Rebooting communities
2025 was an 'interesting' year. For me it was best defined by the rebooting of several open source, technical communities. This post is a pause-and-think reflection on close to ~14 months of community building.
This post was written in late 2025, but took a few weeks to sit, mellow and edit.
Truth be told, 2025 was tough. For many friends and peers it was a year of holding patterns and spinning wheels. And after a contemplative glass of bubbles over the end of year break, I think most of us were quite happy to see 2025 in the rear view mirror.
But there were a plenty of genuine gems to be celebrated this year. And this post is my musing on the silver linings, and the grit and hustle, that defined the past 12 months.
Sydney Python Community.
In roughly October of 2024, Renee and I had a brief phone call with the shared desire to reboot the Sydney Python community. SydPy hadn’t regularly gathered since 2020. It has, after all, been a rough few years for communities and I very much appreciate the many varied reasons communities have struggled to return.
In early 2025 we formed a rag-tag team of wonderful humans, Renee, Ali, Amanda, Sophie, Kai and I formed the new organising team to reboot the Sydney Python Community. Our first event was purely social - drinks at a pub the night before the Easter long weekend. I was anxious we’d have a complete flop with no attendance, but I was delighted to meet a handful of new folks excited for the community and events ahead. While Kai has quietly stepped back since, I want to say thank you for his early commitment, enthusiasm and support for the local community!
We’ve run every month since April, with a reliable format of two short talks + after drinks at a nearby pub. Agile Insights, our regular monthly sponsor has followed us wherever we travel to, as we’ve relied on the support of multiple venue hosts including Microsoft Reactor, The Onset and CSIRO to host our event.
Sydney Python has a few interesting community attributes that define both opportunities and challenges:
- Python is widely used across multiple sectors. Our monthly topics span sectors such as academia, science & research, AI & data science, as well as good ol’ application development. It’s difficult to define who the ‘audience’ is by modern popular sectors or job roles.
- We have an ethical standard when it comes to data sharing - we do not wish to ‘sell’ contact data like attendee lists to sponsors. This rules out several organisations who are unwilling to support technical communities without what we consider to be unethical marketing practices.
- We’ve yet to find a regular home. Primarily down to a combination of locations, scheduling and availability it hasn’t aligned well to have a regular repeat location for the community to gather every month.
We have a wonderful cross functional skill set across our organisers. Renee and I have focused more of our efforts on hustling sponsors and venues. Amanda and Ali have coordinated with our speakers to help them prepare and give them a great speaking introduction at the event. All of us have pulled together to host, facilitate and generally hustle each monthly event into existence. Something has to be said about a rag-tag team of volunteer organisers operating with high-trust and seemingly random availability to make a monthly meetup come together for the community.
Some open source communities are organised on the shoulders of one or two key individuals, but I’m relieved to say that Sydney Python is setup for success with a proper high-trust team effort going into 2026.
Watch this space for February…
Sydney Tech Leaders
I’ve been an attendee and member of the Sydney Tech Leaders community for about a decade now. Give or take. At one point, a speaker remarked about an attendee that was RSVP’d to three meetups that day (that was me, and yes I made those three meetups! Hiiii from the front row of the September 2015 event!).
In early 2025 I reached out to the organisers Anne-Marie and David to see if I could help co-organise. After a far-too-early breakfast coffee we agreed on some next-steps I could help with. See I’m a HUGE fan of Sydney Tech Leaders as an industry community, but in late 2024 and early 2025 the group hadn’t managed to run an event. Most certainly not a complaint - I'd interpreted it as a subtle flare for some spare elbow grease to make things happen.
We gathered in May, skipped April (due to Easter) and regrouped in May for an awesome workshop - a new format that had lower attendance but very very high positive feedback. Definitely an experiment worth piloting again!
Every now and then we come together for breakfast and brainstorm future topics, ideas and experiments. It's a great excuse for coffee!
A few of the driving forces that has enabled Sydney Tech Leaders to get back to strength were:
- A reliable monthly host - thanks to the advocacy and support of our friends at Atlassian, we've had offered to us a regular reliable home to host Sydney Tech Leaders. With venue and catering taken care of, we can focus efforts on theme, speakers & format!
