Transcript: Thibaud Colas - 2025 DSF Board Nominations

Well you can.

Carlton Gibson joined us everybody by Will Vincent.

Hello, Will.

Today we've got with us Thibaut Colles, who's a DSF board member and Wagtail Core team member and all around Django hero.

Hello, Tebo.

How are you?

I'm doing good.

Freshly back from DramaCon US.

Good to be here.

So maybe we could talk about you're a new board member.

Or what do you want to say about the upcoming elections?

And then we want to ask about what it's been like one year into your term.

I guess um can maybe start a few years back, like what it feels like to uh go through the journey of becoming a board member.

So for me, I work at uh an agency in the US called Torchbox.

Uh we do quite a bit of open source at Torchbox, but it's definitely only one part of the many things that you do as a dev there.

Um and it took me, I guess, quite a few years to understand that with open source, uh, there's plenty that's happening outside of um those jobs.

And um, I guess find different ways to be involved as a contributor and then through the maintenance and then leadership.

So I guess the the Django board specifically took me quite a while to realize that even the DSF was a thing separate from the Django project, and that uh it had uh elections going for its leadership positions.

And um, I guess I think once you get there, you start to project yourself in those kinds of roles.

You wonder if you have the time and so on.

And um, yeah, I guess the time is right now for the board for the next year.

So uh very keen that we do a better job at explaining what the DSF and the board does, and uh also practically the step-by-step process of becoming a board member.

Um, yeah, where should I where should I spend more time?

What do you think is helpful to know about?

And the current election is for four of those positions.

Yep, right.

So it's quite a you know, quite a big opportunity for people.

So for me, my involvement only started uh with the DSF about a year ago with the board elections then, and uh board has seven members, but we follow a staggered term, which is why last year we had three people up for elections, three three positions, and this year four.

And um, yeah, I guess we're the group that gets to decide the direction of the foundation, at least where the funding goes, how actively we look for it, how we coordinate other people.

So those four new members that's a majority on the board, effectively, they'll be able to have quite a big say in um where the DSF spends its time and resources.

Uh yeah.

And Thiba, you're currently on the board.

So I mean, what's it so I I'm interested in Django, I want to help uh push Django forward.

What am I signing up for if I say if I run for the board?

Uh yeah, so I guess in my mind, there is the business as usual of uh operating a medium-sized international charity uh foundation, and then there is things that you might want to do on top of that as someone who's keen to move forward the community.

So, like day-to-day, the biggest thing the board does is uh super simple is meeting once a month to decide on uh grants where we spend our funding, um, any current events, how we respond to them as the boards, uh, day-to-day management of the foundation.

And um, the the biggest thing that the foundation does by far, just to be super clear, is uh funding the fellows, fellows who are paid employees of the foundation who work on Django.

The board itself, aside from hiring the fellows and making sure they keep happy, we don't manage them day to day.

That's separate.

So, yeah, as a board member, once this kind of business as usual is taken care of, you get to decide okay, do I want to spend more time on the fundraising side of things?

Do I want to spend time with initiatives like Django Girls, the Django cons, Django.space to achieve specific goals within our community?

Do I want to go for even more blue sky things?

So for me, for example, the blue sky things are uh making Django as accessible as possible, reducing the cardboard footprint of Django projects out there, and uh yeah, just the marketing side of things, making Django more competitive with other frameworks.

Um, yeah, will your blue sky things I assume were quite different by then?

Or maybe there's some similarities?

I think I agree with your overview and the fact that you have those things accessibility, marketing, global footprint.

I I strongly think everyone on the board should have blue sky areas that they want to do in addition to the day-to-day, because it can be easy to get caught up in the day-to-day things.

And one of the things I noticed about the board is that most people don't know about it, and even people at Django cons who know that a board exists have no idea what it does on a regular basis.

And so so as with many things in Django, there's so many ro roles that people are doing that don't have any recognition or acknowledgement.

So uh that's one thing I've tried to do is talk about what the board does because I realize how would anyone know if we if we on the board don't talk about it?

But so what was different when I joined, well, one thing was we had one-year terms, so we added the staggered two-year terms because we noticed that uh it was really it took a year to understand what the board actually was doing day to day, and then that second year to start implementing and making changes.

So staggered terms was better.

It also with annual elections, sometimes people would show up, finally get their feet wet, and then maybe not be um elected in the next election, right?

So even as someone on the board thought, this is a great person, I want them to be around, they you know didn't market themselves or or whatever reason, and so someone else came on the board and they didn't really get a chance to make an impact on the board.

So that was a big reason for the two-year terms.

But I I'm curious how it is now because when I was on the board, there were three there were three roles.

So there was president, well, four roles president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer, and then there were three other members.

And the president, so for me it was Frank Wiles and then Anna.

Um they did the most work by far.

The secretary did did a bit of work.

The treasurer did a lot of work.

The treasurer um before me was a little bit of a like the professor of the dark arts at you know, Hogwarts, because the role was just unmanageable.

And so that was one of the things I just wrote about it that we on the board were able to make it a little more manageable, I hope.

Um anyway, so yeah, I agree.

