The recruitment angle has always been pretty successful, and now with JP's extensive open source work exposure to collaborators and emerging projects has become valuable for participants at these conferences.

With the pandemic, I moved us from being just a pycon sponsor to sponsoring the psf directly (https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/), though without a senior MD championing these types of initiatives it's always up to lower level employees being vocal and committed enough to push.