- A plan-ahead momentum focused on announcing the next event’s theme at the conclusion of each month’s event. This gives speakers time to prepare, attendees time to schedule, and a general roll-forward momentum to the community’s growth.
- We moved from Meetup to Luma… a shift some would say was many years in the making. Meetup has been in the thralls of capitalism’s wave of enshitification for many years now and the move to an alternative RSVP platform has meant lower no-show RSVP’s and a drastically improved show rate helping us plan drinks and pizza budgets ahead of time!
As an aside: Meetup… wow… what a sad demise for a fantastic platform. For many many years women have been sharing stories of inappropriate conduct on Meetup making it an increasingly hostile environment to modern, positive culture tech communities. Logistically, meetup was full of no-show profiles, to the point I’m starting to suspect spam-bot RSVP’s would inflate our numbers in order to promote the ‘pay to attend’ features Meetup was trying to monetise.
While I don’t have evidence for the suspicions, I can say I’m delighted to be clear of meetup as a platform! The challenge now is what to do with the old group. Historical groups that aren’t ‘paid for’ can be claimed by ‘anyone’… and we don’t want Sydney Tech Leaders to be pivoted into some grift economy (read: crypto or AI slop) marketing outlet… so kudos to the product manager at Meetup.com who is incentivised on meetup retention!
</rant>
Anyway... watch this space in March!
Python Australia
After PyCon AU 2024, a gathering of meetup and community leaders occurred in a quiet hotel restaurant in Melbourne. Our goal was to pull together the various disparate python communities around Australia and start to act as a more unified ‘Australia’ group. The aspiration was to share insights, work on challenges together, and strengthen the nation-wide sector of people who use the Python programming language.
We started a discord. Held monthly office hours. Formed working groups to focus on pushing this new 'thing' forward.
Fast forward almost year, and ‘Python Australia’ was announced publicly as a lightning talk at PyCon AU 2025. The behind-the-scenes efforts are those of many contributors, monthly meetings, workshops, contributions and working groups.
Fast forward to that announcement and there is now a nationwide community discord at pythonaustralia.org, and we’re hosting social events, locale focused conversations and occasional event office hours (such as for PyCon AU!) Please join us - we’re welcoming of anyone who uses Python in any capacity (including our regional friends and international supporters).
PyCon AU 2025
The PyCon AU 2025 team formed in early 2025, with a goal to return the conference to Melbourne the same year. I returned as sponsorships & partnerships working with Nic to drive commercial sponsorship efforts. At about the same time, I also joined the official PyCon AU steering committee in an effort to add more hats to my juggling routine.
The 2025 conference was certainly a slog - organising an almost 600 person conference in under 9 months. But we made it across the finishing line to (post-lockdown) record attendance.
Nic and I also put our hands up to co-organise the Data & AI specialist track. We saw a gap and clear need for a practitioner-centric AI track focused on skills, practices and ethics. The resulting track was received by standing room attendance, and had a phenomenal CFP response that a large number of proposals were also invited to present during the main conference program. I want to give a shout out to Ned Letcher who’s technical advice helped us shape a genuinely phenomenal line up!
Unfortunately, Nic wasn’t able to see the remainder of PyCon AU 2025 in person due to a family emergency and I’m gutted he didn’t get to see the fruits of his labour first hand. Nic, if you manage to read this - thank you! Your skill, compassion, and hustle is so warmly appreciated in making 2025’s specialist track such an incredible success!
PyCon AU 2025 was the culmination of almost two years of hard work with Peter at the helm. Mate you absolutely sprinted two marathons and your calm and steady decision making led that charge with grace. Thank you, and relax well my friend!
PyCon AU 2026
In late 2024, a preliminary planning document for PyCon AU 2026 was authored. While I remain the lead author-now-director, the co-authors have since changed. This document was admittedly a mix of cathartic ‘how might I do this differently’, as well as aspirational ‘how might I do this differently’.