I think the board does a lot of things, and I think you should go onto the board and be on the board having at least one blue sky area in addition to the day today, because the day today can easily consume your your time, and I think it's also less um less rewarding to just be keeping the lights on for Django rather than having initiatives that you want to push um and see through.

But Carlton, well, you know, I one of the big things I noticed, and T Bode, I'd like you to talk about this, is that the fellows and the board are very separate.

I mean, the fellow, you know, the treasurer pays the fellows and the fellows write reports, but there's a fellowship working group that is ostensibly is in charge of the fellows.

The board doesn't tell the fellows what to do.

So, you know, if not for the fact that I knew Carlton so well, I feel like it's easy for there to be a little bit of a lack of communication between the board and the fellows.

You were trusted to get on, but there wasn't any supervision really, there wasn't that much oversight.

You'd communicate with the people on the forum, you communicate with the contributors on the on the list, but there wasn't well, there hasn't been any direction.

I think that's something that you know a lot of people have voiced.

We need more direction to be able to push forward.

We need to solve this this problem of a sort of technical vacuum.

And so the fellows are very the fellowship program is is structured such that the fellows can continue, they can keep the framework going, and we can keep making the small changes.

Like, you know, if you look over the last few versions, there's been loads of nice features gone in, really nice quality of life and performance improvements and you know, stuff with the ORM deepening, but there haven't been these kind of major headline features, you know, Django task tasks is hopefully coming in this release or the next release.

Um, so that's like the biggest one, but that that's kind of been missing for quite a long while, I think.

And so one thing I think as an ex-fellow that I'm excited about is a push to try and provide more technical direction towards Django to help us push forward again.

Uh to me, it's also not just direction, but simply speaking, coordination between the different groups.

I think uh the fellows, you know, they're hired primarily to look after Django, the the code base board primarily to look after the foundation, steering council, we've not discussed yet, have their own remit as well.

And uh it's not really like spelled out for any of those roles, how you're meant to collaborate with other people, plainly speaking.

And um, I guess as a board member in particular, you know, it takes quite a bit of time to get up and going with your own role, let alone consider how other people can work with you.

So, yeah, you mentioned with the stagger tons not being a thing, like it definitely takes three, six months to onboard as a new board member, and by then you can decide okay, like how do I actually work with other people?

How do I make like my own things happen?

Um, so yeah, uh this kind of coordination definitely requires, I think, upfront thinking of how those groups on paper are meant to work together.

Because in my experience, uh, you know, it's not decided you don't just come in as president, vice president, secretary, treasurer.

You know, you sort of have the first meeting and it's you know, there's the old board members are there for half the time, and and then you come in and then you quickly decide on who's doing what role without understanding what it means to be necessarily uh so maybe you could speak to the how do you see the four positions and um how might someone new to the board uh you know put their hand up for one of those roles?

Yeah, I

It's very similar to what you just said.

Spend 15 minutes on the previous board's meeting going through, you

know, the day-to-day, and then we had this thing coming up where we had to decide our roles.

And yeah, I guess

Yeah, unfortunately.

Uh, each of the four roles we're gonna write proper documentation for each of them, we know some of which we already have, but making sure that people have access to this documentation ahead of this actual meeting, making sure that uh if multiple people want the same position, they can prepare statements ahead of those meetings so that they get to you know project themselves and so that uh next phase is the other board members voting.

Okay, I think this or that person should be secretary, this or that president, um, in case multiple people want the same role.

So, yeah, for me, I uh was very keen to be president uh in my first year as board member and uh didn't make it.

Uh so you know I want to make sure that the new people that we get to uh appoint this year, they have uh all the resources they can get to to give it their best job.

It's and now let's now let's now let's decide.

Well I mean uh so so Haim and I served together, and I know that one of the things we worked on before he was president, and then he was president I think for a year while I was there, is trying to offload some of the responsibilities of the president because the president has a lot of administrative and kind of duties that consume them rather than being able to I don't know, lead or project.

Um so I guess what what is your take on how the president role is now and then you know if you're if if you if you or someone else takes it on, what do you think it should be doing?

I g I guess to me, first of all, I I I should say that um I definitely feel like you know, we talk a lot about uh the burden of volunteering in open source.

Um to me, it does feel like if you go for being the president of an organization like the DSF, you kind of should know what you're getting yourself into and uh have some amount of time set settled aside for that.

So yeah, I definitely feel like first of all, you should expect coming in to spend, I don't know, two to five hours a week, maybe on that kind of role.

And it doesn't feel too appropriate, then I guess we have to think of um options to reduce that.

Um, executive director.

We talked about this quite a bit.

The other oh no, don't laugh at the same time.

So the whole board delegating their responsibility to volunteers has been working quite well, room for improvement, you know, but still.

Um so yeah, I guess to me, at the end of the day, presidents their responsibility first and foremost should be to coordinate all the other people, make sure they're happy with what they're doing.

And that's like about an hour or two, hopefully.

Carlton.

You mentioned the working group.

So we need to be the board needs to be more directive rather than executive, if that may like that they need to be able to say, okay, we'll set the direction, but then the working groups go off and do it.

