Transcript: Thibaud Colas - 2025 DSF Board Nominations

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Hi, welcome to another episode of Django Chat, a podcast on the Django web framework.

Carlton Gibson joined us over by Will Vincent. Hello, Will.

Hi, Carlton.

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, Thibaut. How are you?

Hi, folks. I'm doing good. Freshly back from German Con U.S. Good to be here.

So you've recovered from the jet lag, yeah?

Honestly, not just yet, but close enough.

Okay.

So we want to talk about a lot of things, but I think the big one is board elections for the Django Software Foundation are on the 25th, which will be nine days from when this comes out.

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.

Oh, okay.

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

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

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

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

And I guess find different ways to be involved as a contributor and then through the maintainer ship and then leadership.

So I guess 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 it had elections going for its leadership positions.

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

so very keen that we do a better job at explaining what the DSF and the board does

and also practically the step-by-step process of becoming a board member

yeah where should I where should I spend more time what do you think is helpful to know about

well so the current election there's seven members in the board right and the current

election is for four of those positions yep right so there's quite a quite a big opportunity for

people yeah it's uh it's um i think the definitely the biggest we've had a year in years so for me

my involvement only started 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 election 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 where the DSF spends its time and resources.

I wanted to ask you both

because Will, you used to be on the board, right?

And Thibaut, you're currently on the board.

So I'm interested in Django.

i want to help push jango forward what am i signing up for if i say if i run for the board

so tebow you go first because you're you're living it and then i'll i'll talk about what it was like

a couple years ago sure sure uh yes 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

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

And the biggest thing that the foundation does by far, just to be super clear, is 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 more blue sky things

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

Yeah, your blue sky things, I assume, are quite different by then, or maybe there's some similarities?

No, I'm really excited to hear. I think I agree with your overview and the fact that you have those things, accessibility, marketing, global footprint.

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

So 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 on the board don't talk about it?

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 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 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'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.

They did the most work by far.

The secretary did a bit of work.

The treasurer did a lot of work.

The treasurer before me was a little bit of a, like the professor of the dark arts at

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.

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-to-day, because

the day-to-day can easily consume your time. And I think it's also less rewarding to just

be keeping the lights on for Django rather than having initiatives that you want to push

and see through. But Carlton, one of the big things I noticed, and Thibaut, I'd like you to

talk about this, is that the fellows and the board are very separate. I mean, the treasurer

pays the fellows and the fellows write reports, but there's a fellowship working group that

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. It's one of

the things that over the years, like the fellow role when I was doing it was totally autonomous,

basically you were trusted to get on but there wasn't any supervision really there wasn't that

much oversight you communicate with the people on the forum you communicate with the contributors on

them on the list but there wasn't what 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 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 it'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 tasks tasks is hopefully coming in this release or the next release

so that's like the biggest one but 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 toward Django to help us push forward again.

Yeah, I agree 100%. To me, it's also not just direction, but simply speaking, coordination between the different groups. I think the fellows, you know, they're hired primarily to look after Django, the code base, board primarily to look after the foundation, steering council, we've not discussed yet, have their own remits as well.

and it's not really like spelled out for any of those roles how you're meant to

collaborate with other people plainly speaking and i guess as a board member in part 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 will the staggered turns 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, these kinds of coordination definitely requires, I think, upfront thinking

of how those groups on paper are meant to work together.

Could you talk about how the roles are decided, um, these days?

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 so maybe you could speak to the how do you see the four positions and

how might someone new to the board uh you know put their hand up for one of those roles yeah i

can tell you how it was for me it's very similar to what you just said spent 15 minutes on the

previous balls 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 that sounds familiar yeah yeah unfortunately plan

is very different for this election uh each of the four roles we're going to 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 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 next phase is the other board members voting okay i think this

or that person should be secretary this or that president in case multiple people want the same

role so yeah for me i was very keen to be president in my first year as board member and

didn't make it so you know i want to make sure that the new people that we get to

appoint this year they have all the resources they can get to to give it their best shot so just to

be clear the decision is made in the meeting in that 10 minute 10 minutes at the end it's in there

and now let's now let's yeah let's decide it's very tight for time yeah 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.

So I guess, what is your take on how the president role is now?

And then, you know, if you or someone else takes it on,

what do you think it should be doing?

