Nomination for the Python Packaging Council
I am nominating myself for election to the Python Packaging Council.
Python packaging sits at the intersection of technical design, community governance, and the practical needs of an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem. I am running because I want us to become better at developing new ideas, adapting to emerging uses of Python, and recognizing the people whose expertise sustains packaging.
Why I Am Running
Giving new ideas room to grow
In 2024, I co-created WheelNext with a simple objective: to foster a community where people can build prototypes, nurture ideas, and work together in a positive and constructive environment.
discuss.python.org remains an important venue for formal community discussions. However, it does not always serve early-stage and exploratory work well. Discussions can become long, fragmented, and difficult to navigate. Ideas can encounter too much "stop energy" before they have had an opportunity to mature, demonstrate their value, or even become precise enough for productive debate.
WheelNext provides a complementary incubation space: somewhere an idea can be prototyped, challenged, refined, and strengthened before it has to stand in the arena of broader standardization and governance.
As a member of the Packaging Council, I would work to create better conditions for experimentation across the packaging community. I want us to develop faster feedback loops, provide clearer paths from prototypes to proposals, and make it easier for contributors to explore ambitious ideas.
Our processes should remain rigorous, but rigor should help good ideas become better, not prevent them from getting started.
Preparing packaging for scientific and hardware-accelerated computing
Python is extraordinarily flexible. It can be used in ways that many people would never have anticipated (e.g. JIT-compiling Python traces into entirely different execution domains). This adaptability is one of the language’s greatest strengths.
The other side of that success is that many use cases considered niche or highly specialized yesterday become mainstream requirements today. Python packaging must be able to evolve alongside them.
This is particularly important for scientific computing and hardware-accelerated computing. These communities are continuously expanding what Python can do, and their needs do not always fit comfortably within assumptions made by existing packaging standards, tools, and distribution models.
I want the Packaging Council to engage more closely with these communities, understand where the current ecosystem falls short, and support the experiments and initiatives needed to address those gaps. We should not wait until emerging use cases have become urgent, ecosystem-wide problems before responding to them.
Python has become a language of choice for science, engineering, data, and accelerated computing. Packaging must continue evolving if we want Python to remain a central and durable part of those domains.
Recognizing packaging as core Python expertise
I would also like to pursue a specific pathway for contributors to join the Python Core Team based on sustained contributions and leadership in Python packaging, rather than requiring a record focused primarily on contributions to CPython itself.
Packaging expertise is deep, specialized, and essential to Python’s success. The people who design packaging standards, maintain foundational infrastructure, shepherd interoperability work, and support the broader ecosystem possess vertical expertise that should be recognized within Python’s core governance structures.
Creating such a pathway would strengthen the relationship between packaging and core development. It would recognize the standing of experienced packaging contributors and, importantly, enable more of them to sponsor and shepherd packaging-focused PEPs.
This is not something the Packaging Council could establish unilaterally. It would require collaboration with the Core Team, the Steering Council, and the broader community. The Packaging Council can, however, clearly articulate the need, help develop credible criteria, and build the consensus required to make it possible.
Relevant Experience
Besides my founding role in WheelNext, my recent community work has focused on the relationship between packaging, core Python development, scientific computing, and the processes through which new ideas become standards.
I am an author of:
I have spoken about these broader challenges at PyCon US:
- PyCon US 2025, with Barry Warsaw: Reinventing the Wheel: A Community-Driven Roadmap for Python Packaging
- PyCon US 2026, in a panel co-organized with Michael Droettboom and Dawn Wages: Fostering Better Collaboration Between the Scientific Python Community and Core Python Development
I have also participated in Packaging Summits at:
- PyCon US 2025
- PyCon US 2026
- EuroPython 2026
Through WheelNext, the PEP process, conference discussions, and these summits, I have tried to help connect communities that often approach the same problems from different directions: packaging maintainers, standards authors, scientific Python contributors, hardware-accelerated computing projects, and core Python developers.
What I Would Bring to the Council
I would bring a bias toward experimentation, a concern for the health of our working environment, and a commitment to building stronger connections across the Python ecosystem.
I do not expect every experiment to succeed, and I am not running with a predetermined solution to every packaging problem. I want us to become better at finding promising ideas, testing them early, learning from failures, and helping successful prototypes develop into robust proposals.
I also want the newly elected Python Packaging Council to venture beyond the most visible or established packaging use cases. Python's future will be shaped partly by communities whose requirements currently appear unusual, specialized, or difficult to support. We should treat those communities as partners in the evolution of packaging rather than as exceptions to it.
Python packaging must support both what Python is today and what it can become tomorrow. That requires room for ideas to grow, sustained attention to emerging technical domains, and governance structures that recognize packaging expertise as core expertise.
I would be honored to work on those priorities as a member of the Python Packaging Council. Thank you for considering my nomination.