How how is the working groups going?

Because there was the the several I saw several pull requests on the on the GitHub repository to set them up, but I don't know if they're they've managed to get full of the website.

Well, can

So we had this discussion, you know, modeled on the PSF, the Python Software Foundation, because their board does like decides what other people do, and then they have working groups that do the doing, and sometimes board members are on the working groups.

From my experience, we we recognized that the board you know couldn't do everything that needed to be done, and so we tried to take some steps to have working groups, but I think people just didn't didn't appreciate how much time it was gonna take.

So if people were thinking, oh, it's one hour a week, the amount of that amount of time is just enough to catch up on emails.

It's not enough for a board member to oversee a working group, let alone to push it through.

So at least when I was there, I felt like most of the working groups stalled out because you need more time just to manage them.

And then sometimes it becomes easier as a board member just to do it yourself, which reinforces the bad pattern we're trying to get out of.

So I think what you were saying, Tebo, about expectations around commitment.

I think we do a disservice by saying, you know, one hour a month, when I think the reality is it's at least an hour a week and probably more like two and up, depending on the position.

But you you tell us how it is now.

And if you don't, if you can't do that, then there's not much of a point in being a director at all.

Um and yeah, definitely one hour a week, I think is a good, good actual like minimum.

Uh yeah, the working group, um, they I think we've had quite a rough start, to be completely honest.

Um, it takes a while, I guess, to get going with the new concept and find people out there who are interested in the specific groups, make sure that you know they they work well together.

Uh, but we do have um I think two, two, three working groups that are working reasonably well at the moment.

Uh, first one that I've uh kept tabs of that has started is the social media working group.

And we've had quite a few people involved with that that had no prior DSF like foundation involvement before.

And uh the latest one that I've been involved with somewhat is the uh fundraising working group, which is a much more critical topic.

And again, we have a few board members involved, obviously, but we have two to three people who again um pre uh Stephanie have no involvement with other DSF activities.

Um, so yeah, I I guess uh one thing that I really like, aside from getting those extra people on board, is also the um added transparency to the process.

Uh, it's very clear who's a member of those working groups, it's very clear how they are meant to report to the uh board and the rest of the DSF, and also it's very clear what they're responsible for.

So it should make it quite a bit easier for people to understand exactly um how the foundation functions and for people to find the specific areas where they can help.

Because oh yes, I want to you know help shout about Django.

Well, okay, I can join the the social media group.

I think that's been amazing, by the way.

The feature Fridays, I'm loving, I'm loving the um the fact that the the social media accounts are actually active and they've got a personality, and sometimes they retoot, or sometimes they reply, or sometimes and it's like okay, that's not just the blog, and then the blog posts have been more exciting than the feature Fridays posts have been, you know, so it all just adds to a bit of oh that actually Django, there's something going on with Django.

In your mind, is there a minimum level of active activity or involvement that makes sense to put yourself forward?

Because on the one hand, you don't you certainly don't need to be a core contributor to Django to be on the board.

And in fact, we probably want less of that.

But sometimes when I was there, you'd get people who say, I just heard about Django, you know, in my college class and I'd like to be on the board.

And that's you know, that I feel like we do a disservice by not saying there is some level of engagement probably required before you can be a serious candidate.

I guess in my mind, uh I do feel like uh it's a good challenge for us if we have so much interest that we have to help signpost things a bit and make it clear who has what experience.

So I love that challenge.

I'll I'll happily go for the 30 candidates on the ballot if if we we do want to get there.

I I think I guess just uh setting expectations, uh, I'd want to see people who have about a year's worth of awareness of what Django and the DSF are, and also see themselves uh being able to commit two hours a week, say, for the next two years.

So I guess it's people who have enough past to see, understand what we're doing, and also enough that they know they're gonna be sticking around with this for quite a bit.

All right, Carlton, you take it.

One is to run for the board, to be a board member.

The other is it perhaps a step down from that is to find a particular working group that you want to engage with and join that.

So you know, we compare ourselves with the PSF quite a bit.

PSF has uh 20 times our budget, but you know, we still want to kind of meet their level of visibility and uh operational effectiveness.

So um, yeah, I would say rather than just looking for a specific working group, also just proposing the ones that are missing.

Uh, marketing is a big one for us that's missing at the moment.

And I think there's quite a few things as well around uh individual members of the foundation, making sure that we make the most of people who are keen to be involved with Django longer term.

Um yeah, that's the two ones that come to mind.

Okay.

So if I'm thinking about running for the board, I'm not, but like hypothetically, someone someone is, and they say on the marketing front, you know, the Django project website needs a redesign because it is a little bit old.

So this is something Carlton and I worked with um Paolo and his agency quite a lot on, and we didn't quite get it over the line.

How would you see that playing out in a way where it actually happens?

Like what what would someone need to do in terms of is that something that a a board member should do?

Is that a working group thing?

Um, because the problem with Django is always we're volunteers and committees, and sometimes things can get stopped even when a majority of people want to push forward.

It's one of the challenges with Django being so community driven.