It's a tough question.

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

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 have some amount of time set aside for that.

So 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.

it doesn't feel too appropriate then i guess we have to think of options to reduce that

executive director yeah yeah exactly we talked about this quite a bit the other oh no don't laugh

at the same time the other thing that we've discussed quite a bit is the working groups

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. That's about an hour or two, hopefully. Carlton?

I wanted to ask about the working groups. You mentioned the working groups. The idea was that

the board is only seven people. They can't possibly do all the tasks that there are to do,

so the board needs to be more directive rather than executive. They need to be able to say,

okay, we'll set the direction, but then the working groups go off and do it.

is the working groups going because there was 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

let me provide historical context before t boat says how it is now 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 recognize that the board 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 appreciate how much time it was going to take. So if people

are thinking, oh, it's one hour a week, 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, Thibaut, about expectations around commitment, I think we do a disservice by

saying one hour a month, when I think the reality is it's at least an hour a week and probably more

or like two and up, depending on the position.

But you tell us how it is now.

Yeah, well, one hour a month,

like that's just a bare minimum.

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.

And yeah, definitely one hour a week,

I think is a good actual like minimum.

Yeah, the working group.

They, I think we've had quite a rough start,

to be completely honest.

It takes a while, I guess, to get going with the new concept

and find people out there who

interested in the specific groups make sure that you know they they work well together but we do

have i think two to three working groups that are working reasonably well at the moment first one

that i've kept tabs off 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 now

the latest one that i've been involved with somewhat is the fundraising working group which

is a much more critical topic and again we have 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 one thing that i really like aside from getting those extra people

on board is also the 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 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 how the foundation functions and for people to find

the specific areas where they can help yeah it's it there's visibility in how to get involved as

well right because oh yes i want to you know help shout about django well 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 uh

the fact that the social media accounts are actually active and they've got a personality

and sometimes they retweet 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 actually jango there's something going on with

jungle. Future Fridays, 100% credit to our social media group and Bovenesh in particular, that

didn't come from the board at all. They just picked it up, created the concept, have been

running it ever since. And yeah, people love it. I know in our notes, there's been different

amounts of people who nominated themselves or been nominated for the board historically,

Sometimes as much as 30, sometimes 12. In your mind, is there a minimum level of activity or involvement that makes sense to put yourself forward? Because on the one hand, 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.

And sometimes when I was there, you 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.

Yeah, definitely. I guess in my mind, I do feel like 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 happily go for the 30 candidates on the ballot if we do want to get there.

I think, I guess, just setting expectations, 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 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 going to be sticking around with this for quite a bit.

I like that response.

All right, Carlton, you take it.

well it just okay so then there's two there's two things we've identified the possible

levels of commitment that we've identified already 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 and and uh it was when you say find a working group

we do have quite a lot of things that we know aren't uh up to scratch with what we want 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 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 our individual members of the foundation making sure that we

make the most of people who are keen to be involved with Django longer term.

Yeah, that's the two ones that come to mind.

Okay.

Maybe I ask a question to you, Thibaut.

So if I'm thinking about running for the board, I'm not, but hypothetically someone is,

and they say, on the marketing front, the Django project website needs a redesign

because it is a little bit old.

So this is something Carlton and I worked with Paolo and his agency quite a lot on,

and we didn't quite get over the line,

how would you see that playing out

in a way where it actually happens?

Like what would someone need to do in terms of,

is that something that a board member should do?

Is that a working group thing?

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.

Yeah, yeah, definitely it's not easy.

You know, it's one of the challenges with Django

being so community-driven, I think it's a big asset for us compared to the WordPress

BDFLs of the world, but still it's a challenge that community-driven means coordination.

So I would say if you want to achieve this specific thing, the best 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 possible improvement to Django out there to

require someone to achieve it but it does help in making sure that it has the right visibility

in the decision making circles and also that we're in the right place to find the funding for it

should i 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 but i would assume that it will be sped up dramatically if we had someone

at the board level making this their priority also having their priority helps you get elected right

because you've you've got something to say when you're in your in your candidate statement it's

like this is what i actually want to go and push forward yeah definitely i think it's easy for

people you know to think of their elections as just like stating who they are and stating the

things they could bring to the dsf 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 yeah, I think that people will react very well

if you identify gaps that are correct compared to how they perceive it from their side.

