2026-10-23 –, Room 332
Even though finishers will nearly always get the credit, starters are the secret power that changes the world. From the US civil rights movement to the push for community-controlled social media, finishers have always relied on dozens or hundreds of starters to lay the groundwork for them. We should do more to reward starters in open source.
Starting new things is undervalued. We love to reward people for finishing things and getting to the end of things, even though sometimes that’s easier. The really hard part is starting, whether we’re talking about software projects, creating new habits or changing the world. Without new approaches and new perspectives, our world becomes change-resistant and it becomes easier to let the biggest and most comfortable entities do what they’ve always done.
Even though finishers will nearly always get the credit, starters are the secret power that changes the world. From the US civil rights movement to the push for community-controlled social media, finishers have always relied on dozens or hundreds of starters to lay the groundwork for them. We should do more to reward starters in open source. In this talk I will cover why many of us shy away from starting new things and why you personally might want to do more starting.
Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Executive Director at the Python Software Foundation which serves as the non-profit steward of the Python programming language. 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 lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.