A few folks agreed the doc had legs, and so 2025 became the planning year for PyCon AU 2026. We contemplated almost 30 venues, considered 17+ locations, evaluated 11 locations, visited 8 sites and shortlisted 2 venues. Selecting a venue is an adventure. It was a mammoth but exciting effort to find the ‘right’ location for the conference we wanted to run, rather than be confined to the PyCon AU we could run if we were constrained to a specific city.
We also embarked on a rebranding journey with our partners at Lemonnade, a wonderful local brand and creative agency in Adelaide. See PyCon AU as a conference is 100% volunteer run and we’ve never quite had volunteers step up and give us a brand identity that fully represents our modern, professional and deeply technical community culture.
On stage in September I was both ecstatic and also utterly terrified to reveal the new ‘bulky-boi’ inspired brand and logo alongside our city, dates and location for 2026. Oh… and we snuck in early bird tickets on sale 11 months out from the conference. 🫳 🎤
Almost 9 months of planning culminated in raucous applause with ooh’s and ahh’s from the audience as the new brand animated, no, slithered across the slides. Only a few in the room know how much love and care went into that moment, but I’m so so SO encouraged by its reception by our community.
Standing alongside my co-directors Sophie (and Nic - in spirit) we were able to greet departing attendees as they ran up to us at the 2026 banner to show us their tickets to the conference - 11 months early. "Did I get the first one!?" was heard more than once <3
Yes, our friends at Lemonnade also had their own hiccups along the way 🐦🔥 but we had absolute trust as they recovered and rebounded to help us re-launch the full new 2026 website in November - ready for Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand.
Cannot speak highly enough of their work so please go say hi to them if you have a creative, brand or marketing project that might need their flare and expertise!
I've since been hustling PyCon AU 2026 at every turn. Kiwi PyCon, Yow! Sydney, and most recently at Everything Open.
Kiwi PyCon 2025
Just quietly, Wellington, New Zealand is my secret home away from home. I always love a visit and any excuse will do. Especially a Kiwi PyCon!
I choofed off in late November to cheer on a full cast of colourful characters (friends) who were running, volunteering and speaking at the conference. It was full of art, and music, planes, and Python. 🐔
My talk 'Brevity' was a very last minute entrant, an operational upgrade if you will, from narrowbody lightning talk to widebody session the night before. And yes, I did have to check the legality of playing the ATIS recording in New Zealand.
Kiwi PyCon 2027
I love our friends in NZ, and they organise a genuinely wonderful, warm, and welcoming community. But ‘ooooft’, they’ve also had a really rough couple of years, and I’m stoked to see them out the other side of that slog (see page 7). In good news, Linux Australia was able to provide financial continuity to NZ PUG and Kiwi PyCon; approximately and coincidentally to the tune of about 7 years of PyCon AU yearly profits!
Recovering from that situation takes enormous time and effort, and by November 2025, Kiwi PyCon hadn’t yet formed formal plans for their 2026 conference. So in concert with the conference organisers, we made two commitments from the PyCon AU side of things:
- Let’s make a “Kiwi Landing Pad” at PyCon AU 2026 in Brisbane, where delegates from New Zealand are warmly and proactively welcomed to the conference as a community space to gather.
- Let’s support Kiwi PyCon 2027 by helping share and potentially mentor 2027 core team organisers in how to run a regional PyCon. Chelsea has joined the PyCon AU 2026 organising team as a core team member with a focus on community and culture that we hope will have a slingshot effect on our trans-tasman partners.
I have a genuine soft spot for the community Python NZ has fostered all since my first Kiwi PyCon almost a decade ago in Dunedin (2016). I genuinely wish them success regrouping towards 2027 and beyond!
——
So… yes. 2025 for me was a year of communities. Rebooting, regrouping, gathering and planning. Some might say scheming too.
Look. Shit happens. There, I said it. And when it does happen, communities come together. But community doesn’t just ‘happen’ by itself. There’s a hustle that happens when the going gets tough.
There is no perfectly articulated conclusion to this post. Genuine long-standing communities take years of curation, care and attention to build. Through thick and thin, open source tech communities survive and thrive through the years on the shoulders of volunteers who show up and take proactive actions to help make ’community’ happen.
We’re in it for the long haul and 2025 was a stepping stone for growing technical community to survive and thrive in the years to come!