I just realized, I don't think we talked about who actually votes on this,

because there's the board, and then there's 200 or so individual members,

and then there's everyone else. 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 you can be nominated for.

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

And voting on steering council elections, which I'm sure we'll discuss soon after.

Definitely those people being able to understand what the foundation does, Django's direction,

and also obviously registering to then be eligible for voting.

That's quite critical for us.

Yeah.

I'll put a link to the individual members because, to be honest, I didn't know about it for several years, and I think Adam Johnson nominated me for it, and then I got it, and I was like, oh, now I know about this thing.

And then I was on the board, so I got kind of pulled in.

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

So I'll put a link to that.

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

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

I don't know. What do you two think of making a distinction between the two?

Yeah, so individual membership is about recognizing a contribution to the Django community, but that's in, you know, the community writ large, not just that you were a committer to Django Core, or not just that you maintained a package, or not just that you helped with a meetup, or you helped with a conference, or you, you know, you gave a talk, you know, any, what did you do that pushed forward Django in some way?

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 yeah there's one sounds gonna sound a bit petty but one

thing i really dislike about the dsf is the s why are we the software foundation we should be the

community foundation first and foremost and the bar is really high these days to contribute code

to django like just way higher than it should be in my opinion um and definitely higher than

a lot of people can meet without you know years of experience so 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 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 sustained enough for us to say okay great let's have you on board

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okay so anyone can be nominated but then the board reviews the nominations right 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's there's some minimum of involvement in the community we do it

much more interesting these days that's very similar otherwise well i was going to just swing

the topic slightly have you got a question on the same point or i just wanted wondered if you could

tell people what does a 60 minute board meeting look like in terms of what things do you go

through and then what would you want to change with the four new board members because i think

People have no idea.

This is such a big topic, Will.

In particular, because I'm very keen to become president,

if I can pull it off.

Well, yes, this is good.

Be the change.

Yeah, there's lots of things in those meetings

that must have business as usual,

that I'd rather we do much more asynchronously

if we could raise the expectation

that board members have to be around

for more than an hour a month.

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 malcolm trade unique prize whether that's jango com support the elections

the campaigns we do changes quite a bit the survey yeah yeah well if it makes you feel better when i

joined the board the discussions around funding various conferences took up 30 40 minutes of the

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, just so we didn't because people 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?

So those absolutely should be async.

And we did shrink those down, I think, to 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.

And definitely, you know, there's been discussions about the DSF having an executive director.

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, yeah, it is going well.

It could go better, but we do have these kinds of tasks

done up front rather than during the meeting.

Okay, Carlton, you go.

Incremental improvement is the Django way, right?

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 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,

but as a way into the steering council,

you just said something about contributing code being too hard

And to get encode into Django being too hard.

And there's this massive trade-off between we want new features,

we want 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 going to break.

And we've got this trade-off.

What's your kind of take?

How could we change the way we're doing it

to make development in Django more dynamic?

I guess I should say, first and foremost,

I appreciate the stability of Django. 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. Just a simple example in Python, one of the big things these days is type

annotations. And I think Django has yet to find its position on this. It's feeling like it's

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. Practically speaking, 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 very simple

improvement to Django, it turns out I'm going to have to spend 10 hours on it rather than just 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 a single

community driven but it does feel like if we had a better process in place people who more

proactively uh curates those types of decisions we'll be able to shrink down that phase of the

process okay that's interesting i just want to follow up for people applying 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 what does the role maintain, but is there a place so people know what's expected

of a secretary versus a vice president versus a treasurer versus a president? Definitely, we need

to still get better at this. So definitely by the time that the upcoming board members look at those

roles, this will all be public. It'll be a definition of what the secretary does, what each of

officer roles does do sorry um i do want to stress again that people do get to decide as board

members we're 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 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 calton 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 the

one-way broadcast um so yeah uh we know that's working really well great steering council do

we still want to keep talking about that yeah yeah 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 the way the contributions are processed or can be processed

is that something which falls to the steering council what is the steering council is that

the locus of that kind of decision making or should it be something somewhere else

I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer here.

I guess, as you said, 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,

the steering council does formally, in their definition of what they do,

they're meant to be actively steering the direction of the projects.

