This is a cool article. If you want to understand how to contribute to python there is a guide at https://devguide.python.org
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pyhton-dev is a corporate shark tank where only personalities and employer matter (good code or ideas are optional).
The members occupy different chairs in the PSF, Steering Council and the all-powerful CoC troika. They rotate, sometimes skip one election and then come back.
Their latest achievement is the banning of Tim Peters and others:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41385546
Tim Peters is just the tip of the iceberg. Many bans are private, intimidation is private.
Steering council members can insult, bully and mock others without any CoC consequences for themselves and keep getting elected. That is how you know that they are in the inner circle.
For the other 60, if someone was friendly to them 30 years ago, they still think he is a awesome chap even if he is now a venomous bureaucrat.
Approval voting is used, and SC members often sail through with just 30 of 90 votes. The pool of candidates is limited due to lack of interest and the perception that only the inner circle will somehow get the required low bar of around 30 votes. Also, people are intimidated since the SC ruins careers and gets away with lying.
The whole thing has the dynamics of a high school party where somewhat popular people dominate the scene and a handful of intelligent people stand in the corner and wonder where the popularity comes from.
It is all a deeply unprofessional setup.
It seems that the active developers are either in "the group", don't care (because they can get their work done), or care and now suffer the consequences.
And it seems the majority strictly doesn't care. Which is strange, but ... Python is old, and has its conservative-ish status quo, so it kind of makes sense (at least in my interpretation) that most eligible voters basically represent Python's "past" and doesn't really want much to do with its "future" (and present, apparently).
Do core devs lose their vote if they don't contribute for some time? Is there some kind of publish-or-perish thing?