Deb Nicholson is the Executive Director at the Python Software Foundation, the non-profit steward of the Python programming language. She is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. After years of local organizing on free speech, marriage equality, government transparency and access to the political process, she joined the free software movement in 2006. She has previously served the open source ecosystem through her work at the Open Source Initiative, Software Freedom Conservancy, and the Open Invention Network. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award and the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for her efforts to broaden the free and open source software movement. She is also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Let's Future-Proof Python”
If you're lucky, you're part of a big important project (like Python) that is very likely to outlive you. That might make it feel like you have all the time in the world to do everything you want to do, but you never know how much time you have. That might sound a little grim, but it's important to accept that if we're going to plan for the future. Even though it feels very, very personal while you're doing it, community work is not entirely about you. It's about what we leave for the next generation of Pythonistas. I want us to start planning for the far future of the Python ecosystem today.
In this talk, we'll discuss future-oriented leadership which means addressing issues as you find them, spearheading thorough solutions that don't leave a mess for the next person and always, always planning for someone else to take over your work one day. With a forward-looking mindset and some strategic planning, we can make sure that the next generation (and the one after that and the one after that) will always have a robust, open source Python eco-system to rely on. This talk is for all mortal Python contributors.