So I do look at this role and think,

OK, we have to incrementally get them to do better at that.

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

But, you know, we want to be very careful when we separate 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.

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 people who aren't on the council step in

and try and, you know, people like Hugh Carlton spend lots of time curating possible things

that feel like they are within the realm of feasibility,

connect the dots on who should talk to whom to get things going.

But it strikes me that, yeah, it's definitely a case for people who do this

to have a specific job title, air quotes.

And there's going to be a steering council election as well, like not the first of all, we've got the board election. And then there's a steering council election coming up soonish sometime in the autumn or spring, right?

Yeah. And the mechanism there is quite similar, to be completely honest. 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 do that. Submit your

self-nomination as a digital member so you get to vote in those elections. And then we have a phase

where we ask for candidates steering council compared to the board does have quite specific

eligibility requirements which some people have expressed an interest in changing but it does feel

appropriate for there to be some amount of requirements of understanding of the direction

of open source in Django and of you know technical aspects of the project and then once we have those

candidates that are eligible to be elected the secretary of the board which is me will put

put together the ballots and have a membership vote on who they want for the next council.

And we don't want a repeat of the last election. 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 how they devolve decision-making

in the whole Django community and the Styrian council specifically.

yeah i mean so just for people who don't know last time there was it was the steering council

election came on the back of um the board election and we didn't i don't we didn't do the outreach we

didn't do the messaging i don't know but we only had four people standard there's meant to be five

people on the steering council so it's been shorthanded for this entire cycle and we need

at least five people we needed to be fully fully stuffed one so you know if you're involved in

Django, do think about it. I think there's a real tension with the steering council because

it's ultimately, as 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 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 homogenous

a sport. It's not going to represent the wider community very well. Contrast to the DSF board.

The DSF board has been quite diverse. 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 has been all white men. And that's not Django,

because you go to a DjangoCon and that's not the audience and that's not the user base.

So how, I keep asking about how we can balance the trade-offs,

but how can we balance this 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?

I guess definitely in my mind,

step one is to be transparent about the fact

that we have this issue of diversity in our decision-making.

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

And once we've agreed that we do have this as a problem, make practical steps, both, 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 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.

I guess 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.

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.

Thinking of my background with the Whitetail 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.

Anything else on the board or the steering council?

There are some other things we want to talk about, but is there anything else you want

say on those or ask carlton no that's no i guess i guess to me i should say like at the end of the

day um i think we all need to realize that even with django being community driven it's not going

to drive itself and we do need people specific people to step in and uh go for those roles

and 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 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 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 nice one reason one of the why did i get

into open source at all is because i was building a business around based on django and you know i

needed the packages that i was contributing to 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 trawling through the Django developers

mailing list like a day or two ago and I found a decade old issue deco plus old issue saying

if we didn't have a better front end story to right now immediately that Django was doomed

Oh, do we really need to stay? I mean, don't we just stay competitive naturally?

Doesn't it happen over time?

How much of an answer do you want, Carlson?

No, no, no, go on.

If you look at the numbers on the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, for example,

it is very clear that Django is working very well for current Django users.

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 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 mindshare.

And on the technical merit standpoint, you could argue that Django has the tools that people need to build websites.

But I would say that that's true to the extent of, you know, sites that have following a specific pattern.

I guess for frontend specifically, there's been lots of discussions.

API first, API maybe, single page applications and so on.

Personally, I do quite like React.

I said it.

And I do believe there are quite a few things that we'd be better off

if we stole from the hype-crazed front-end ecosystem,

one of them being UI components in templates.

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 core.

Okay.

I mean, it's interesting specifically seeing what Laravel is doing in terms of what Django, if it were for profit and we wanted to buy Lamborghinis for ourselves, what we could do because 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 one figure at the top it can go badly

quickly so i guess that that is the tension yeah it 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

current experience with Wagtail, which is quite a successful Django package that's built by

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 the open source ethos.

