If We Had $1,000,000: What Could The DSF Do With 4x Its Budget? with Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Hi

Speaker 1: folks, I'm Jacob. I'm on the board of the Django Software Foundation and I'm our treasurer. This talk today has three parts. I'm going to talk about the DSF's budget, what it looks like today, where our money comes from, how we spend it. I'm going to imagine a world in which that budget magically gets quadrupled and suddenly we have a million dollars to play with. What might we do? And I'm going to talk about what we might be able to do to get from here to there. There's also a secret fourth part to this talk, but we'll get to that. So what does our budget look like today? This is a visualization of our finances as they stand today. It's not this is not an audit, this is not exact, this is a rough

Speaker 1: simplified average of what our cash flow looks like over the last five years, including an estimate for 2024. It's actually fairly stable, but it's not really intended to give you a down to the dollar accounting. Um It's more intended to give you a broad understanding of where the money comes from and where it goes. So where where does the money come from? We get money from two sources. We get money from companies that make donations as corporate sponsors. These are mostly large donations measured in the hundreds or in the thousands of dollars per year. And we get about $160,000 in corporate donations, of which the bulk come from our top-tier platinum and gold sponsors.

Speaker 1: We also get about $90,000 a year in small individual donations. These are individual donations, five bucks, $20, sometimes up to $100 a year, but quite small. Um so where does that money get go to? Where do we spend it? We spend the bulk of our money So that's our fellows, Natalia and Sarah, right there. Oh, yeah, okay, yes. And also our board admin, Catherine, who is probably sitting out front. Uh you've almost certainly seen her at registration. Um so we spend most of our money paying people. Um

Speaker 1: To work on Django to keep the foundation healthy. We you know the the easiest way of thinking about the broad picture of the DSF's funding is we turn donations into sort of health of the project and and of the foundation. You know, the primary thing the fellows do is triage tickets, review pull requests, sort of keep the project flowing, keep the project moving forward, and the primary thing that that our board admin that Catherine does is keep the foundation flowing and keep the foundation healthy. So at a very simplistic nature, big companies give us money, we turn it into the health of the project. Not a bad not a bad oversimplification. We do also give out grants, about $35,000 a year on average to events.

Speaker 1: Those range from small events like uh Django Girls Workshops all the way up to large events like this one. So let's imagine what we could do with four times this money. Um I've chosen a million dollars in part Just because it's a convenient round number. Um it's conveniently four times our current budget. Um But it's it's also like really achievable. There are companies in our community who could write us a million-dollar check today and not experience any financial hardship for doing so. It's an achievable number. Given the scale of what Django does and the scale of who uses Django. And it's an amount of money I can imagine spending

Speaker 1: I don't I can't really imagine what we would do with $10 million. That's a ridiculous number, but I can imagine what we do with with with one. So let's start there. So what would I do? So at this point, I need to be really clear. I'm not speaking for the DSF. I don't think I'm gonna say anything particularly spicy here. I don't know, other other board members in the room they can tell me if I'm right about that. But this is not a plan or a proposal or a hypothetical budget even. This is this is what I would do. None of these are particularly new ideas, but they're they're they're they're my priorities. In reality, what we would actually do would look I think probably somewhat close to this, but also substantially different. You know, in the

Speaker 1: since I finished writing this talk, I've come up with like five different things I could put on this list instead. But So I would hire an executive director. We have reached the limit of what a volunteer board can do. I can't imagine effectively spending four times our budget without someone whose full-time job it was to like do that like ethically and successfully. I also can't imagine raising a million dollars without someone whose job it was to work with sponsors and Work with community fundraising efforts. I just can't imagine a world in which we get to this point without a

Speaker 1: professional working on the project. And I'll talk more about that later. I don't want to expand the fellowship program. I think the fellowship program has been hugely successful and one of the sort of secrets to Django's stability and longevity longevity over the last decade or so. I think w a at a million dollars we could easily afford three full time fellows. That's a that's doubling the current bandwidth Maybe the spiciest part of this talk, there's this policy, soft policy that's been in place that fellows don't work on features. Ah, I'd get rid of that. And I'd want to expand the grants program. You know, thirty-five thousand dollars a year in grants is Not really that much given the size and the scope of our community.

