Today I facilitated the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington PGSA Special General Meeting, where we adopted a new constitution, elected some new executive committee members, and said thanks to those who were rolling off of the committee - including me.
I’ve been helping with the PGSA since I first landed, if at first in a minimal, arm’s length kind of way. I knew when I got here that it would be tempting to help with the PGSA, because I like organizing and helping students, but that it would be exactly the sort of job that would take a lot of my time, wouldn’t be paid work, and would get in the way of my thesis and my other organizing, such as with CURIOSS. Last October, after a year of attending events and meeting fellow postgrads, I realized at the AGM that there was a constitutional issue involving the amount of postgrads on the exec. So, I volunteered to run during the meeting, and ended up being elected.
For the last six months, I’ve been helping out where I could as an exec – helping to figure out strategy, advising on how to handle negotiations with VUWSA, the student association that includes undergrads and which was trying to take over all of PGSA’s activities, serving on various faculty boards where a postgrad voice from PGSA was missing, and organizing and attending some events. Today was the capstone of that, as I helped shepherd through the new constitution, something that was mandated by the Societies Act here. I helped with PythonNZ’s new constitution, too, as they went through the same process. The SGM today was a bit difficult to facilitate, as there was some excellent and very difficult questions to answer about how the new constitution is going. I think we managed. All of the motions passed.
I ran for the position of VP Academic/Research, but iff (if and only if) no one else ran. Thankfully, someone else did. So, for now, I find myself as of this afternoon without a position. I am now just a member of the PGSA again. I look forward to doing what I can on Te Here Tāura Rangahau Faculty of Graduate Research (FGR) board, and on Te Wāhanga a Manaia Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) board, and others. But, from now, the exec meetings are optional – which is great, because it means I can focus on my thesis work. I’m happy about that.
I’m looking forward to being able to attend the coffee meetups, and just saying hi.
After the last Wikicon Aotearoa in Ōtautahi Christchurch in May, 2025, I made the decision to change the license on all of my iNaturalist photos to enable easy reuse for Wikipedia and elsewhere. I am not a professional photographer; while I have sold art before, and while I have had showings of my work, I don’t prioritize returns on my photography. I am just happy to see it used.
Which is why I was excited to get a Google Alert a few weeks ago that my name had been published somewhere on the internet. In this case, I was pinged that I had been mentioned in an article called Rat-free forest offers rare boost for kōkako north of Rotorua. The article talks about how an indigenous Māori-led conservation project in the north of the North Island is doing exceptionally well at eradicating predators that imperil the native birds here in New Zealand. The focal species for this project is the Kōkako, a beautiful endemic that has a haunting, organ-like call. I’ve only heard it once, on Tiritiri Matangi near Auckland, where I managed to snap some photos of a Kōkako as it munched on some Taupata on the coast.
I didn’t explicitly allow RNZ to copy this image. They didn’t ask. They didn’t need to, as it is freely available under a CC-BY license on iNaturalist. I don’t profit on this work. That’s OK. I profit in other ways - my work was part of a movement of people trying to save this rare species, and through having access to free, good imagery, the journalists were able to make the project come alive to a wider audience. That’s profit enough.
I arrived in Wellington with fresh eyes and a spring in my step, back in 2024. I almost immediately signed up and gave a talk at Kiwi Pycon 2025, where I also volunteered a bit and helped out setting things up. The community seemed amazing - a great group of pythonistas who worked on furthering the language and building a lasting, fun community here in Pōneke Wellington. Some of my friends from the before times were also at the conference - most notably, Chris Neuegebauer and Deb Nicholson, my former boss at the OSI and now the president of the Python Software Foundation.
When elections for PythonNZ occurred, I decided to run. Somehow, disturbingly, I was elected. So, from 2024 until today, I was on the PythonNZ committee. While I was there, we dealt with the normal rigamarole for these sorts of nonprofits - making a new constitution, dealing with finances, having long committee meetings where people talked over each other. It wasn’t always fun, but it was rewarding. I learned a lot.
We also planned and hosted Kiwi Pycon 2025, which was an entire conference in itself. Together with help from Chelsea Finnie and Devi Ganesan, we produced the first academic proceedings and academic track the conference had ever had - small, but a good start. I gave a talk. I got an arbovirus. I missed half the conference. What I saw was still great.
The time commitment balooned to a year and a half, due to changes in our constitution and how we decided to do the fiscal years going forward. So, today, at the AGM, I rolled off of the committee. I am now strangely noe a member of any nonprofit boards – wait, no, I am now on the EC for the PGSA. Good lord. Well, it’s one down, anyway.
I was grateful for the help and support I encountered being on this board, and for the friendship and care of those involved. We didn’t always agree - it’s a board - but it was well worth the effort.
During my tenure, I attended not a single Wellington meetup. I wish I could say I didn’t know about it, but the truth is that I live just far away that driving into Wellington is difficult, and because someone in my house is immunocompromised, we mask everywhere. Going into a meetup at night is never on my list of things I want to do. It’s difficult. I wish masking were easier, but it’s not for me.
PythonNZ isn’t just about the meetups - Kiwi Pycon is great, by itself. It’s also about the wider community and the Discord and so on. I felt honoured to have been voted in and to have been able to serve.
Now to take a much needed nap before I work on my thesis.
TAXACOM is a mailing list that started some time in the forever ago, and ran until it was suddenly cut off at the end of 2025. It was one of the primary places for discussions of taxanomy and nomenclature as a listserve or public forum. I, together with Shinichi Nakahara and my mentor from the Royal Society Te Apārangi Neil Birrell, restarted it as a Google Group to allow continued discussion.
I’m hoping that we’ll end up having more good conversations in the years to come. I’m also hoping to institute the Contributor Covenant as a Code of Conduct, too.
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:
Littauer, R., & Ganesan, D. (2026, February 10). Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings. Kiwi PyCon 2025, Wellington, NZ. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18516794
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.
Littauer, R. (2026). Mapping the Open Source Ecosystem for Climate Science and Sustainable Technology. Kiwi PyCon 2025 Academic Track Proceedings, 4–5. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18597029
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.