I I think it's a big asset for us compared to the the WordPress BDFLs of the of the world, but uh still is a challenge that community-driven means coordination.

So I would say like if you want to achieve this specific thing, the the best uh thing you can do by far is still to try and get elected and get that seat at the decision table, so to speak.

Obviously, you know, we don't want every single uh possible improvement to Django out there to require someone be elected to achieve it, but it does help in making sure that it has the right visibility in the decision-making circles and also that uh we are in the right place to find the funding for it, should that require funding.

So the website, for example, that strikes me as something that should be achievable within the working group.

We do have a website working group that's in the process of being formed.

Uh, but I would assume that it will be sped up dramatically if we had someone at the board level making this their priority.

Because you you've got something to say when you in your in your candidate statement.

It's like that this is what I actually want to go and push forward.

Yeah, definitely.

Personally, I also like people to be quite critical, to be completely honest, and hold the previous boards to account on okay, this is what I think we should be doing, and this is where I see the gaps.

And uh yeah, I think that people will react very well if you identify gaps that are correct compared to uh how they perceive it from their side.

So, someone listening, if you're not an individual member already, you don't get a vote.

You should apply to become an individual member.

But I guess this this episode is targeted at those 200 people and then also at people who don't know that there's this individual step that um you can be nominated for.

And one of the primary perks is voting on board elections.

sure we'll

discuss soon after.

Uh, definitely those people being able to understand what the foundation does, Django's direction, and also obviously registering to then uh be eligible for voting.

That's quite critical for us.

So I think the visibility and just of how it all works is important.

So I'll put a I'll put a link to that.

The bar is um I don't want to say lower, but it's individual members are meant to be the whole community.

So you it can be community, it can be um code, it it's a much broader, and I would say it maybe a little bit less requirements than to be a board member.

I don't know.

What what do you two think of making a distinction between the two?

That's enough, right?

It's not it's meant to be much more than just the the code side of it because the community is much more than that.

Why are we the software foundation?

We should be the community foundation

first and foremost.

So uh definitely these days we try hard to recognize people who contribute to the community, not just the software.

And um, I guess by the book, our definition is uh recognizing contributions that are substantial or uh sustained.

Sustained meaning you do it over time.

So these days the cutoff is kind of you've done something positive, tutorial, conference attendance, conference speaker, organizer over maybe like a six-month period that's substantial or uh sustained enough for us to say, okay, great, let's have you on board.

Well, you can.

Okay.

That's that's how it goes.

That's one of the board duties in a meeting is looking at at least when I was on the board, there'd be two to eight people nominated, and we'd kind of look around the room and be like, does anyone know these people?

Okay.

If we do, you know, they're probably in.

If we don't, let's ask someone about it.

Um, because yeah, there needs to there's some minimum of involvement in the community.

Have you got a question on the same point or

Because I think

Be the change.

Um, so up to an hour a week or more.

I guess uh plain and simple nominations of individual members, grants that require our approval, any other ongoing business with sponsors that might require the board's approval, and then um topics depend quite a bit based on what the DSF does year to the year, whether that's the the Malcolm Trednik prize, whether that's DjangoCon support, the elections, the campaigns we do changes quite a bit.

Yeah.

So it was just a complete not not a good use of time.

So one of the things we changed is we said, okay, right, we if we approve it, we have a set amount for, you know, like Western Europe versus and in the US versus globally, um, just so we didn't because people would can request different amounts, and then you're playing a game of like, who are these people?

And I would have to email someone at the PSF because often they would submit there.

And you know, usually it's okay, but especially if it's in a location where it's somewhat remote, you know, how do you know that it's legitimate?

Um so I so that those absolutely should be async, and we did shrink those down, I think, to 10, 10, 15 minutes at the end through those things, but it really doesn't need to be discussed in the meeting at all, I don't think.

So it could be worse, is what I'm trying to tell you.

It was worse.

Uh for now, we do have our assistant to the board, Catherine, who helps us a lot with this kind of research ahead of the meetings.

So uh yeah, it is it is going it is going uh well.

It could go better, but we do have these kinds of tasks done up front rather than doing the meeting.

We don't have to, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a little bit better than it was before.

That's that's how we roll.

Thibaut, you said two things that I want to pick up on.

You talked about we've mentioned twice the steering council, and but as a way into the steering council, you just said something about um contributing code being too hard, and it should for to getting code into Django being too hard.

And there's this massive trade-off between we want new features, we want new new stuff, but also the stability guarantees that Django has to provide because people want to pip update it and know that their deployment isn't gonna break.

And we've got these this this trade-off.

What's your kind of take?

How how how could we change the way we're doing it to make make development in Django more dynamic?

My my concern in trying to move things along faster is that we do need to make sure Django as a framework for Django users stays competitive compared to the other tools out there.

Uh just a simple example in Python, one of the big things these days is uh type annotations, and I think Django has yet to find its position on this.

It's feeling like it's uh starting to be a bit late for Django to decide whether types are in or out and what to do about it.

So just yeah, I'll leave it there.

