What can (the DSF | I) do for (me | the DSF)?

Speaker 1: So first of all, for those of you who don't know me, ow, my ego. That's really painful. Um, I'm Chaim Kirby, uh president of the DSF, the Django Software Foundation, which is the legal entity responsible for everything Django. Um but yeah. So we're just gonna dive right into it. First of all, if you thought this was gonna be a talk about regex, I apologize. It isn't. That could be fun, maybe, but as a public service announcement, never name a talk anything in regex. You can't tell somebody what the title is. Um they're really hard to write, they render horribly, and like almost all regex. It's wrong. So let's try that again. What can the DSF do for me?

Speaker 1: What can I, or you, do for the DSF? With apologies to Kennedy's speech writers, this relationship is a reciprocal one. That's right, I'm gonna spend most of this talk asking something of really everyone who considers themselves a Janguanaut. And for the people in this room and in this hallway and at this conference, even a little bit more, because my slide count suggests we're going to have lots of time for questions at the end. So, what can the DSF do for me? That's a good question. Thank you for asking it. By the DSF bylaws, Which are on file with various taxing representatives and authorities and really allow us to keep our nonprofit status, the DSF has a purpose. It's a good thing to have a mission and purpose. And that is

Speaker 1: This. To support the development of Django by sponsoring sprints, meetups, gatherings, and community events, promoting the use of Django among the World Wide Web development community. Protecting the intellectual property and the framework's long-term viability, and advancing the state of the art in web development If anybody saw, heard, watched, was present for my talk in Porto, this probably looks fairly familiar because it's a really good sort of grounding. And I try to look at this list pretty often. And when I do, I'm humbled. Um, we have a lot of volunteers who do a lot of work. We have paid staff that do a lot of work. And when we look at this, we look at it and go, we could probably be doing better. So I suggest we review these and grade ourselves. Who wants to do a little grading session with me?

Speaker 1: Yeah? All right, thank you. So supporting the development of Django by sponsoring sprints, meetups, gatherings, and community events. I think we do a pretty good job at this. This year, we are very ecstatic. There are four Django cons this year. This is the third of four, and we still have DjangoCon Africa coming up. We also had DjangoCon Europe and DjangoCon Australia. In addition, we provide funding to various Community events, Django Girls, um, smaller Django smaller Django Day events, and most recently and largely Django Not Space. Um of course there could always be more events. There could be more things we could do. You know, see various talks today, Debs in particular. Um But that's dependent on fundraising, which I'm not going to talk about except for that it is a thing.

Speaker 1: Needing to re-evaluate requests for funds. documenting how you put together a Django con, a one-day event, a meetup, and just sort of supporting people and running more events. So overall, I give us a B. Do pretty good, could do more. Promote. Promote the use of Django among the World Wide Web development community. The community does promotion. Django Girls does promotion. Django NotSpace does promotion. Django News. Django chat. Django Social. Everyone in this room, I assume, does some promotion. Thank you for that. The DSF, we have an informational blog.

Speaker 1: It posts that we have elections coming up. Please nominate yourself for a friend for the board if you're so interested. It posts that new versions of Django are out. And those get mirrored on X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it on the Fediverse enter Reddit. But we don't have any advocates. We don't have a proactive fundraising process. We're not active on social or traditional media. And yes, there is still some traditional tech media. So I'd say personally, promotion, not so good. A D. And that's generous, I just heard. So there we go. I'm a generous grader. Um protect. Oh, what a great one, protect.

Speaker 1: Protect the intellectual property and the framework's long-term viability. And these two together are really interesting because, well, I am also a lawyer by training. And so on that first half, If you want a dissertation on protecting intellectual property, I'd love to do it. I can, you know, talk philosophically and in reality for a long term. So catch me after the next two days, it'd be great. But the framework's long-term viability, I think, is somewhat more interesting. And I think we get high, high marks on that one. We have three paid staff members. We have Marius, Natalia, and Catherine. And their day-to-day work is focused on it. it Marius and Natalia are fellows um and they keep Django moving day by day. As a code, they are looking at code, they're doing ticket triage, they're doing

Speaker 1: merging everything to keep us on a good release cadence to make sure our builds are good and beautiful and they do great work. Catherine is the assistant to the board and she keeps the board running. If there's money moving to or from anything, that's because Catherine does work. Um honestly, we could all disappear if Catherine sticked around. It would keep things going pretty well. Um and we have volunteers I'm not going to call out everyone specifically, but on various councils and committees. They really keep Django thriving. The steering council makes the big directional decisions for Django, right? We have an ops team that keeps CI running, that keeps the website running. We have a security team. If you ever see a security release, it's because they spent a lot of time looking at code, patching code, making requests for CVEs, all sorts of things.

