The Black Python Devs Leadership Summit, which took place on September 21st at 8 a.m. was a successful event.

Event Breakdown

The Summit began with Registration at the front desk where each attendee’s name was written on lanyards. Afterwards, participants grabbed a light meal to kick off the day.

At 9 am, Welcome and Opening Remarks were given by Abigail Afi Gbadago. After this, Jay introduced the morning session, which was followed by a chop-it-up session during which we talked about succession, mental health, and leadership skills.

From 10:15 to 11:00 a.m., Jay Miller gave a State of BPD highlighting our leadership, growth, sponsorships, and initiatives from 2024 with plans for 2025.

At midday, we took a 2-hour lunch break.

After lunch, we had a keynote address by Wesley Faulkner on Leadership vs Management

Right after, there was a Coffee Break at 10:15 - 10:30.

After the break, Loren Crary gave a sponsor Lightning Talk on behalf of the PSF.

Then there were our interactive talks where we received updates from:

• -Kudzayi on Experiences Leading Workshops in Zim (What Works/What Doesn’t)

• -Afi on the Open Source Program (Challenges, Successes and Overall Progress)

After a coffee break followed by a 50-minute Panel Discussion with:

- Loren
- Velda
- Jeff
- Monica
- Benedict

At 2:50 - 3:00 in the afternoon, we prepared to break out into sessions for an hour; these sessions were very informative and we recapped at 4:15 - 4:45 pm.

At 4:45 - 5:00 pm, we took a coffee break and grabbed snacks from the hall before going in for the Closing Remarks.

To wrap up the day, we had a fun, soft drinks session and water cooler conversations were had while we closed up the summit and went for dinner in the area.

Key Discussions

There was a lot of conversation around succession planning and feelings of being overwhelmed, burnout, and not feeling that opportunities to help and receive help were being effectively handled. This starts at the top and the executor agrees that they need to be willing to put more trust in the team. They also showed interest in creating standardized methods for onboarding and offboarding new leaders.

There were also conversations about helping people get more involved in open source. A breakout session on physical health and wellness as well as conversations around fundraising opportunities for BPD.

Logistics

Overall the event came in under budget at approximately $2000. The biggest with the generous donation of a venue by the Caktus group. This event was completely covered by the We also raised an additional $200 in donations for BPD. We had about 25 in attendance in person with another 20 consistently online. One highlight was that we had a couple of folks from the local community find out about the event and join us. There was a lot of conversation about the Raleigh-Durham area being a potential site for a local Black Python Devs User Group.

There is currently a plan for at least one other independent leadership summit to be held in Africa (location not yet announced) in the Fall of 2025 and a possible leadership summit to be held at PyCon US 2025 as a track. If we can standardize cost and logistics, we can see these leadership summits as a regional track that can benefit more local communities.