Speaker 1: And we we regularly we regularly give grant requesters less than they ask for. So I'd want to do more and bigger event grants. I would love to do feature grants. Imagine you wanted to work on some some cool feature. I just watched Karen's talk, so HTMX is on the brain. You have an idea for better Django HTMX integration, but you need to take six weeks off of work to make that happen, and you'd like a little bit of money to make that like a financially feasible thing to do. Imagine if you could approach the DSF with a proposal and we'd fund it. And lastly, I want to steal an idea from the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation issues what they call hardship grants. If you're a member of the Rust

Speaker 1: community and you're experiencing some sort of financial hardship, you've lost your job and are having trouble making rent, you have a medical incident. whatever, you can apply for a hardship grant from the Rust community and from the Rust Foundation and they'll give you some money to help out. What an incredible example of like caring for your community. And really what is the DSF for other than to try to care for our community? I would love to do something like that. So here's a way to think about what this million-dollar budget might look like. we'd still be spending the bulk of our money on people. Close to three quarters of that budget would go towards spending on people. That's simply taking what's worked and continuing to do it.

Speaker 1: But we could also dramatically expand what we're doing in grants. You know, this chart. has $200,000 in feature grants, another way to think of it is that's like a whole nother fellow, except it like rotates among people for specific projects. We could triple our event budget. We could have a modest hardship grant budget. We could do quite a bit with that amount of money. Now you may notice that this chart is remarkably vague about where the the other $750,000 comes from. So let's so let's talk about that. Broadly speaking, there are two ways that nonprofits raise money.

Speaker 1: They can raise money from major donors, a few a few large donations, or they can raise uh l small lots of small donations from many small funders. Um I'm taking this to term from Sue Gardner, who was the uh executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the foundation behind Wikipedia. She wrote an article that I think is fantastic. Anyone interested in nonprofit funding should should read this article. And she observes that a major flaw of nonprofits is that their revenue is decoupled from mission work. Which pushes them to provide a positive donor experience at the expense of doing their core work. So the example she gives is of Medicine

Speaker 1: Sans Frontiers, the Doctors Without Borders. The people who donate money to Doctors Without Borders are not the people that the foundation serves. Right? The structure of Doctors Without Borders is that Rich people give money to Doctors Without Borders, who then give money to poor people. And what that means is that Medicine Sans Frontiers is incentivized, unfortunately, to optimize for what the wealthy donors want to see, not the experience of the downstream recipients of that money. And I think Gardner chose Medicine Sans Sans Frontiers for the same reason that I like using them is they are regarded as a really effective and and positive nonprofit organization.

Speaker 1: This is not like, oh, they suck. And they spend money in the wrong way. No, no, no. They're they're doing really good work and they still struggle with this. Um Wikipedia was able to make the many small donors model work. They raise something like 95% of their budget from people donating under $25 a year. And it's really awesome because the people giving Wikipedia m Wikimedia money are the people who read Wikipedia, right? There's this direct connection between the people experiencing the benefit of the organization and the people giving them the money. So could the DSF make it work? I mean, maybe. Our community is certainly big enough. You know, Django is downloaded something about three million times a year

Speaker 1: by real people. Um I could get way in the weeds about how I came up with that number. We'll talk about it later, but let's just just go with me here. So if if pip install Django charge you 33 cents, there's our budget. And I think most of you would probably pay 33 cents to install Django. That doesn't seem like a lot of money. Okay, it's a silly example, but the point is there are enough people who use Django and it's used broadly enough to imagine small donations c adding up. However, I think it would take being really aggressive about grassroots funding. Everyone gets annoyed at these at these Wikipedia funding drives. I can tell how old you are by whether or not you get this joke.

Speaker 1: You know, you get annoyed by the donation drives in your podcast feed. Right? But these aggressive fundraising tactics work. They're effective. There are reasons why organizations do them. And if the DSF was serious about a small donors. strategy you would see my ugly face on the homepage of of Django Project. com a lot. And realistically, I don't think that's something we want to do as a community. I think we're I think we're really committed to sort of Django being like Really, no strings attached. That's that's not just free, but like no strings attached. And I think we feel really strongly about that. And I think the kind of pushy nagging we'd need to do to raise money through a small donor strategy

Speaker 1: probably isn't realistic. But I also think that's probably okay. You know, to come back to The incentives that Gardner talks about were different from Medicine Science Frontiers and that the companies that make up our major donors do experience the direct benefit of our foundation's work, right? These are by and large, I mean look look at the sponsor banners around this conference. These are organizations that have built businesses and hired people and been successful because of Django. They are experiencing that benefit directly. So I don't think we have all of the same Perverse incentives. I think a major donor strategy is probably the most realistic one for for Django.

Speaker 1: So when I say major donors, who am I talking about? I'm talking about corporations. I'm talking about very wealthy individuals. I'm talking about government grants. The most notable example of this is the Sovereign Tech Fund uh run out of Germany. I'm talking about private foundation grants. The one that comes to mind for me is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which gave a large grant to the Python Software Foundation several years ago. So how do you get these major donors to give you large sums of money? Well this is where hiring an an ED comes in. It it takes this is a skill working with large donors Is not something I know how to do. It's probably not something that anyone in this room knows how to do, but that's not because it's, oh, I see someone who does know how to do it.