Uh practically speaking, I I do feel like we want Django to be competitive for its users, and also as far as contributors, people have a finite amount of time they get to spend on open source, and they can't tell their boss, hey, there's really simple improvement to Django.

It turns out I'm gonna have to spend 10 hours on it rather than just a one hour.

So we have to be careful there.

I guess from my perspective, the biggest thing we could improve that wouldn't compromise on stability is just decision making, arriving at a picture of okay, this change is good enough, or okay, this change needs to be done in this or that way in a few minutes discussion rather than six weeks email thread.

I appreciate you know we're async and community-driven, but it does feel like if we had a better process in place, people who more proactively uh curate those types of decisions will be able to shrink down that phase of the process.

Okay, that's interesting.

Like, is there a good resource on like what each role?

I know sorry, I'm going backwards, but I'm just thinking about the fact your secretary, we haven't asked you what the secretary actually does.

Like, is for someone coming in, is there an up-to-date, like I know there's internally, there was at one time documents on like what does the role maintain.

Um, but is there a place so people know what's expected of a secretary versus vice president versus treasurer versus a president?

So definitely by the time that the upcoming board members look at those roles, this will all be public.

And there'll be a definition of what the secretary does, what each of the officer roles does do.

Sorry.

Um, I do want to stress again that people do get to decide as board members.

We are all equally elected.

Uh, we get to decide what those roles entail.

But I think there's definitely value in uh documenting a baseline of what those roles should do.

So, secretary, for example, the the biggest discovery for me a few months into the role was realizing I was meant to be in

charge of uh social media communications amongst other communications.

So, Carlton, you mentioned uh the flavor of the social media responses and so on.

You've probably seen my work right there, trying to, I guess, uh make it you know more casual, more uh two-way rather than a one-way broadcast.

Um, so yeah, uh we know

Great.

No, absolutely.

We want to talk about the steering council.

So, okay, so we want to make the decision-making process um quicker or smoother in Django in order to help speed up the way the contributions are processed or can be processed.

Is that something which falls to the steering council?

What is the steering council and is is that the the locus of that kind of decision making, or should it be something somewhere else?

Um, I guess as you said, uh in the Django world, we do try and make those kinds of improvements incrementally, both to the code and to the organization around the code.

So to me, it does feel like okay, up to that point, uh, the steering council does formally, in their definition of what they do, they're meant to be actively steering the direction of the project.

Um, so I do look at this uh this role and think, okay, we have to incrementally get them to do better at that.

Um, I guess on paper, uh, I would expect that the board is ultimately responsible for the direction of Django as a whole.

Um, but you know, we want to be very careful when we separate uh the decision making for people who have the expertise technically and for those who have the expertise as far as community building.

So yeah, I don't think the steering council has to do this to get back to your question.

Um, but it does strike me as the best instrument we have at this point in time to do this.

Obviously, it's really helpful when uh people who aren't on the council step in and try and, you know, people like you, Carlton, spend lots of time curating possible things that feel like they are within the realm of feasibility, um, connect the dots on who should talk to whom to get things going.

But it strikes me that um yeah, there's definitely uh a case for people who do this to have a specific uh job title, air quotes.

Like not the first of all, we've got the board election, and then there's a steering council election coming up soon-ish, sometime in the autumn or spring, right?

Um, like Will mentioned, there's a need for people who are working on Django to be registered as individual members in order to be eligible to vote on those elections.

So definitely do that.

Uh submit your self-nomination as digital members so you get to vote in those elections.

Uh, and then that's uh we have a phase where we um ask for candidates.

Um steering council, compared to the board, does have quite specific eligibility requirements, which some people have expressed an interest in changing, but uh it does feel appropriate for there to be some amount of requirements of uh understanding of the direction of open source in Django and of um you know the technical aspects of the project.

Um, and then once we have those candidates that are eligible to be elected, uh the secretary of the board, which is me, will put together the ballots and have a membership vote on who they want for the next council.

And uh we don't want a repeat of the last election, we we want a good amount of eligible candidates to choose from, and we want them, I guess, again, in my opinion, to be quite critical of the current state of Django and to give us a vision of um how they devolve decision making in the whole Django community and the steering council specifically.

One so you know if you're involved in Django, do think about it.

Um I think there's a real tension with the steering council because it's was ultimately as the it currently stands, it's responsible for the technical direction of Django, and so it does require at least some members who are you know deeply involved in the the technical development of Django currently.

But if we limit it to people who are deeply involved in the current technical direction of Django, we're going to have a very homogeneous board.

It's not going to represent the wider community very widely, uh very well.

In contrast to the the DSF board, the DSF board has been quite diverse.

It's you know, historically the last 10 years or so, you look at it, it's had a quite diverse profile.

Whereas the steering council, because it's been restricted to old core contributors, but essentially, as being all white men, and that's not Django because you go to a Django con and that's not the audience and that's not the user base.

So, how I keep asking about how we can balance different trade-offs, but how can we balance this uh need for sort of technical awareness or technical familiarity with what's going on in Django with a desire to have a steering council that's representative of the wider user base?

The board is very diverse, steering council very much not so.

