Published on 10 February 2026
Last year, I was on the organizing committee for Kiwi PyCon, the main Python conference held in New Zealand. Python is the most popular programming language in the world - this wasn’t a herpetology conference. This was part of my role and responsibilities as a board member for PythonNZ, which I joined because I wanted to help the Python here out, and to make new friends and learn. I had another motive, too. I wanted an academic track for Kiwi PyCon, so that researchers and students could submit academic papers or conference abstracts and have them count towards their publication records.
Today, I finished that task by publishing the Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. You can read them here: https://zenodo.org/records/18516794.
All in all, this took a bit more time than I expected. In the lead up to Kiwi PyCon, we had to plan how who would be on the academic committee, eventually settling on me, Devi Ganesan, and Chelsea Finnie, who provided much needed support to keep the work going. We decided to publish only abstracts for the conference, not full papers, as previous experiences at PyConAU suggested that reviewing papers and submitting them to JOSS was too much effort. We sent out marketing materials for the event, wrote up a CFP, emailed university programs to share it, and organized a small group of peer reviewers. In the end, we had very few submissions - just three. Two of them were chosen to also be part of the main program track, and so were presented at the conference.
These abstracts have now been published on Zenodo, complete with DOIs and references and some light editing. You can read and cite them here:
One of the published abstracts was, somewhat embarassingly, mine. I presented on similar work to what I had presented a week before in Rio for the OpenForum Assembly, on Open Sustainable Technology.
You can also see a recording of my presentation here.
I am amazed that I seem as cogent as I seem, as I was very out of it that day. I didn’t make it to the second day of the conference, as jetlag and an unknown arbovirus knocked me out flat for the next week.
This is my first time I have been an editor for a proceedings, not counting my failed attempt in 2012 to publish ULAB proceedings, published ten years later by others who took up the mantle here. It was surprisingly easy to do on Zenodo, although a bit finicky to publish both the abstracts and the compiled proceedings together.
Thanks to Devi for being coeditor, for Chelsea for the encouragement, and to the Kiwi PyCon 2025 team for organizing a brilliant conference.
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