Jazzband, the cooperative experiment that let developers share maintenance of open source projects, is winding down after more than a decade. New signups are disabled as of today, and project leads will be contacted before PyCon US 2026 to coordinate transfers. The GitHub organization and website will remain available through the end of 2026.

Founded over 10 years ago, Jazzband grew to 3,135 members from every continent except Antarctica, maintained 84 projects with ~93,000 GitHub stars, and shipped 1,312 releases to PyPI. Projects that passed through Jazzband are downloaded over 150 million times monthly, including pip-tools at 23 million and prettytable at 42 million. The cooperative model aimed to reduce maintainer burnout by letting everyone who joined gain push access.

However, the rise of AI-generated spam PRs and issues made Jazzband's open membership model untenable. The organization also suffered from being a one-person operation, with every project transfer and infrastructure decision going through a single point of failure. Projects are encouraged to find new homes, with Django Commons recommended for Django projects and an invitation for someone to build similar governance for the broader Python ecosystem.