So yeah, I do think that there is ways for us to be more explicit. And even if Django were to stay

community driven find occasions for those commercial interests to help us financially

with things that would make a difference for the users i think it's well if we want to solve our

community goals we have to find a way of pulling more money in because the bottom line is even if

you widen so okay the the old django core was all white men and but even if you widen to the

third party package system it's still men and why is that and that's because of economic privilege

Right. Men are economically privileged to be European 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 lubricant in those tight points of, you know, the economic vice.

right we have to do that otherwise we won't achieve our diversity goals yeah well and what

used what you said tebow we we had a discussion with marietta we jaya um who's python core

developer that we actually recorded before this but it'll 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

And 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 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, 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, Klaviyo, I may be saying it wrong, K-L-A-V-I-Y-O, that just went public for like $10 billion.

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 know how to have an answer for it, but.

Yeah, if you ask me, we should be hungrier as a community

and we should be looking for those people

who have access to the big prodigal purse of funding.

I guess in my specific example, for example,

the Whitetail people, 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, I don't know, Mozilla,

is using Wagtail and for Django.

And we do have this list now

with the 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 try and find the right stakeholders

in those communities.

Those people are interested in supporting open source.

They generally are.

But you need to make your projects compelling enough,

have the annual reports,

understand what they're funding to close the loop. Well, one thing you just said is feature

sponsorship, right? Like there's a dedicated page, you know, how to sponsor Wagtail, where you kind

of lay it out saying, do you want a specific feature? Here's the funding, here's all these

things. There's nothing like that in Django, right? Like we want Meta's money, but we're not

going to make any promises. So that does seem like, and maybe this, 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

There has to be a big corporation that would want to have 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.

we do currently have the google summer of code program where we do create this list of features

that are potentially available for people to step in and we do get you know financial support from

google uh in that way to run this so it's not nothing but definitely i want us to look at other

similar programs like outreachy 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 fund.

That just sounds really exciting.

It almost makes me want to run for the board.

You have to recirculate and refresh yourself a bit before.

Well, we only have about 10 minutes left.

We haven't asked at all about Wagtail, Torchbox,

your day job, Google Summer of Code.

Maybe just if you could, like Wagtail to me

is this amazing ecosystem that has some you know crossing into Django itself with you Sage and

others and yet it also just feels completely like a whole other realm so maybe 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 well first off I hate that it feels like a separate thing 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. But I guess it has its own success outside of Django. It is probably the most popular

column management system in the Python world by now. It has on the order of 10,000 to 50,000

websites, probably by Wagtail. It's been around for 10 years as an open source project. And yeah,

I guess compared to Django, that's what makes Wagtail more interesting is the open source

project is managed by a core team that's heavily skewed on people from different organizations.

So I think the Wagtail core team at the moment is 21 members, half of which are affiliated with agencies that create projects with Wagtail.

And the other half is organizations that use Wagtail in other ways.

And yeah, from those agencies, the most prominent by far is my employer, Torchbox.

Torchbox started Wagtail in 2014 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 Torchbox people.

So yeah, I guess me at Torchbox, I'm doing products for Wagtail in a kind of leadership

position and also just day-to-day development, day-to-day marketing and working on projects.

An example of a project I worked on recently is the London Museum website. So, you know,

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 makes it possible to have a bit of work on, you know, for-profit projects and also on

open source, hence Wagtail. So to me, it's very interesting as a point of comparison, because

by virtue of Wagtail having more of commercially interested companies behind it, we do have

quite a bit more considerate efforts on marketing and sustainability of the development of the

project.

Where can someone find those job listings if they're interested in applying?

Definitely.

We'll put a link in the show notes, but where do you do that?

Toshbox.com slash about slash careers.

We've had a very successful CTO, Tom Dyson, with the company for quite a while, one of the founders of Torchbox.

And with Torchbox becoming employee-owned, that's kind of a natural point for Tom to make some room for other people.

And yeah, the CTO role right now is going to be very popular, I assume.

It's quite a cool company to work with.

I would think so.

Well, we haven't even talked about accessibility.

We have links to talks and articles you've written and, you know, maybe 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?

Well, I was just taken by what you were saying about the Whitetail core team and contrasting

that with Django where there was a core team, but then it all, it sort of withered on the

vine and, you know, as people went off and did other things and what it didn't have was

a mechanism to refresh itself.

And so there was, you know, the last five years before the core team was devolved, no one was added to it.

There was, you know, 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 the show, it's like, yes, this is what we want.

And this is the exciting opportunity we have now is to 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?

