Building Community

This year, we made a few subtle changes to the way we approached building community and enforcing our code of conduct. This post addresses some of those changes, and includes a transparency report from our community team on the enforcement of our Code of Conduct.
From the outset we had a handful of goals in mind:

• Create a vibrant and energising environment where people were encouraged to be themselves
• Foster opportunities for building lasting connections across different communities, industries and geographies
• Ensure that the code of conduct continues to be upheld, and enforced if need be.

Importantly, it was important to us that our culture wasn’t just defined by ‘what we don’t do here’, but also that it is remembered by what we do do, and what we celebrate, and what we’re proud of. Crudely summarised as ‘more carrot than stick’.

Physical spaces

The physicality of a conference space defines how people ‘flow’. PyCon AU has run at many different venues over the years, and the proximity of rooms shapes the interactions everyone has. In some venues, attendees bump into one another regularly changing rooms that are closely situated. In others, more time is needed to move between more dispersed locations. A conference cannot change their venue layout, but the venue selection influences what environment they’re able to build.

We selected the venue this year in part because it gave us closely proximate presentation spaces, along with nearby breakout ‘open space’ and quiet rooms.

The combination of which meant that pop-up emergent community moments like BoF’s were much more easily self-organised.

Outreach and invitation

Organising the conference on a longer time horizon gave us the ability to do more intentional outreach to new members of the community who might not have considered attending a PyCon AU. A longer running CFP allowed us to do more outreach, and we went along to many many, MANY meetups and user groups over the past 12 months as well. For example you might have seen us at DDD Melbourne which is not traditionally a Python-centric community. By reaching outside our existing channels, we got to invite many new awesome PyCon AU attendees, some of whom went on to present at their first PyCon AU too!

Moments of connection

We had a handful of puzzles or challenges to solve during the conference. These weren’t just for puzzles-sake, they were each designed to create more authentic and less ‘tacky’ ways of connecting with other attendees.

While we had a few more planned, we ultimately refined and published four puzzles during the conference - all of which were solved. This post has more on puzzles, but I’ll touch briefly on the design intent here:

• The Badge challenge encouraged attendees to share ‘three random words’ on the back of their badge - allowing groups to solve the puzzle together. This is a much better icebreaker than ‘what do you do’.
• The sponsor challenge gave sponsors a two digit code to give away, and enough codes collected should allow you to solve the clue. We picked a solve word that didn’t require all clues, so attendees had some flexibility on how they wanted to engage with sponsors without requiring they connect with every single exhibitor.
• Two different puzzles were released on Thursday and Saturday respectively, each encouraging the sharing of clues found in discord to connect asynchronously as well.

Together with long-standing PyCon AU traditions like BoF’s (link) and community dinners (link), we wanted this conference to be a moment of connection and delight for everyone who attended - especially if it was their first time.

A friendly community

During our volunteer briefing, we cover a LOT of things. But we emphasise a few key points:

• The highest impact thing you can do at the conference is put energy and good will into the world.
• You don’t need to solve conflict or escalation (there’s a number on your badge you call instead)
• Point people towards the rego desk, who can then escalate to an organiser if need be.

What this meant was we had a large cohort of friendly and energetic faces in yellow lanyards who were tasked with creating an awesome environment. Yes, they were also handing out lanyards, distributing t-shirts and helping recording talks too, but with clearer social permission on adapting with good intent and energy.

Our community team, formerly the ‘safety team’, were one important part of a wider approach on building community at the conference. Building on their thankfully quiet year in 2025, our brief to the community team was to not just be there for enforcement - but to also go and create moments of delight for attendees. To be the people that sparked new BoF ideas, who encouraged others to put their hand up for lighting talks, and generally live the values of the conference community we cared about building.

Code of Conduct

Our Code of Conduct exists for a reason - unfortunately there are times we need to deal with undesirable behaviour. It’s there to help codify what behaviour we don’t tolerate in the community, and to give us a framework for ensuring everyone is safe and welcome. We always have, and will continue to, enforce the Code of Conduct when needed.

Therefore, the community team also carried a mobile phone 24/7 during the conference, and were functionally ‘on call’ if someone needed to raise a concern relating to the code of conduct. The number was printed on the back of attendee badges, as well as available on the website.

We are also very happy to share the community transparency report that has also been published today, alongside this post.