All about The Django Software Foundation DSF

Speaker 1: Yeah , My name is Anna Makarze and I would like to welcome you to my talk all about the DSF where I want to talk to you about everything to do with the Django Software Foundation. Before I get started, I would like to thank the Porto team for organizing yet another great conference and for having me as a speaker. A little bit about myself. I'm a freelance software engineer based in Harari, Zimbabwe. I started working with Python and Django in 2015. And got involved with the DSelf in 2016 when I became an individual member. I'm the president of the Django Software Foundation for 2021, and I've been on the board of directors since 2018. I'm also a trustee and fundraising coordinator for Django Girls

Speaker 1: Foundation. Just to give an overview of my talk, I'm going to talk about what the Django Software Foundation on DSF is all about. how it is organized and how to get involved with the DSF. So what is the Django Software Foundation? The Django Software Foundation or DSF is the legal entity and non-profit set up to promote, support, and advance the Django framework. It is important to know that the Django project itself is not a legal entity. So who makes up the DSF? The DSF is three types of members, corporate members, individual members, and Django code developers. I will explain each of them in 10. The first type of members we have are corporate members.

Speaker 1: Corporate members are organizations that support The Django Software Foundation financially. Some of them also participate in membership discussions, foundation member meetings, or serve in committees or on the board. These are the logos of the DSF corporate members at the time of preparing my slide. Some corporate members may be missing, as we recently approved a couple more in the previous two board meetings, and their logos may not be on the Django project website yet. Are you an agent or a company that heavily relies on Django? Consider becoming our corporate member. We have different sponsorship levels which you can consider joining at. The list is leadership at 1,000, bronze at 2000, silver at 5,000, gold at 12.

Speaker 1: 5 ,000, platinum 30,000, and diam It it's hundred thousand. All amounts are in years to last What are the benefits of supporting the DSF? Corporate members receive an email address on the DSF members mailing list. A single vote In votes put to membership, an organization description on the corporate members page, your logo and link on the fundraising page A Django supporter page denoting your level of membership for use on your website and elsewhere. An annual impact report from the board featuring highlights from our fellows work and our other Philanthropic activities. Announcement, thanks for your membership on our verified Twitter account, which has over 125,000

Speaker 1: followers. So how do you become a corporate member of the DSF? You apply to become a corporate member by filling out our onboarding form on the corporate members page of our website. The DSF board will vote to approve your membership and application. And if approved, follows up with an invoice. You pay up and will be asked to renew annually, which you can choose to renew or not. Hopefully you will renew. Then individual members. The next type of individual members of DSF members are the individual members. In fact, individual members are people who have been appointed to the Django Software Foundation in recognition of their service to the Django community. Contributions can either be code contributions or non-code contributions, such as organizing Django events or volunteering.

Speaker 1: In the JSF Code of Conduct Committee, remindering others on use of Django in Django Users and Developers mailing list. As well as our IRC channels. Individual members are part of the DSF membership mailing list and exist to offshape the future of the DSF and Django community by contributing to discussions on various Issues affecting the DSF and the Django community. They also vote in DSF Board of Directors in Technical Board elections. Do you know anyone whom you think should be a DSF member? If you know of someone that you think should be a member, including yourself, please fill out the form available on our website in the DSF board. Or membership will

Speaker 1: enter them into consideration. The last type of DSF members are the Django Core developers. Before DEPTEN was put in place in the end of 2020, The core team was a group of trusted volunteers who managed the Django project. They assumed many roles required to achieve the project's goals, especially those that require a high level of trust and made the decisions that shaped the future of the project. After depth, the responsibilities of the Django core team were moved to the technical board and other technical teams. Now the core members will be people who have made contributions to the Django ecosystem. So how do you become a Django core developer?

