Pycon NL keynote: sustaining open source for the future - Georgi Ker¶
(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Pycon NL conference in Utrecht, NL).
This year is the first community-organized Pycon NL: hurray!
Most of us use open source as users. It is free! But all those open source projects only exist because someone started it and because someone maintains it.
“Care became contagious”: she told the story about someone in Mumbay, India that started to clean up plastic waste that covered the whole beach. He and a 84 year old neighbor. Slowly other people joined in. Then a lot more. Care became contagious!
Python started when Guido van Rossum made a new language in his Christmas holiday.
But projects like this are fragile. The beach cleanup (almost?) stopped after 109 weeks: administrative lethargy, heckling, etc. (She said it stopped, but I guess it almost stopped, as later on she had photos of a clean beach with newly-hatched turtles). If you start a nice open source project, you’re probably not thinking my dream is to answer Github issues for the next 20 years.
Sustainability is not endurance. Sustainability is regeneration. Joining a community, but also having the option to leave (just as an example).
Open source is safe. In open source project, code is public, knowledge is shared. A community. The community is the infrastructure. The community is the reason the code is trustworthy.
The Python software foundation holds the trademarks and licenses. Infrastructure like python.org, pypi, the documentation website. It hosts/helps conferences.
Pypi, the Python package index. 81.000 requests per second. And there are only two full-time security people working on it. Seth Larson and Mike Fiedler. We can call them heroes, but we might also look at Python’s growth compared to the growth of its human infrastucture.
Our human infrastructure hasn’t grown with Python’s growth. And AI is making it more urgent. AI can consume whatever the community has to offer or has ever offered. Without giving something back. AI companies capture our value…
Public spaces are not self-maintaining. They need funding and public responsibility.
In 2025, the United Nations published the UN Open Source Principles. Countries are taking note. For example, Germany has the Sovereign Tech Fund, that invests directly in the people behind the code, supporting maintainers, community managers and technical writers.
She started Open community Leadership, helping communities create future contributors and leaders. The foundation is POPCOM: participation (how to join), ownership (how to gain responsibility), purpose (why people stay), connection (how relationships form), opportunity (how contributors grow), mentorship (how communities reproduce).
Regeneration takes people, time and money.
Open source is better together.
Unrelated photo from our Nelen&Schuurmans company trip to Cologne/Köln in Germany. Extreme low water in the Rhine: the ‘beach’ on the left should be fully submerged.