And once we've uh agreed that we do have this as a problem, uh make practical steps, both uh, you know, as far as the process, the theory of what the steering council does, and practically reaching out.

You know, you mentioned outreach being an issue in the past elections, possibly.

Uh, this feels like something that's quite a simple win for us.

You know, people who are on the board, people who are having those discussions, they have the network and they'll know the individuals who might be able to fill those gaps.

Um, I guess something something else in my mind is definitely thinking of this beyond the past expertise with Django Core and looking at the wider ecosystem of Django.

Um, it definitely feels right to me that we'd have people on the steering council that might represent more commercial interests, companies that use Django day-to-day as users.

I'm sure they have very competent technical decision makers there.

Um, thinking of my background with the Wagtail project, I do have quite a few colleagues, so Matt Westcott and Sage Abdullah, for example, that have been making technical decisions as far as quite a prominent package for years, if not decades by now.

I see no reason that those people couldn't also stand for elections for Django core and to some extent, you know, the whole Django package community.

There are some other things we want to talk about.

But what do you is there anything else you want to say on those or ask Carlton?

And we do need people, specific people, to step in and uh go for those roles.

And I I want to say like again, uh in the world of open source, we do tend to think of uh this as a service to the community, but to me it's also quite clear what would happen if we didn't have a functional steering council or a functional board.

And I think I want people uh involved who see that side of things as well and help drive us further away from the pitfalls of you know commercial VC funded open source and uh still allow us to navigate like this current set of challenges.

Um so yeah, we we community driven, but we do need uh competent and motivated individuals, and uh we'll be looking for you if you don't come for us.

I needed to know they were going to keep working, and it's you know, if you've got an interest in Django, then you know keep it going.

Um you said something about staying competitive, and I was strolling through the Django developers mailing list like a day or two ago, and I found a decade-old issue, Deko Plus old issue, saying that if we didn't have a better front own story to write immediately that Django was doomed.

Oh do we really need to stay?

I mean, don't we just don't we just stay competitive naturally?

Doesn't it happen over time?

No, no, no, come on.

It is not so clear that people who don't already use Django do start using it and keep with it.

We're very popular with um people who are new to coding and they take the Django Girls tutorial and they're very happy having their first experience with them.

But beyond that, we do have quite a few frameworks out there that have marketing teams with budgets in the millions and that use it to gain that mind share.

And on a technical merit standpoint, you could argue that Django has the tools that people need to build websites, but I would say that uh that's true to the extent of you know sites that have following a specific pattern.

Um, I guess for frontend specifically, there's been lots of discussions, API first, API maybe, single page applications, and so on.

Personally, I I do quite like React.

There I I said it, and uh I do believe

there are quite a few.

I do

And there is some innovation there in the package ecosystem, but I really think it's about time we move some of this innovation from packages to Django call.

Okay.

Because they're pretty they're pretty good with the marketing and making changes.

You know, they have hosting option, they have a starter starter kit, but we've also seen from WordPress Rails a little bit that when you have a uh one figure at the top, it can go badly quickly.

So I guess that that is the tension.

But to me, it's definitely like we can we can get the best of both worlds.

Like for me, it's interesting because I do have um my um current experience with Wacktail, which is uh quite a successful Django package package that's built by uh big community now of different companies, and those companies definitely find ways to collaborate for their own commercial interests, but not at the detriment of uh the open source ethos.

So, yeah, I do think that there is ways for us to be more explicit and uh even if Django were to stay community-driven, find occasions for those commercial interests to help us financially with uh things that would make a difference for the users.

And why is that?

Men are the uh economically privileged to be European or or North American men, global North men are privileged to be able to spend the time it takes to maintain a package, and we have you know plenty of contributors beginning, but it's that sticking with it over time that we can't do without helping to put some put some lubricant in those those tight points of you know the economic vice, right?

We have to do that, otherwise we won't achieve our diversity goals.

Well, and what you what you said, Thibaut, we we had a discussion with Marietta Weijaya, um, who's Python core developer, that we actually recorded before this, but will come out after because we want this episode to be out for the board elections.

But she was talking about how Python is structured, and for Python, most of the board is people at big corporations, you know, Microsoft, Meta.

Uh so that helps with funding and that helps with the decision making.

And we were talking to her about the fact that Django is doesn't have that at all.

I mean, if you look at Django cons, you look at most of the board, it's generally in individuals, you know, consultants, small startups.

I guess Torchbox Wagtail would be as corporate as we get, but but those stakeholders are really missing in a way that, you know, in terms of funding, but also that perspective of I mean, there's so many multi-billion dollar companies built with Django, and yet they're com as far as I can see, they're completely absent from any technical or community discussions.

And I don't know if that's because they've done their own forks.

I don't know if that's because they just put all their money into Python as opposed to Django.

But it is, you know, hearing you talk about it and Marietta, like it is a real weak spot that they're not represented and they're not contributing to Django itself.

Yet we know they're, you know, like where I live in Boston, there's a company, Clavio, I may be saying it wrong, K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, that just went public for like ten billion dollars.

And I don't know anyone there.

You know, it's a Django company.