Speaker 1: Well, we're gonna talk. But it is but my point is it's it's it's not magic, right? The work we do seems like magic to people who don't who haven't learned it, but we we sit in hotel rooms and learn how to do our job and there are people who work with major donors who Also study that work and learn how to do it and do it really effectively. I have a friend who's a major donors coordinator for uh an animal shelter, and I can speak to the effectiveness of her work and the seriousness with which she takes her career. So, you know, once again, what I'm saying here is we should hire experts and pay them to do their job. It's worked really well for us, and we can continue to apply that to fundraising. So if you like this vision

Speaker 1: and you want to see a million dollar DSF, what can you do to make it happen? So this was this is the secret part four. I'm yes, I'm going to ask you for money. So if you If that annoys you and you want to leave, I will not be offended. But I'm not just gonna ask you for money. In fact, I'm mostly not gonna ask you for money. I'm gonna ask you for even harder things. So I'm gonna break this up into three three ways you can help achieve this vision, or one like it. Um easy, easy things, things that you can do in a few minutes. Um medium things that might be more difficult and some like you know high achiever stuff. If you've contributed in any way to the Django community, to Django's mission, you are eligible to be a Django Software Foundation member. That means volunteering

Speaker 1: at this conference, that means if you have a history of writing blog posts or publishing YouTube videos about Django, if you've Written code for Django or a popular third-party package or even an unpopular third-party package, you are eligible to be a DSF member, and thus you get a voice in what the real version of that cash flow diagram ends up looking like. If you can afford to, and I really stress that if, please donate to the Django Software Foundation. I know I've talked about major donors, but small donations really do make a difference. They are This the the size, the number of people who support your organization is a signal to donors of every size about the health of your organization. It is one of the things we use when we talk to large donors.

Speaker 1: you know, a hundred thousand people donated last year would be an amazing thing to say, right? It would signify a real health and vibrance of our community. But once again, if donating to the DSF causes any sort of financial hardship, please don't. I don't, it's not that important. It's just an open source project. If you can afford to donate, but don't want to for some reason, I would really love to know why, even if it's critical, especially if it's critical. Honestly, this might be more valuable to us as a project than a donation. If I come home from this conference to like a six emails in my inbox telling me all the ways that we suck and you're not going to give us money because of it, that would that would be incredibly positive.

Speaker 1: I'm really serious about this. Another thing you can do is you can buy PyCharm. I mentioned major donors. One of our major donors is PyCharm and the way that we raise money is They they do a promotion where you buy PyCharm at a discount, we get all the money. So like it's a win, it's a win-win and it's one of the major ways we raise we raise money for the foundation. Okay, some harder things. You could ask your company to become a corporate member. I suggest asking your company to fund us at a number around 1% of your company's annual revenue. That's a big number And your company will probably say no, which I'm super interested in hearing about. We've had a lot of trouble approaching companies for large donations, and I'd like to start collecting information on why that is and what the objections are.

Speaker 1: and how we might get over that. Once again, this second part, telling me why your company said no, is probably more valuable than whatever they might donate. So ask. I would love to hear about what happened next. Um if you are doing any sort of estate planning, uh did you know you conclude the Django Software Foundation in your will? If you can't afford to make a donation now, perhaps you can leave money to us uh uh hopefully many, many, many years down the line. I am doing my will in estate planning right now, so this is on my this is on my mind. Mm-hmm. Uh if anyone watching or listening online happens to be a high net worth individual and would like to make a really large donation.

Speaker 1: Uh we are ha we will happily accept it. But once again, I would love to hear about why you'd why you wouldn't, why you would want to, you know, prioritize other uses of your money. I think you're sensing a theme here. And you can introduce me to people who you think might be interested in doing any of these. If you think your company might be interested, but you don't know how to have that conversation, I can, or another one of the board members can. Let make an intro, we'll see what happens. Okay. This is the stuff for the sort of true overachievers, but if you're super inspired and you want to you want to really go hard, here's what to do. You could join the fundraising working group. Uh this is new, we've only been around for a couple of months, but this is where when I have said I in this talk, I probably should have said we. In all reality, it may not be me doing some of this talking

Speaker 1: introduction, whatever. I'm gonna serve as a conduit to this working group, but this is where the discussions about fundraising are centered at the DSF for now. Anyone's eligible to join this map member or not. Particularly if there's something you think that's a really good idea that I haven't mentioned today, love to hear about it. Um you could propose a feature grant to the DSF. We do not have a feature grant program. We have never given a feature grant in the past. We will probably not accept your grant proposal. Man, I would love to have that conversation as a board. Um you would be doing us a great service whether or not we said yes. Carlton's taking notes.