Well, nobody told me that when I was learning Django 10, 12 years ago.

I mean, it's like anything, right?

From the outside, it seems like this monolith, you know, this big stable made out of granite

thing and then you get in the inside and you're like oh okay like yeah but also things need you

know maintenance and improvement just like 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 jango going and

then wind it up gracefully if that ever need needs to come to pass but 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.

Well, and that's explicitly, you know,

Frank Wiles, who was president for a while,

I asked him at one point about this

and he, you know, basically said,

yeah, like the point,

one of the major points of the DSF

was to fund Django.

And if it ever died,

to have enough money around to,

you know, not burn all the bridges

as it withered on the vine.

But yeah, that doesn't seem to be

the trajectory that we're on.

I think I would have definitely agreed

when I became a disabled 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 framework and community,

and it only helps us to have people out there remind us of that.

I guess if you want to definitely 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 possible, I suppose.

Well, and there's, like the fellows have a report

that they put up on the forum now of weekly things.

And I know that there's minutes,

there's public minutes and private minutes

for the board that the secretary is in charge of

that we try to feature on the Django News newsletter.

But there is a, I don't know how to say,

like not a lack of accountability, but only people on the board know how well or poorly

the board is functioning. And so that's a double negative, right? Because people who are doing lots

and lots of work aren't recognized. And then people who, you know, have changes in their

personal or professional lives and maybe can't make the commitment, that's also not acknowledged.

So there's, yeah, you know, 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 definitely think it's very, very essential for us to have a better culture of feedback

in open source and of letting it okay that sometimes other volunteers will criticize

your work and that it's okay to take a step back.

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 of the new reports and 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 in 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 it feels to me like there's a whole wave of

um new not new but people young people who weren't around five ten years ago in the community now who

have loads of energy and loads of ambition to push Django forward 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 people who

were and how do we step back and get out the way so to allow that other than just well just step out

how do you gracefully deprecate yourself yeah exactly like 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 for i'll stop you right there you're doing great at this already things like

django news the django chat chef triplets office hours people you know stepping in leadership

position django girls in the 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 and spot on you almost need like a what do they call it like a emeritus board or

you know something where you're kind of out to pasture you're retired but you still maybe know

something like you could still be called upon if if there's because there's so much institutional

knowledge that is lost right 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 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

yeah we need to get much better sorry no yeah i know yeah i don't have an answer for that but

i think we definitely need to get much better as a community at having those communication

mechanisms between the different groups you know we're 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 to the different groups we'd uh uh

I have quite a few 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 board, what they plan to do and how we can, I guess, make the most of, you know, their motivation and their expertise.

Yeah. And if I could make one suggestion, if someone's thinking about running for the board. So I think it's crazy there isn't an email list for Django people. I mean, it's great that we have the Django News newsletter, but that only has 4,000 subscribers.

If the homepage just had an email thing that was like, 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. It shouldn't be all these different communities. There should be an option for something there.

And so that would be if I were going to 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 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.

Anyone over 40 as well.

I mean, me too.

Me too.

But, yeah, I don't know.

Anyways, I just throw that out there.

Like, that's, yeah, someone wants to come on the board and, like, the only thing you're going to 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.

Yeah, I agree 100%.

We've been discussing redesigning the homepage,

like just this very DjangoCon actually.

And it would make quite a big difference for us.

I think Django users, it's about 50,000 people.

And definitely I like the idea of making more use of that

as a like renewed communications mailing list.

We have that for Wiktail as well.

This week in Wiktail, it works really well.

And I think there's no reason that Django couldn't have that.

And it doesn't even need to be a weekly thing, is what I'm saying.

It can literally just be the official posts, which come out less than that.

But, yeah.

Okay.

We'll do it.

I really like this idea.

Tell us your favorite thing about DjangoCon US, and then we'll wrap up there.

it's uh i mean to me you know the tech talks i've seen i've seen them many times and i can see them

online so favorite thing by far is just the people obviously i spend 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 feeling very lucky that i get to attend those events and uh makes me feel

great about the future of the community. I guess just one last plug maybe is 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 yeah, I'm looking forward to attending that too. All right. 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, Thibaut,

for making the time. My pleasure. Of course.

And we're at jangochat.com.

We'll see everyone next time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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