Episode 169: Dawn Wages of PSF on organizing communities, ethical licenses, and more

Guest Dawn Wages Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Today, Richard is very excited to have as his guest, Dawn Wages, who’s the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, Core Team Member for Wagtail, DjangoCon Organizer, and Director and Treasurer for the Python Software Foundation. We’ll hear Dawn’s journey into how she got involved with the PSF and as a Python Community Advocate at Microsoft, she explains how to become a PSF member, as well as the benefits, since they’ve made some changes recently. She explains where she falls on the ethical source divide and dives into the AntiRacist Ethical Source License, which is her niche. Also, she shares advice on how communities can be more sustainable at navigating conflict in their communities and reveals that we should lead with empathy. If you’re looking at going to a conference this year, there’s some great DjangoCon’s and a PyCon going on that are worth checking out. Hit download now to hear more! [00:03:31] We hear how Dawn got involved with the PSF and how she became the Python Community Advocate at Microsoft. [00:05:23] Dawn shares why foundations in the open source space seem to continually have this community voting way of entering into the board, if she thinks it’s healthy, and if she thought about it when she was working on Django’s new process. [00:08:27] Both dollars and time are things which are often barriers to entry for DEI, so how does that help diversity, equity, and inclusion versus how it hurts it? Also, we hear about Wagtail and Torchbox and what they do. [00:11:40] Dawn mentioned that the PSF lowered the dollar amount and Open Collective, so now we hear the benefits it gives to an individual to become a member of the PSF, if that’s something people should think about if they’re working in Python, and if it’s possible to join on behalf of the project and not their company. [00:13:30] We hear about a tool called, Fiscal Sponsoree, with the PSF