And I live two miles from there.

So that's a weak spot.

I don't have an answer for it, but yeah.

Uh, I guess in my specific example, for example, the the the Wagtail people, we do uh we are able to find those companies and get them on board as feature sponsors.

And I do have quite a big list of who at Google, who at NASA, who at uh I don't know, Mozilla is using Wagtail and uh for Django.

And uh we do have this list now with the fund fundraising working group as well, and very interested to go looking for those people.

So if you're listening to this and you're already within those organizations, definitely do reach out if you think there's some room for us to make something happen.

But if not we will reach out to you and uh yeah try and find the right stakeholders in those communities that you know that those people are interested in supporting open source.

They generally are but you need to make your projects compelling enough you know have the annual reports understand what they're funding to close the loop.

So that does seem like and maybe this is I'm sorry if the working group is already doing this but like having that list of features and saying hey do you want to not just have this be in Django but do you want the public recognition for this in the same way that there have been discussions about you know our fellows like I there has to be a big corporation that would want to have you know Django fellows sponsored by XYZ for three to five years.

It's a drop in the bucket if we can position it correctly and then it opens up talking about all these other things as opposed to the current status where we just barely raise enough to keep the lights on and so this is all kind of wishful thinking.

So it's not nothing but definitely I want us to look at other similar programs like ArtRicy where there's room for there to be more funding and also outside those programs as you say just have that page somewhere on a website that states okay like here are the top five features that we definitely want to make happen no matter what but we think are compelling enough for someone to step in and uh fund.

It almost makes me want to run for the board but

Um maybe just if you could like Wagtail to me is this amazing ecosystem that has some you know crop crossing into Django itself with you, Sage and others and yet it also just feels completely like a whole other realm.

So maybe how how did you get involved with Torchbox and Wagtail and you know independent of Django if that's possible what's what's the future there?

It is a Django package like any other and it is installable on any Django project out there.

I want to make that crystal clear uh but I guess it has its own success outside of Django it is probably the most popular code management system in the Python world by now has on the order of 10 to 5000 websites powered by Wagtail.

It's been around for 10 years as an open source project and um yeah I guess compared to Django that's what makes Wagtail more interesting is uh the open source project is managed by a core team that's uh heavily skewed on people from different organizations.

So I think the Wagtail core team at the moment is 21 members um half of which are a lot uh affiliated sorry with uh agencies that create projects with Wagtail and the other half is organizations that use Wagtail in other ways and uh yeah from those agencies uh the most prominent by far is my employer Torchbox um torchbox started Wagtail in 2014 um as an open source project just like any other definitely then

it was a Torchbox only project but we've moved it quite far from that by now and I think there's only about a third of the core team at the moment is is Torchbox people.

So yeah I guess me at Torchbox I'm uh doing products for Wagtail in a kind of leadership position and also just day-to-day development day-to-day marketing and uh working on projects um uh an example of a project I worked on recently is the London Museum website so you know I do do coding now and then we are hiring by the way I should mention that we're looking for a CTO and a senior developer at Torchbox.

And yeah Torchbox I guess is the kind of company that uh makes it possible to have a bit of uh work on you know for-profit projects and also on on open source hence Wagtail.

Um so to me it's very interesting as a point of comparison because by virtue of Wagtail having more of uh like commercially interested companies behind it we do have quite a bit more considered efforts on marketing and sustainability of the development of the project.

uh we we've had our uh very successful CTO Tom Dyson with the company for quite a while one of the founders of Torchbox and uh with torchbox becoming employee owned that's kind of a natural point for Tom to make some room for other people and uh yeah the CTO role right now is uh gonna be very popular I assume uh it's quite a cool company to work with

I haven't even talked as I say we haven't even talked about accessibility we have links to talks and articles you've written and uh you know maybe we we don't need to spend time on that just because there's so much out there.

But Carlton what else were you going to say?

And so there was you know the last five years before the core team was devolved no one was added to it there wasn't you know there it was just it was dead essentially and so the core team was removed and the steering council was put in its place but the steering council didn't take on that leadership role of a core team it didn't drive the development board and I think that's what's been missing and just talking to you now Thibaut I think that's and you know before but talking to you on this show is like yes this is what we want and this is the exciting opportunity

we have now is to um give Django another burst of direction.

It's managed to do very well and it's matured very nicely I don't think anybody I guess 10 years ago nobody thought it would ever get to be 20 years old right but it has so okay what are we going to do on its way to 30 and 40.

Okay but just give you one example why isn't the DS DSF budget already bigger than it was well because the DSF budget was sized to keep Django going and then wind it up gracefully if that ever need needs to come to pass.

But no no no that's not ambitious enough let's keep it going but also push it forward.

So okay let's forex the budget as Jacob was talking about at DjangoCon recently

ame elected as a board member but I'm hoping that we've made improvements by then but beyond that definitely I think it's very helpful to us if people hold the elected officials and the steering council accountable to this we do have the responsibility to have Django grow as a as a framework and community and it only helps us to have people out there remind us of that.

