Until a few years ago, RubyCentral was very similar to the Python Software Foundation in that it managed all the infrastructure and the main conferences - everything except language development.

A few years ago, RubyCentral lost power when the Rails Foundation was created (most of the Ruby world revolves around Rails). The Rails Foundation organizes its own yearly conference, and RubyCentral stopped hosting theirs.

However, RubyCentral still controls the package management tools and the package registry.