Meeting Minutes: Nov 10, 2026

Notes

• Trey and Keith from the Edu and Outreach Working Group joined us.
  • Community engagement has come up in our past meetings, and the Edu and Outreach WG has been thinking about it too.
  • They joined to learn and discuss, and so we could get to know each other better: see where our work overlaps, how we can work together, and share what we’ve learned.
• What does the WG membership look like?
  • Members: Abigail, Trey, Keith, Sheena, and Kelly Paredes (from the Teaching Python podcast).
  • Their work includes making sure the Education Summit happens.
  • They are currently exploring to bring back the Young Coders track at PyCon US.
  • Each member has some small projects they’re interested in.
  • They want a space to engage with the community other than PyCon US, and are considering options like Discord, Discourse, or monthly meetings like this one.
  • Q: Where do you keep notes? A: Google Docs. Only private notes so far, nothing published yet.
    • Having public notes helps with community trust and transparency. They praised our effort here, as well as the Docs WG, who have published their meeting notes publicly from the start.
• The Docs WG has been more focused on tooling, and not so much on the structure and content of the docs. The Editorial Board focuses on docs ownership and content, and is looking for direction now that there is less concern about ownership than in the past.
• The Edu and Outreach WG has projects in mind but doesn’t have the bandwidth to do all of them, and doesn’t want to prevent the community from participating in those projects.
• Some docs projects are harder to do within core Python. It would be nice for more docs, like learner docs and tutorials targeted at other personas, to come from the PSF side instead of the core Python side.
  • But there are also people working on competing or similar projects.
• Q: How can people contribute to the docs? Edu and Outreach members don’t always have the power to help. For example, at the Docs WG monthly meeting, people discussing a docs PR could merge it right then, but others don’t have that power.
  • When someone joins an Edu and Outreach call, how would they be able to contribute? The WG has multiple projects, like running the Education Summit.
• How do we maximize impact? This was also in our own notes from June, and the Edu and Outreach WG is facing the same issues we are.
  • Q: Is our structure blocking any contributions? A: It’s more a lack of participants. The Docs Community meeting also doesn’t seem to be drawing many new members.
  • Edu and Outreach: we need to take action instead of waiting and reacting.
• EB: each of us wears two hats. Individually we each have projects we’re interested in, but we don’t need to be on the EB to do them.
• Docs changes sometimes stall or turn into bikeshedding, because people don’t always have the context about usability, accessibility, etc.
  • One wish: the Python docs could be more of a reference, and the community could create tutorials for different personas. That would be less likely to lead to bikeshedding.
  • For example, it’s easier to make scientific Python docs in pyOpenSci than in the CPython docs, since there are fewer scientific Python folks among the core developers.
  • External docs should not be seen as competitors to the CPython docs, especially if they are made by a PSF-sponsored group.
• Which personas would be interesting in the context of Python docs and tutorials? What onboarding experience does each persona need, and who are we trying to serve?
  • Example: data science and statistics folks who live in Jupyter notebooks. The CPython docs aren’t really aimed at them. The CPython docs were primarily written by a group of developers with a strong C programming background.
  • Interactive documentation: running on WebAssembly, some kind of learning center. It needs to come from people who understand teaching and docs well, and that may not be the core Python team.
  • Q: Where are the personas Joanna has been working on?
• Edu and Outreach: they have ideas for docs they want, but aren’t ready to publish the big idea and receive lots of LLM-generated contributions. How do they proceed while still wanting the community to contribute?
• EB: we would love to see a section on the PSF website about empowering learners and helping people get started with Python under the different personas, and highlighting the education work that comes out of the Education Summit. The EB made a conscious decision not to work on the PSF website; we focus on the core Python docs.
• What kind of help do you need for the tutorial?
  • Keith: a tutorial with visual and musical examples, interactive, in the browser. Thinking of creating a template. Scoping it down is what’s needed.
  • Suggestion: look into The Carpentries, which has examples and templates for creating lessons.
• This group feels more like a support group.

Our own business

• We’re thankful for each other.