I guess um if you want to definitely uh help there without running on the board comparing ourselves to the other frameworks like the Laravels and the Rails and even comparing ourselves to Wagtail can help quite a bit in understanding what's what's possible I suppose.

And so that's a a double negative, right?

Because people who are doing lots and lots of work aren't recognized.

And then people who, you know, f have changes in their personal professional lives and maybe can't make the commitment, that's also not acknowledged.

Um so there's yeah.

You know, there there have been cases where people probably shouldn't have been on the board, and the mechanism to do that is not specific.

They're um sometimes they can be asked to step down after a while, but usually they sort of filter out again if personal and professional things come in the way.

But that feels like something that could be, you know, if you miss two more board meetings in a row, maybe you're out or something.

Could be it could be explicit at some point.

I I just just yesterday I looked at a very ambitious proposal for a reset of the steering council that involved very specific commitments on how many meetings per week you'd have and with whom and how often you report.

I might be taking things slightly too far, but I really like the idea of um us all being much more transparent about what we're doing, and I guess comparing that with you know what people have committed to earlier on.

And the board specifically, it feels to me like we need to steal lots of methodology things from the agile world and have OKRs as an example, have specific retrospective sessions that we share the results of so we know exactly what we set for ourselves and how we perform against that.

And first of all, it's like, well, those to all those people, do stand, do put yourself forward, do do it.

But for the for the the people who were around, how do we step back and get out of the way so to allow that other than just well, just step out and

get out of the way?

Like we because it just feels like if we could just sort of take the battle and put it from one hand into another hand, Django's got everything it needs to go forward.

I'll I'll stop you right there.

at this already.

Things like Django News, the Django chat, Jeff Triplett's office hours, people you know stepping in leadership position, Django Girls in the Gran of Space, that's exactly what we

need for people who have been around for a while to let others step in.

So to me, all those initiatives that are about making other people more visible, not spot on.

Yeah that it shouldn't just be that once you step away, like you're just that's it, right?

Because I feel like there is that period.

I mean, Carlton, you stepped away as a fellow.

There is that you you do need to kind of take a hard break from the board or steering council or whatever for a little bit, but then you're still probably around and available and could be helpful if you're asked, but there isn't that mechanism to to ask, I don't think.

Sorry.

Yeah, we need I don't I don't have an answer for that, but

You know, we split split across seven different communication platforms.

And it takes a while just to know who's where.

And I think if we if we spend a bit more time being more intentional about how to reach out with the different groups, we'd uh uh have quite a few uh improvements there.

So you mentioned past board members definitely as a secretary, I'll be in touch with all of them to ask them whether they intend to present themselves again for the next board elections and also to ask for their intentions as far as after the boards what they plan to do and how we can um I guess make the most of you know their their motivation and their expertise.

I mean, it's great that we have the Django news newsletter, but it's that's only has 4,000 subscribers.

If the homepage just had an email thing that was like, just be no just be notified about official blog posts, there's no way we wouldn't get hundreds of thousands of people on that.

And it seems to me that it shouldn't be the Django Chat podcast, it shouldn't be the newsletter to get out some of the communication, you know, it shouldn't be all these different communities.

There should be an option for something there.

And so that would be if I were gonna run for the board, I would really push to to make that.

I mean, technically, it's not hard to do, right?

It's just sort of pushing through people who might be a little bit against that, but that's always been one of the biggest problems is there's no consistent way to meet to reach people.

And you know, we don't like there's no email solution, right?

If you go to the homepage, you scroll to the bottom, A, the forum's not on there.

I have a PR open, I should add to put the forum there.

But it's it's the Google News, you know, Django developers and Django users, which are already kind of outdated and also deeply off-putting to probably anyone under 40.

Um anyone over 40 as well as

Me too, but yeah, I don't know.

Anyways, I just I'll just throw that out there.

Like, that's I I yeah, someone wants to come on the board and like the only thing you're gonna do is put an email box on the homepage and just use whatever software you want for it, like that would be a win in my book.

We did been discussing redesigning the homepage, like just this very Django con, actually, and it would make quite a big difference for us.

Um, I think Django uses us, it's about 50,000 people, and definitely I like the idea of uh making more use of that as a like renewed communications mailing list.

Um, we have that for BackTell as well.

This week in Baghdad works really well, and I think there's no reason that Django couldn't have that.

Like it can literally just be the official posts which come out less than that, but yeah.

Okay.

We'll do it.

Right.

I've seen them many times and I can see them online.

So favorite thing by far is just the people, obviously.

I spent way more time in the hallway than in

the actual conference rooms, and uh the community vibes in the conference are amazing.

So it does make me, I'm I'm feeling very lucky that I get to attend those events and um makes me feel great about the future of the community.

I guess uh just one last plug, maybe, is uh next year we have DjangoCon Africa as well.

I feel like there's lots of room for Django to grow quite a bit there.

And uh yeah, I'm looking forward to attending that too.

Well, we'll have links to everything in the show notes, but especially if you're thinking about the board, October 25th is the deadline.

Nominate yourself or someone who you think should be on there.

So thank you, Tiba, for making making the time.

My pleasure, of course.

We'll see everyone next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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