Speaker 1: The original code team members who were on the Django core before it was dissolved already make up the new Django core developers. However, more people will be ended with the code Django core developers list by the DSF board with the input of the technical board in recognition of their safety to Django. The next thing that I want to talk about is the governance of the DSF. So the DSF is governed by many teams and committees which handle the various aspects of the foundation. The Board of Directors and Code of Conduct Committee handle the non-technical issues, and the technical board and technical teams handle the technical decisions and operations of the DSF. First off, the board of directors.

Speaker 1: The board of directors handled the legal and fundraising aspects of the DSL. It is made up of seven elected volunteers who hold, four of whom hold the officer positions of President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer, and three non-officer directors. And we have the eighth member, who is our GSF assistant, who is not elected, but is a member of the foundation who helps with treasurer in admin duties. The board meets once a month for an hour to deliberate on corporate member applications, fundraising activities, DSF funds, and exp Expenses, grant requests for events, Django trademark issues, Django Con

Speaker 1: licenses, and oversee Django Con events organization, changes to the GSF committees, GSF board. Oh technical board directions, DSF partnerships, as well as DSF individual members We are always getting spammed with emails about guest posts and user lists of Software packages, and I thought I should just mention this. The JSF is not in the business of accepting guest posts, buy user list of anything, or promote anything that has nothing to do with Django or Python. The next thing that I want to talk about is uh DSF funding.

Speaker 1: So the DSF is an annual budget of 200,000, which it funds through corporate sponsorships. Pai Chang and Django Partnership, which contributes to about 20% of our budget, and this year we raised 45,000 donations via the Django Project website GitHub sponsors and Amazon Smart. We also have a threatless shop for merchandise such as t-shirts. Then what we use the funds we raise. The DSF uses fund the funds raised to pay wages for our two fellows and DSF assistant. Sponsor conferences and events and maintaining infrastructure such as the Django domains. Most of our budget is consumed by staff costs.

Speaker 1: Event sponsorship have been low due to the pandemic because since the pandemic broke out in 2020, the board suspended funding for all in-person events The next committee to talk about is the Django Code of Conduct Committee. These are part of our Django and Sang Heroes, who are not as frequently mentioned as the DSF board. Members or technical board members. The Code of Connects Committee consists of a group of volunteers who end on Reports of code of conduct violations in Django spaces on behalf of the JSF bond. They sign up for a limited of time. six months or nine months and are each put on a rotation to respond in the end

Speaker 1: or code of conduct reports and can renew if they are winning after their time lapses They also help Django Kong organizers with screening of speakers so that they do not accept speakers with code of conduct violations put against them and advise the board based on reports they have received. Insure that they help to keep the Django space safe and welcoming for all. The next important team within the DSF of the technical board The technical board is an elected group of five committers. They are expected to be experienced and there is no form of seniority required. A new board Is elected after each feature release of Django.

Speaker 1: The election process is managed by the DSF board. All members of the technical board are volunteers. Since the technical board is a group of experienced and active committers, their always to steer technical decisions. Their main concern is to maintain The quality and stability of the Django web framework. The technical board is the final decision-making authority for technical decisions on the direction of Django and is also charged with the canvassing for ideas and proposals. for Django's future technical direction and resetting the release of the release schedule Next, we go to the technical teams who work together with the technical board.

Speaker 1: So The technical teams indicate who is actively contributing in certain areas and can be found on the teams page of the website. They make up a great chunk of jungles and sang heroes as they do most of the technical work required to keep The Django Project running on a volunteer basis. The ops team maintains the Django's infrastructure like the Django Project Server, track instance, continuous integration keeping various jungleproject. com websites running, managing DNS requests, Twitter access, etc. on behalf of Conference organizers. Some major one-time tests they've done include source in seventy-five thousand. US dollars of donated hosting services annually for the DSF across three providers.

Speaker 1: Adding a CDN for the dog site to speed up dogs access around the globe pay the community suggestion on the developers list. And this was also donated by a vendor firstly at a value of 12 ,000 US dollars annually. The team is also self-managed and operates on a volunteer basis. The ops team is sufficiently staffed at this time. Membership is in by is strictly by invitation. And as needed, the team may make a call for help on the jungles developers mailing list. The security team. The security team is responsible for Django security policies. It handles private reports.

Speaker 1: of security issues. The security team is sufficiently staffed at this time as well. Membership is by invitation. As needed, the team may make a call for applicants on the Django Developers mailing list. The next team, the majors. The majors role was introduced end of last year as part of depth chain. This is yet to be implemented. They are to merge other people's PRs into the Django project. Majors will have commit access, but only to merge pull requests from others. Majors cannot decide to add Things to Django on their own initiative and hold no special decision making privileges. Releasers. Releasers take care of building Django releases. They have access to issue

Speaker 1: Issue releases of Django and carry out the associated mechanics like bumping version numbers in key files Then the technical advisory team. The technical advisory team is made up of the two contributors to Django and or its ecosystem who are currently less involved in day-to-day development of Django. They may be consulted about design decisions in their areas of expertise Then we have the technical team. The technical team is composed of veteran contributors. To Django who are actively involved in this development. Activities may include ticket trash, page authoring, and page review.

Speaker 1: Then, last but not least, we have the fellowship committee. The fellowship committee handles the recruitment and all issues to do with the management of our Django fellows. The team is by invitation only. Then we have our fellows. Django has two-page staff, our fellows or community managers. We work with the community of contributors to the Django project and together with the technical teams of the DSF to manage the Django project infrastructure, Django code base, and new releases of Django These are Carlton who joined in 2018 and Morias who joined in 2019. The next thing I would like to talk about is the JSF Awards program.

Speaker 1: The DSF makes an annual award in honor of Ellie Django contributor Malcolm Trednik, called the Malcolm Trednik Memorial Prize. Which is a monetary price to the person who best exemplifies the spirit of Mokong's work? Someone who welcomes and supports in nature's newcomers freely And gives feedback and assistance to others and helps the community to grow. Announced before nominations are announced to the GSF membership mailing list and through A blog post in November each year. If you know someone who deserves to be awarded the Malcolm Treatment Award, be sure to nominate them. If they are not selected that year, keep nominating them until they win the award.

Speaker 1: The future of Django. So the GSF supports the development of Django, but it has no formal power to influence the direction and the or priorities of the Django project. And so, as the president of the DSF board, I cannot speak about the future of Django. However, if you want to take part in the discussion about the future of Django, please join the Django Developers mailing list. Oh, the Django dev, I add a C channel. The future of the DSF. So what is in the near future for the DSF? In the works, the board has been discussing aiding working groups to help with managing Django Coins organization and appointing one of the non-officer directors to be conference lawyers.

Speaker 1: We are also considering learning from the PSF and setting up a grants working group to help the board identify possible grants the DSF qualifies for and can apply for to get more funding. If you would like to take part in these working groups, please reach out to the DSF board. Do you want to get involved with the D SF? There are many ways to contribute to the Django Software Foundation, which include code contributions to the Django project itself, non-code contributions such as training the DSF Code of Conduct team Organize a Django con or a small event or run for the DSF board elections or technical board if you meet minimum requirements for the technical board.

Speaker 1: Do you want to organize a Django con or the next Django Con Europe? Read our guidelines on Django Con and how to apply. For new Django Con events, please bear in mind that the name Django Con is reserved for large events. which cover a region or a continent and not just one country. Submit your proposal to the DSF board and once your proposal is accepted, be sure to keep the DSF board in the loop uh about all your major decisions. Then the board of directors elections. The board of directors elections are held annually in November Anyone who uses Django is welcome to run for the DSF board. And you do not need to be a member of the DSF membership.