Speaker 1: And it keeps Django secure, which we like. And yeah, we have a I'm not gonna I could list everyone. I won't because it'll take forever. And I'm gonna forget somebody and that would be horrible. Um But before I say anything else, we have lots of staff and lots of volunteers here at this conference, so let's please give them our hand, whether they're in here, in the room, or on the screen. Thank you. So for protecting, I give us an A with a small caveat. And that is the volunteers and the staff who are doing this have been doing it for a long time. And we go back to the same well. Day after day, year after year. It's going to be mentioned later on. We actually have two people stepping down from a committee.

Speaker 1: We're going to talk about that. And they've been doing it forever. So We need to we're good at protecting Django, but we also need to protect those people who help us out. And finally, advancing. The state of the art of web demon. This is a really interesting one. And I see Jacob laughing because I know he originally wrote it into the bylaws, and I don't quite know what he was thinking, but I'm going to say what I was thinking. I see this as an aspirational goal, and it means to don't let Django become irrelevant. We embrace innovation and discovery. With purpose and with some deliberation, but we can't really expect it. Uh there's, you know, our industry is littered with companies who poured billions of dollars into RD to to force innovation.

Speaker 1: Um, and those RD groups are gone so let's not force it um because yeah but no grade on advance i think this is just a good thing to remember So that's what we do. That's the goal of the DSF. Those are the the mission and the goals of the DSF. So what can I, meaning you, Or anyone else, do for the DSF. So hopefully we had an honest grading session. Um and odd often when you're at a DjangoCon, you'll hear an appeal like this. Many times from Carlton, and he gives great appeals. Um, but that is often for help on Django the Code, which don't get me wrong. continuing to need that the code

Speaker 1: documentation everything um there's a lot of good people working on it but a lot more people can Django not space I'm gonna call it out specifically getting new contributors in every Django newsletter cycle. Um so that's amazing. But I'm here to tell you that there are more ways to help than just code and documentation. Without community support, without the community participating, Django is really just a bunch of bits sitting in a Microsoft data center. And because of cosmic rays and various other things, bits rot. And so we need to keep the bits going, but that only works if people are around. So, to help maintain the community involvement and potentially increase it, in an effort to not burn out the DSF members who have been giving forever.

Speaker 1: And to give more people more opportunity to participate, we are announcing two new initiatives. When I say we the board, um, they've both been announced sort of softly on the website, but first. And DSF membership. Originally DSF membership and DSF membership means an individual member of the Django Software Foundation with voting rights in our elections. Input for lack of a better term on the membership mailing list and sort of a voice in the direction of the community. Originally, as written, membership was available to people who shared IP with Django, quite literally wrote code or documentation. We've updated that to recognize the myriad ways that people

Speaker 1: do support Django and give back to Django in ways beyond code and beyond documentation. We're still working on exactly what the boundaries are going to be because you always have to have boundaries and and frankly the lines won't be perfectly clear. But as a statement of policy, DSF membership is now predicated on making meaningful contributions toward the purpose of the DSF, and that will be the standard of DSF membership going forward. Second, in order to help people actually do that, we have initiated DSF working groups. Prior to Thursday, we had a few committees But we've overhauled those committee structures into a new working group structure.

Speaker 1: Part of that is to better manage and give better insight into groups that are doing things with DSF, but also to give people an opportunity to give back prior to membership if they so desire. So If you have an idea on ways the DSF goals could be better achieved and want to work on it, we now have a process. There's a template for it. You can nominate yourself to sort of define a working group and the board will review that and we'll put it in. Um there's even potential for budgets for working groups, though we'd have to figure out the fundraising around that. because that's always a thing. I want to call out specifically and personally Jacob Kaplan Moss for taking the lead on this initiative. It was a huge amount of work to switching things over. Thank you, Jacob

Speaker 1: Um and specifically an already one existing working group and two new ones. Uh well one and a half I guess. Are already looking for members. So the first is our code of conduct, formerly committee, now working group. Two of the members have chosen to step down, and the code of conduct is the final arbiter on all code of conduct. uh disciplinary requirements and action. It's a hugely important group, working group to our community. So I would suggest anyone who's interested, please do reach out. I've said a few times, we're starting a fundraising working group. A lot of people have a lot of ideas on how to fundraise direct outreach to donors, a one-pager for people to bring to their company's CTO and say, hey, can you throw $1,000 Django's way?