Speaker 1: You could run for the DSF board or for the Django Steering Council. Both of those bodies, the board leads the DSF, the steering council leads the open source project. Both of those bodies will have elections later this year. Watch for announcements. Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about any what's involved in any of those. And finally, if you're looking at this and you're going, I think an executive director is just a brilliant idea, and I'm ready to write a check today to hire an ED. We we can do that, right? We can we can work with a sponsor who's particularly interested in some specific role and fully fund one of one of these ideas, one of these positions, you know, do it do it as a trial, whatever. The PSF has had really great luck with sort of companies that fund

Speaker 1: um uh they don't call them fellows, they call them something else. Um de essentially funded developers. Developer in residence, right? So just copying copying the PSF here. Um we could easily do something like that if you or your company is is in interested. This is probably the most realistic way of sort of bootstrapping from where we are today to where we want to be, is sort of to get someone who's interested in, you know, being the sort of supporter to help us take the next step toward towards this vision. We'd love to work on a proposal collaboratively that you could kind of toss around with your with your company or whatever. Alright. Let's do this.

Speaker 1: I'm excited. I am Jacobian on basically all the things. Please reach out. I'm really serious about that. I read every email I get. I don't I respond to maybe 90-95% of them, I'm not perfect, but I try and I'd love to hear what you all have to say And I think I have a couple minutes. I have three minutes for questions.

Speaker 2: Thank you. This was very interesting. Um, I had a question. Can an individual donate stock to the DSF?

Speaker 1: Yes.

Speaker 2: Okay.

Speaker 1: I'm glad Catherine's not in the room because she probably winced when I said that. But we'll we we can receive stock. It'll it we haven't before. It'll be it'll be tricky, but we can make it happen.

Speaker 2: Okay. Because that's one way high net high net worth individuals might be more attracted to stock that has appreciated and then they

Speaker 1: Yeah, and if anyone's in that in that world and doesn't know this, one of the cool tricks is that if you have a stock that you bought years ago and it's has a huge appreciation, if you if you sell it, you have to pay a capital gains tax. But if you donate it to a nonprofit, you don't pay any taxes, and the nonprofit receives it with a the the cost basis is adjusted to when they receive it. And so they can also they can then sell it without paying taxes. So it's a really it's a it's a way that people with large investments um can donate money more effectively, basically. Yeah, thank you for my reminding me about that.

Speaker 3: I'm just curious if it's ever been discussed of creating a for-profit um you know, that could donate to Django. For example, I know other open source projects that have created a like a hosting business for their project that makes it easier. for people that are working with Django to host their project or whatever, and then that business, the profits from that business could be uh given back to the nonprofit.

Speaker 1: Yeah, and like famously Mozilla is an example of this, right? That has a for-profit and a not and a nonprofit arm. Um I don't think that has been discussed seriously at all. I don't Uh, think that it's the best fit for sort of our community and what we want to prioritize, but uh also don't think Anyone's ruling anything out. And if folks have other questions like b please find me at lunch or later on and we'll talk more

Speaker 4: Do you think that the feature grant uh could be awarded to a company or an entity versus an individual? Would be one of my questions. And related would be kind of how the Gill proposal came about in Python and then was implemented by a meta-engineer and then they offered three developer years to support it because obviously they needed it. and considered it worth it. And so the second question is, do you think there's anything inside of the Django internals that some of these big companies have expressed need for? uh that would make it more attractive for them to consider donating if it was implemented.

Speaker 1: I mean second question first, like I I uh I I'm gonna put uh Uh Jib on the on the spot here. I don't know if he's in here, but Mon MongoDB is working on so sorry man, but you're you're on the spot. So MongoDB and specifically him are writing a database backend for MongoDB. And I think that that's a perfect model of the second part of your question where a company has a very vested interest in seeing something exists and so they hired they hired someone to do it. Love it. That's fantastic. I would love to see more of that. I would love to see that's at least for me a real model for how I'd love to see companies engage with with Django. For the first question, that feels like a lawyer question, and I don't know the answer from like a tack from like a tax and nonprofit standpoint.

Speaker 1: I I know that grants to individuals Individuals are like are legal. I don't know if grants to companies I I imagine they probably are because the law tends to treat those two things pretty similarly, but I'm really not a lawyer and we'd have to talk to one before we figure that out.

Speaker 5: Sadly, that's it. If you have any more questions, please email Jacob or talk to him on the lobby. So thank you very much, Jacob. Give it up for Jacob, everyone.