Speaker 1: Or Django call team to be a board member. Then technical board elections. As of depth 10, technical board elections are held every And X release of Django. And since we just heard elections for the 4. x release, the next vote election will be in about 1. 5 years for 5. Due to the nature of the work involved with the technical board, six qualifications are expected of the technical board candidate election candidates. Mainly that they should have a issue of contributing to Django technically at least in 18 months prior to the election.

Speaker 1: Since the next technical board will be election will be held In approximately eighteen months from now for the Django five point X version Now may be the best time to start contributing technically to Django if you want to run in the next technical board election. We definitely need to address the elephant in the room, which is the lack of diversity in all the technical teams of the DSF and the technical board. Currently, all technical teams lack diversity and are fit mainly with white males from US, Europe, and Australia, and very few

Speaker 1: fall outside this Demography. This is a problem which, however, does not have an easy fix or a page you can apply to overnight. It requires the Django community to put in some effort And yes, in rectifying this. I joined the Django community through the initiatives of former Vice President of the DSF board, Daniele Proshida, and his PyCon team. PyCon UK team and Caddiff University team who organized PICO Namibia 2015 and the following uh Pycon Namibias He introduced and welcomed me and a couple other African members to the DSF membership in the in

Speaker 1: 2016 after attending the uh PyCon Namibia 2016 and encouraged us to run for board elections. I did in 2017 and joined the JSF Board of Directors in 2018. And yeah, even the blog post he wrote celebrated the diversity, brought about by having board members from Africa and Asia. When he stepped down, end of 2018 I and I became the pre -vice president in 2019. We met at Pykon Namibia, PICON Africa, uh in Ghana in 2019, and you said maybe you'll be the next by president and I said no Frank will still be president in 2020 and he said after Frank's five years is over you can be the next yesf president and Well, I didn't believe it at that time that actually happened.

Speaker 1: So much has happened in Africa due to Daniela 's work here in Africa organizing events and mentoring people. This year we have two board members From Africa as a result of his work. And just the same way Daniele reached out to Africa to help bring about diversity in the Django community GSF membership and GSF board. Carlton, one of our fellows, is working on a similar program to bring about diversity in the code contributor pool of Django. This will be done through recognizing contributors better by fully implementing Deptin and extending the Django core label. in a number of directions which the DSF body is working on. This will enable regularly calling out more contributors and aiding them.

Speaker 1: To the core members, and therefore encourage more code contributions for both new and old contributors alike. The aim is to give people more recognition for their code contributions SDC helps boost their CVs when one is looking for a job. The other plan Carlton has is to create a contributing workshop along the lines how to get contributing and how to make that pay for your career. To help new contributors from underrepresented communities intake to get started contributing to Django. This might take some time, but it will be a step forward in the direction of having more non -white males running for the technical board Or in the technical teams. One aspect we cannot ignore is that these are sensitive roles with lots of privileges that can crash Django.

Speaker 1: And therefore we cannot ignore the trust levels and experience required to fill in these roles. Just like we achieved the diversity on the Jesse board, I think we can also achieve diversity in these teams in a couple of years if we put in the required work Do you have any questions regarding Django or the DSF? If you do, for questions on how to use Django, you can join the Django users in Django developers. Mailing lists or join the Django IRSC channels. You can also join the Django forum and meet with other developers and ask questions and take part in discussions about the Django framework. For trademark issues and all other issues, you can email the JSF

Speaker 1: or using foundation at Jangle Project at Jangle project. com or contact us by filling the contact form on the website. For event sponsor is for sponsorships, filling the form on the website If you're not sure which team to reach out to in the DSF, reach out to the DSF board and they will redirect you to the right team. If you have any security issue to report, all Django security issues should be privately directed to the security team via their email address. at jungleproject. com please reach out to the security team for security issues only

Speaker 1: Do not report bugs to security team unless they have uh an impact on Django security. If you want to report a code of conduct violation, you can report any code of conduct issues you may encounter or witness within Django Spaces. To conduct at jangleproject. com. If you are not sure about whether there is a code of conduct violation, visit the Django website for Django's Code of Conduct. And if you are still not sure, reach out anyway This brings us to the end of my presentation. And uh before I go, I want to thank all the volunteers who make up the DSF. The Junko