Speaker 1: various other things. We would love to get that committee started. And last and this one currently is invite only , AjangoCon Europe Organizers Support Group. DEFNA puts on this wonderful conference. Thank you, DEFN. But in Europe, DjangoCon is put together by a new group every year, which is a huge undertaking. And so this group is going to be in place to support them for organizers who've done it before and know the pain and difficulty and things like that. Um finally an empty slide. People have seen my talks before. I almost always have an empty slide, which I mentioned to my wife yesterday. Oh, please give my wife a round of applause. She's sitting in the back. This is the first time she came to JamieCon. And it's our anniversary tomorrow, and I feel kind of bad, but yeah. Um

Speaker 1: but so this is where I get to wax poetic, lyrical, or just sort of take my own time and that's okay. I do believe that sort of putting a renewed focus on the purpose of the DSF and using those as our guide stars and these changes that we're adding. We'll operate to keep Django A growing and vibrant project and community for 18 more years because yes, we've been one for 18 years already. I am looking forward to that adventure, and I hope you join me in it. Thank you.

Speaker 2: If if y'all have never had me do Q<unk>A before, I can talk. So if you have questions, hands. I saw that one first and then that one. We'll come we'll come back to it.

Speaker 3: Hi. When's the next DjangoCon Brazil?

Speaker 1: So that's an awesome question. Um and the answer is you put together a proposal that is sufficiently uh Deep and find a team and we'll do it.

Speaker 2: As I'm walking to the next person, um Oh yeah, I'm sorry. Um as I'm walking this way to get to Deb, new conferences like uh DjangoCon Brazil, how hard is it to submit for those working groups to maybe plan one? And how much support will they have?

Speaker 1: Yep. So um a DjangoCon itself does not need a working group. We actually have a page on the website, uh not necessarily the easiest to find. It's on the DSF stuff about how to run and how to apply to run a DjangoCon conference. I'd say take a look at that. But uh, and it's always a risk when I do that, um, email president at Django Project. com. That'll come to me and I can point you at it. Okay.

Speaker 4: I was curious, I've seen a couple of times that you were looking for m new board members, but I was wondering if you would put a finer point on it like Who's eligible to run and how many hours a week is that and how long do they serve?

Speaker 1: Sure. Absolutely. It's a wonderful question. Um so We are we have elections. There are three seats open. Um they're contested potentially. Um so yeah, so so mm-t that's that. Um as of last year. Board seats are for two years. Um, and so this is the second election in that. So the seats was one year and these three seats are switching. Three seats are up for election. Um the contribution, as we have stated in the past, is an hour a month. That hour is the board meeting. If you're interested in running and only interested in participating in an hour a month, please don't run, very honestly. We recognize people have lives and whatever, but it is a role to be giving back. Um

Speaker 1: yeah. That's kind of the oh right, who and who's eligible? Um any Anyone, uh, anyone in the world can nominate themselves. The board do give the nomination sheets, the current board, um, a once over just for like absurdity, frankly, but anything else comes through. Was there one more aspect? Okay, thank you. Oh, yeah, I thought it was the Django individual members. Um, every member who is a member as of the board meeting. This upcoming one, so our November fourteenth, I think, board meeting is eligible to vote and voting is between that and the December meeting. So

Speaker 2: as those people raise their hands again. Okay. That one there there. Okay. So you don't have to be a DSF member to run for the DM.

Speaker 1: You don't have to be a DSF member. You don't even have to know what Django is. I don't know why you'd want to nominate yourself, but you can

Speaker 5: Since you brought up uh DSF members, um, what would you recommend for someone just getting started as their best way to um start making those contributions to become a member what what do you think is the b the best way for them

Speaker 1: sure an interesting question and and also self-reflection uh more than anything uh there's debate among I think the membership community themselves whether it's sort of a honorary title, a reflection of the past, or an ongoing commitment. And we make no statement about that. But that said, um coming to a Django Con is a great start. Maybe maybe I'll illuminate them by giving the negative. Um, and not the negative on not to, but this is not how to do it. Um This is not actively formalized anywhere, but there are two things, two statuses that will not and will never satisfy for DSF membership. Um one, pay-to-play. We'll never sell memberships. The second one, I love people who love Django. I love people who use Django for work. I love people who've been using it for work for 20 years and say I would only use Django for work.

