BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//pretalx//pretalx.com//compute-paris-2026//talk//YLX8JL
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/Paris
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20251125T000000
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
END:STANDARD
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
DTSTART:20260329T030000
RDATE:20270328T030000
TZNAME:CEST
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0200
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
DTSTART:20261025T030000
RDATE:20271031T030000
TZNAME:CET
TZOFFSETFROM:+0200
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The Invisible Work of the Stack: Measuring the Impact of Public In
 vestment in PyPI - Laia Domenech Burin
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Paris:20261125T140500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Paris:20261125T143500
DTSTAMP:20260930T121901Z
UID:pretalx-compute-paris-2026-YLX8JL@pretalx.com
DESCRIPTION:Almost every Python data science workflow depends on PyPI\, bu
 t few people see the maintenance work behind it.  PyPI hosts over 780\,000
  packages\, making it the largest package repository to gather the necessa
 ry toolkit to develop everything that happens in the Data Science stack: f
 rom data engineering and machine learning to visualization and AI tooling.
  \n\nDespite its importance for the Python ecosystem\, PyPI shares a probl
 em common to many OSS projects. Although it forms part  of our critical di
 gital infrastructure\, its maintenance depends heavily on the often unseen
  labour of volunteer communities. The “care” work in OSS maintenance i
 s often overlooked and undervalued: these maintainers do not receive recip
 rocal contributions for their work\, making entire ecosystems vulnerable t
 o collapse if communities can no longer sustain their efforts.\n\nThis tal
 k examines what happens when public institutions invest in that infrastruc
 ture\, and how we might evaluate whether such investments actually help. B
 etween 2023 and 2024\, the Sovereign Tech Agency invested over €1 millio
 n in PyPI and related parts of the Python cryptographic ecosystem Work was
  done across the cryptographic ecosystem (PyCA Cryptography\, pyOpenSSL\, 
 M2Crypto\, BoringSSL\, the `ssl` module\, and PyPI/Warehouse)\, covering s
 ecurity improvements\, API modernization\, legacy deprecation\, and alignm
 ent with sigstore for supply chain verification.\n\nTwo years later\, the 
 difficult question is impact: how can we measure the effects of public inv
 estment in open source without reducing maintenance to simplistic metrics?
  This question comes with a lot of caveats: we need to find comparable sof
 tware projects to find our counterfactual\, gather data\, control for conf
 ounders without flattening the socio-technical realities of maintenance. I
 n this talk\, we open up these challenges by introducing an **impact evalu
 ation framework** for public investment in **OSS projects**. We construct 
 a goals-to-metrics dictionary to evaluate change over time\, and apply a c
 ausal inference framework combining Propensity Score Matching with General
 ized Synthetic Control Methods to estimate the effects of the funding by c
 omparing treated repositories with a donor pool.  \n\nAttendees will gain 
 a practical understanding of how to evaluate the impact of open source fun
 ding: how to translate funding goals into measurable indicators\, gather r
 elevant OSS data\, and use causal methods responsibly while preserving the
  socio-technical context of maintenance work. We also encourage feedback f
 rom maintainers\, researchers\, and funders on what responsible\, communit
 y-sensitive evaluation should look like.
LOCATION:Room 106
URL:https://pretalx.com/compute-paris-2026/talk/YLX8JL/
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR