Opening Remarks (Tuesday) with Peter Grandstaff

Chicago is situated on the traditional ancestral homelands of the Council of the Three Fires, the Ojibwe, the Odawa, and the Padawami. Pottawatomi nations. This acknowledgement honors the indigenous peoples who have historically inhabited the area and continue to practice their traditions. Welcome to day two of DjangoCon US. Thank you I'm Peter Granstaff. I'm the president of DEFNA and the co-founder of Two Rock Software, which offers Django development services with a focus on the legal sector. How many of you had a good time in Chicago yesterday?

Yeah. It's a pretty awesome city. Beaches, trains, rivers, architecture, great food. I'm having a great time here. How many of you learned something new yesterday? Hey, that's pretty good. There's lots more to come. How many of you have ever gotten some help from somebody you met at a Django Con? Yeah. The way I see it, we're all probably here because someone helped us at some point along the way. And we're all capable of helping others. This is the compounding interest of this community. We come together and create connections here.

Those connections enrich our careers, our understanding, our knowledge, and our lives. And with that expansion, we're able to come back to the community and help the next generation of Django people. And what we're experiencing today in this room is 20 years of that process. Django is weathered or seasoned technology. It has stood the test of time, and we the community are its garden. The conversations and ideas discussed here are at seeds for the next year. Please connect deeply and openly with each other here. This isn't just about us and our framework.

We're carrying these lessons and successes into the wider world. We're growing good in a sometimes troubled world. We are sustaining Django and making the world a better place. Thank you for your hand in that. So part of how we make this conference a good space and give back to the world and set a good example is our code of conduct. We want this to be a fun experience for everybody. I trust now everybody in this room has reviewed the code of conduct and understands the importance of it. If you see

any issues or violations or harassment, please email conduct at jjangocon. us. If you see somebody doing something that doesn't fit this community, please tell them we don't do that here. It's the responsibility of everyone here to keep this conference a great place. So to file a report, as I mentioned, you have the email address. You can also make a direct report to Don Wages, myself, or Kudzai. If you're emailing, please uh include as much detail as you can about the incident. Be sure to include your conf

contact info so we can follow up with you. We will keep your reports confidential. When we discuss uh incidents with the people who are reported, we'll anonymize as much as we can to protect the reporter's privacy. Sometimes one-on-one situations make that difficult. So if you have concerns about retaliation or your personal safety, please tell us in your report. We do still encourage you to report situations like that because in those cases sometimes we can follow up based on several reports and uh deal with things as a pattern of behavior rather than i single incident.

All right, we've got several announcements this morning. We will be doing our group photo during the morning break today, so after Dawn's community update. Let's all move up to the 15th floor lobby, that big open area there, and we'll do a group photo. We had a package mix up and the wonderful folks at Six Feet Up had a swag bag item that did not get into the bags. But it is at their table right over here. So please everyone stop by over there today and grab your swag bag item from Six Feet Up. Speaking of wonderful people, Black Python Devs is looking for support and giving away a piece of art made in Tanzania.

You can get a ticket from their table during breakfast tomorrow or by talking to Benedict or Tim Schilling. They could also really use some financial support and there's details on the giveaway and how to donate in the Hallway General chat channel on Slack. We do need a venue for this conference for future years. So we're going to be publishing a call for venue proposals on the DEFNA website in the next 24 hours. If you'd like to have DjangoCon US in your city, please uh consider submitting one if you have questions about that process. Good people to talk to would be myself or Kinya, our conference chair this year. We have both had our proposals success accepted. And if you have any accessibility issues or problems with the venue, please send an email to hello

at defna. org so that we can be aware of that and talk to the venue and try and resolve that for you. The Wi-Fi information should be all on cards on your tables here You should also, if you're staying in the hotel, be able to use your uh the instructions that came with your room, let an organizer know if you're having any trouble. We have a quiet space set up in American House. Speaker Green Room is in Shakespeare. Wellness room is for individual use at one person at a time, so please if you go in there, put the do not disturb sign on the door while you're using it. If you need uh space for like talking to a few people, check out the Western Stagehouse.

Alright, so the early lunch is going to be served upstairs. We do have a limited amount of food there. So if you're eating lunch while lightning talks are happening down here. Just try and get there early and be aware that they may run out of food and say you need to just go downstairs for the the main lunch after lightning talks. Down here there will be two buffet lines just like there are for breakfast currently and then on the back wall there is an additional buffet line for vegan. vegetarian, halal, kosher, and gluten-free needs. There should also be a staff member there to assist you in finding food that works for you. Or please feel free to ask me, I will try and be around that area.

If you have not picked up your swag bag or t-shirt, you can do so at the Reg Desk today. When posting on social media, please use the DjangoCon hashtag and please follow us on whatever platform you're using to stay tuned for details and be able to sign up to help organize next year's DjangoCon US. When taking photos, be aware of people's land near color Blue means photos are okay. Orange means please ask first. And red means no thanks. So we couldn't make this conference happen without our sponsors and three in particular stepped up in a big way this year.

At the platinum level, six feet up, RevSys, and MongoDB. Our gold sponsors Our gold sponsors this year are Authentic JBS Solutions, Linkin Loop, Kraken, and Button Down. At Silver we have Cactus Group, Two Rock Software, Wagtail, and Foxley Talent. And Sentry is our bronze sponsor. The opportunity grants for this conference, which

allow a lot of people to come here who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend, are funded by Django Events Foundation North America. The Django Software Foundation and the Python Software Foundation. We will have lightning talks again today in this room, 12 10 p. m. Use this URL to sign up, though slots here are disappearing quickly. Sprints will be Thursday and Friday in the LaSalle ballroom on the 15th floor. Please be sure to get a separate ticket for those which are on the main DjangoCon US website. You can also submit a project for folks to work on at Sprints. There is a pinned link in the Sprints channel in Slack.

And we will get everything, all the talks onto YouTube after this event, but give us a few weeks to get everything processed, please. I also want to thank our organizing team. Can you all uh raise your hands, please? And there's uh many more of them out running around and in the in the office over there. This event takes a lot of work to put together and I'm so grateful for all of it.