Speaker 1: However, using Django for your job. And sort of even not your job, side projects, whatever, just using Django is insufficient. You do have to give back to the community. So come take a look at a working group, give a talk at a conference. Heck, give a lightning talk. That's a great way to get in, you know, five minutes up here, or as Kojo pointed out, not even necessarily five minutes, right? Two minutes. Get used to it, get used to giving back to the community. Besides that, there's so many ways. Talking about it, YouTube videos, writing books, writing code, writing documentation, third-party apps. That's a great way to write code, but not necessarily have to get it back into the Django ecosystem. Yeah, I could keep going, but

Speaker 2: Okay, two minutes. Uh

Speaker 6: what do you anticipate might be the next working groups after these are inevitably successful.

Speaker 1: Yeah. So we have some idea on the board and I think Jacob's post had a few. And I do want to put a sort of Overarching note on that is the board could come up with a bunch, but I do hope a lot of them are community generated because we might throw something out. That said, um I am I'm personally interested in a membership one to sort of make better id identification of what membership means. On the promotion aspect, I think a social media outreach kind of group. And there's another one we have to think carefully about what it looks like legally, but once we have a fundraising group up and running, an actual funding group would be interesting.

Speaker 7: My question is more or less on actual not other other than conferences like Django Cons, what about meetups? How easy is it to have like uh Django Con, not Django Khan but a Django group, let's say a city based, say in Nairobi, because you have Python communities like Python Nairobi as well. So how easy is that to set up uh like Django Nairobi as a meetup?

Speaker 1: Sure. Um so to a first approximation it's simple. You say we want to do this and we're gonna be talking about Django, can we use the Django name? And we say yes, um, ideally. Um once you get into questions of What kind of support is there, either via funding or just via like how do we do this? It gets a little more intricate. We do have an application process for funding and funds are limited. I want to make clear, I think people sometimes have a different idea of what funding looks like at nonprofits. The DSF's budget is less than a quarter million dollars a year. year. So not very much. But you know, funding is available for certain things. And we do publish our minutes from every meeting and that includes what's been funded and at what amount. But yeah, again, it like I said, president of Django Software or DjangoSorpher, Django Project.

Speaker 1: com, if you want to email me and I can link you to some specific resources.

Speaker 2: Okay, last question.

Speaker 8: Yeah, um great talk. So there are certain countries, um especially in Africa, that are under sanctions And that sort of poses a hollow in terms of funding with the organization like the the DSF and the PSF. Is there sort of a way that we can look at to sort of overcome that hurdle? Have you taken a look into that? Do you need help?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Um so I yeah, I I I have like, you know, seven roles in my head all all fighting as I answer that question. So um The DSF is organized and operates under US law. Um full stop, including our banking. And so there's It also depends on the level of sanctions. Not to pull one out specifically, but I think the most obvious from a US example is North Korea. We literally can do nothing with North Korea. Korea, quite literally. Um, as you go to other countries, there are different sanctions and different amounts. At the end of the day, if we can make a funding transfer from our bank, because the bank

Speaker 1: banks ultimately are the ones who enforce a lot of sanctioned stuff. If we can get a transfer out of the bank and they don't have problems with it, we can do it. But beyond that, we are um Frankly, is the board risking going to jail if we do? So so I mean there there's just a lot of intricate questions there. What can we do about it? Um I think I love politics and geopolitics, but it's slightly above my pay grade, I think, to answer that question, unfortunately. There is that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, I will say that. So so Jacob makes a good point. Um our our funding levels are at such that we really even can't afford lawyers to sort of answer these questions. Um even if we wanted to in some situations.

Speaker 1: So uh we are a little hamstrung.

Speaker 2: And if you are a really good lawyer and you want to help start a working group. We can have some

Speaker 1: and work pro bono for us. We'd love it.

Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, everybody give hi one more time. Round applause.

Speaker 1: Thank you.