PyCon Pittsburgh. April 15-23, 2020.

Talk: Mismatches and tensions: what PyPI can teach us about open source infrastructure sustainability

Presented by:

Stephen Jacobs, Mel Chua

Description

Digital infrastructure is magical in the same way plumbing is: if it’s working correctly, you barely notice it at all. Unfortunately, this also makes it easy to overlook the fragile maintenance situations of many mission-critical FOSS infrastructure projects, which may be held together by a single volunteer who suddenly finds themselves Dealing With Life. Furthermore, the unique qualities of infrastructure (services as opposed to libraries, applications, etc.) and FOSS project histories and cultural values (freedom!) require some different approaches to conceptualizing sustainability, maintainership, and what it means to improve both those things.

The stories of PyPI combine to create a case study of a successful FOSS digital infrastructure overhaul – an extraordinarily difficult feat. This talk is based on a research project funded by the Ford and Sloan foundations that draws from an open-licensed corpus of interviews with PyPI developers and users to point out tensions and mismatches common to FOSS infrastructure projects. In turn, these tensions and mismatches challenge us to question and sharpen our understandings of what sustainability and maintainership might mean. We’ll examine the implications of these findings for PyPI, Python, and other FOSS digital infrastructure projects and the people who rely on them. And there will be storytime – plenty of it.