realized was that the crucial thing was figuring out how they were gonna decide, like creating a structure and a process that could then be followed over the course of weeks or months. Because not everyone could be at the convening. They didn't wanna just, like, exclude people who happen to be busy that weekend or didn't have the
Brian:Yeah.
Shauna:You know, the flexibility to come. And, actually, you know, looking at the Python governance transition that happened a year or 2 later, I actually see a lot of, a lot of, echoes, resonance, overlap between, like, that experience or what that what that, project went through and what Python went through in terms of, you know, wanting to include people who couldn't be at a physical convening, but nevertheless, having a physical convening and needing that face to face space to figure out what was going on. But yeah. So that that one project, and that one experience really sparked my interest in governance, which had kind of been there lately. But I was like, no, I really want to focus on this.
Shauna:And then so it was again, this was like right around the time that, Guido stepped down as BDFL and Python went through its governance transition. So I was paying a lot of attention to that. I did a a talk at PyCon in, I wanna say, 2019 that I interviewed, I forget exactly. I think Carol Willing and Brett Cannon, but I definitely Carol. And wrote up, like, or gave a talk.
Shauna:I mean, I I always write my talks before I give them. But sort of, trying to analyze what had happened from a perspective of, like, what made this work? Like, how did it like, because it was for Python, it was for the Python community. It was, like, equal parts, like, let me just literally explain what happened because you might not know, but you might be interested. But then also trying to understand, like, this seemed pretty successful.
Shauna:What was successful about it? What, like, what things did the Python community do right during the process before the process? Because, yeah, I think Python is a really big example in part because Python is a really big language that influences a lot of people, and it's a big community. But I think that, there are a lot of open source projects that have been around for a while and have either grown to need new governance or just the original founders wanna step back. And so the BDFL model has stopped working for a lot of a lot
Brian:of folks. Yeah.
Shauna:And so I think that one of my goals is to try and collect information about how projects have dealt with this in the past so that we can give advice to projects that are facing these transitions and help ease them through it. Like, my my interest is larger than just how do you help BDFLs become, like, non BDFLs, but that was sort of the origin of my interest. Like, since then, my interest has sort of expanded to be like a more general question of, like, how do you achieve the open source ideal of a projects that are meeting the needs of users and empowering users and empowering communities of people through software, which I think that, like, just having an open source license alone doesn't do, and that you need governance and project management and tooling and, like, day to day practices that actually achieve that. But, like, governance is definitely a strong element of that, so that's why I've been focusing on that.
Brian:I think that we're just sort of ignoring this problem most places. I mean, the the I'd be curious. There's a lot of there's a lot of projects that are used all over the place that really don't have a structure in place to figure out what to do if the person heading it leaves, like coverage and Ned, for instance. Ned's mostly coverage dot py is maintained by Ned, and other people contribute too, but it's mostly Ned. So what happens if he leaves?
Brian:But there's there's other like, even little ones. Like, there was a couple of Pytest plugins that, I've started to become involved in because my just because I was like, why haven't they updated recently? They're not even tested on 311 yet. Well, because the person maintaining it doesn't wanna do it anymore, so there's nobody left to do it. And and, and sometimes, open source is just somebody stepping up and saying, god, do you can I help out?
Brian:And trying to ask that question before the person is so so stepped away that they don't even remember how to give give somebody else permission, which can happen.
Shauna:Yeah. And I yeah. I think it's also related to maintainer problems with maintainer burnout as well where,
Brian:like,
Shauna:someone might still be maintaining the project, but they're slowly dying inside. And at some point at some point, they're just gonna step away. And if we can if we can intervene and help someone when they are first starting to feel burnt, or maybe even before they even have the first inklings of burnout, and we start providing the support, then then maybe they never burn out or maybe they do decide that they wanna walk away from the project for other reasons. Maybe they just get interested in something else and that's fine because we have, like, a whole we have a plan to support. But I think that yeah.
Shauna:Because we don't think about this very much, we kind of, like, just hope everything's going well. And then someone just, like, walks away from their project or a project winds down, and we're, like, surprised out of nowhere. It's like, no, that person has been miserable for a long time and been pushing themselves to keep maintaining as a solo person.
Brian:Well, it's kinda it's kinda like, you know, women's soccer. Right? A lot of a lot of these people have other jobs. Actually Yeah. Every everybody has another job.
Brian:Almost everybody. There are I've heard of people that get paid by their company to they get, like, extra time to work on their open source projects. That's so cool. But that's that's, that's, not the norm, I don't think. So I'll have to check this out.
Brian:I'm I'm I'm interested to learn more about this. This this looks pretty great. So, and, question on the spot. Did you design the site?
Shauna:Yes. So I actually made this at PyCon during the sprints. I just had been thinking about doing it for a while, and I was like, you know what? I'm gonna do it. So I, I feel like I might have tweaked it a little bit since the sprints, but I basically did this, during during the PICON sprints.
Brian:Okay.
Shauna:Because I during the sprints this year, I basically advertised that if there were any open source projects that had any governance questions like, related to maintain a burnout or decision making or anything, they could come find me. And then I said what room I would be. But then I mean, people and people did come find me, but, like, you know, it wasn't, like, all day for both days of the sprints that I was there. So I was like, during the rest of the time, I'm gonna make this website. So that's what I did.
Brian:Cool. Thanks for coming on the show, and I really appreciate, you spending your time today talking with us.
Shauna:Of course. I'm I'm pleased that I got to spend so much time talking about women's soccer. I never get I never get invited to talk about women's soccer on podcast. So I gotta sneak it into when I get invited to tech podcasts.
Brian:Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Awesome. Well, we'll talk to you later.
Shauna:Alright. Bye, Brian.
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