Description:

By definition, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is available for use, modifications, and redistribution, and it’s often also free of cost to do so. This ethos is why FOSS is at the foundation of our current digital infrastructure. However, wide adoption does not always translate back as contributions, which leads to unhealthy communities and eventually maintainer burnout. The open source Python ecosystem is at the heart of the rapidly advancing data science landscape, and it’s critical for us to grow our community sustainably to match this pace.

In this talk, we’ll discuss some sustainability strategies in the Python ecosystem. We’ll start by understanding open source sustainability and how it includes a lot more than financial support. We’ll then cover some common strategies in the Python community and their pros-and-cons, with a deeper dive into the “oss-consulting-framework” that the speakers are more familiar with. Finally, we’ll share some actionable sustainability best practices for various stages of the open source life cycle.

We hope to spark more conversations around sustainability at PyCon India, and share how everyone, from beginners to industry leaders, can participate and contribute to a sustainable and healthy open source ecosystem.

Prerequisites:

Some familiarity with open source practices, especially in the Python ecosystem, will be helpful, but this talk is intended to reach a general audience and meet them where they are. We’ll briefly cover the history and present state of open source before diving into details of sustainability, to ensure beginners also feel comfortable and included in the discussion.

Speaker Info:

This talk will be presented by Dr. Lalitha Krishnamoorthy and Pavithra Eswaramoorthy.

Dr. Lalitha Krishnamoorthy is the Co-Founder and CEO, OpenTeams Global. In her role at OpenTeams Global, she is responsible for driving the organization’s innovation, expanding the partner and network ecosystem across industry’s and academia, defining the portfolio and investment strategy, and delivering transformative experiences. She leads a team of Open Source experts that work with clients and business partners on their transformation journey through Data and AI methodologies to achieve stellar business results. In her prior role, Lalitha served as Director of IBM Digital Commerce, SaaS, and Data Platforms where she directed IBM’s Digital Business Transformation strategy through data-driven, commerce-ready, subscription-first product offerings. During her 20 year career at IBM, Lalitha has held roles of increasing responsibility and overseen numerous portfolio’s leading IBM’s transition from core databases to federated data to advanced analytical capabilities, and eventually data, cloud and artificial intelligence. Dr. Lalitha serves on the Champions board of Texas Girls Collaborative Project, a University of Texas at Austin statewide network committed to motivating and supporting women and girls to pursue and thrive in careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Lalitha holds a doctorate in Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence, holds several invention patents, is a regular speaker at industry conferences, is on the board of directors for many startups, and a strong advocate for diversity & inclusion in technology. Today, Lalitha is most interested in making technology equitable for everyone, as this creates a new set of market leaders and competitive disruption.

Pavithra Eswaramoorthy is a Developer Advocate at Quansight, where she works to improve the developer experience and community engagement for several open source projects in the PyData community. Currently, she maintains the Bokeh visualization library, and contributes to the Nebari (adjacent to the Jupyter community) and conda-store (part of the conda ecosystem) projects. Pavithra has been involved in the open source community for over 5 years, notable as a maintainer of the Dask library and an administrator for Wikimedia’s OSS programs. In her spare time, she enjoys a good book and hot coffee. :)

Speaker Links:

Dr. Lalitha Krishnamoorthy's OpenTeam's page and LinkedIn profile

Pavithra Eswaramoorthy's list of previous talks and GitHub profile.