Speaker 1: community thanks you for all Yourself is to Django. You helped make the Django the awesome framework it is. I would also like to thank all the volunteers who helped organize DjangoCon Europe 2021 and the Porto team for putting up two events in a row. I know this was not by your own design, but we are happy that you managed to organize these two conferences. I was really looking forward to visit Porto when the pandemic hit and I hope one day I'll be able to visit. Thank you for all your work and the DSF board. Thanks you. And thanks to everyone who attended my talk. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Hope to see you soon at the earliest physical Django con, wherever that may be.

Speaker 1: Stay safe and thank you. Hi

Speaker 2: Hannah.

Speaker 3: Oh hi. Hello. Hi.

Speaker 2: Sorry, I was muted. Thank you for your talk. It was very interesting knowing more about the Django Software Foundation. Sometimes I I know more about the code and less about the the people behind that. So thanks for explaining all the people that work to to improve the community. Uh you're most welcome.

Speaker 3: Do you have any questions for me? Um

Speaker 2: No, you um you explained so well that I now I know more uh about the foundation so I don't have any Any question related to the to the foundation itself? Thanks. I want only to to thank you.

Speaker 4: Uh hello. I I may have a question. So I was wondering about the corporate uh uh sponsor or corporate members of the Platinum in the different years. And I was wondering if there's a resource somewhere where we could help uh pitch to our companies why they should Sponsor, I I think there are some talks, but it's kind of hard to sit your bosses and watch a Django talk. And also for example in my scenario I work in an office that uses Django And the office itself is like uh I don't know, fifty people but only three use Django. The other ones use the the tool we built.

Speaker 4: So but the company itself is quite big. So I mean they would qualify for the biggest uh and they should probably be the biggest diamond uh contributor But I was wondering if um it would there is some examples and if it is possible that just this a small office contributes and not the whole company. uh and something like that uh and also if it is a big company i the do they have to uh be on the higher tiers or or no? I don't know if you if you know much about this sorry so the these are my my questions

Speaker 3: Okay, so uh we have a uh corporate members page on the website which gives details about the various packages we have And uh they the packages depend on the size of the organization. So you can uh start by checking there. I don't know if I answered all of your questions, but uh yes, if you need details also you can always reach out to the DSF port and we are willing to shed more light on that

Speaker 4: Okay, thank you.

Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm I'm curious about um so We have a very good uh code of code of conduct for the community. Uh and there's a uh real effort to to make that that happen. And on the other side, there are companies contributing to that community. that of course are not uh binded by this code of conduct. Uh so like if f those companies, for example, were to I don't know, uh suddenly be we find out that those companies have a terrible harassment

Speaker 5: issue or uh you know something that's really uh Yeah, would make it would be outrageous for the community to you. Companies are left people, people may do terrible things and yeah. So what would be the relationship of the uh Because we cannot enforce that code of conduct to the company's contribution to the but we I guess we would still want to like have this as they are part of this community

Speaker 5: how would be like enforce that.

Speaker 3: Okay, so uh the code of conduct is difficult for us to enforce within campaigns. But uh should there be any incident maybe that is known to the DSF uh that a company probably is done Something that violates uh the code of conduct. Uh we have in with in the past uh refused to get sponsorship from certain companies because of the nature of business they were involved in. So I think it depends on uh what the issue is about and whether the DSF is aware of it And uh for controversial cases normally those are cases that uh if the boat DSF board can't reach an agreement, they also discuss with the membership.

Speaker 3: So it depends on whether it has been known to the DSF or and whether it's an issue that we can actually save safety with a company or not. So it's on a case by case basis really. So I don't know if that answers your question, but uh yeah, that's what we we do. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 5: Thanks.

Speaker 3: Okay, does anyone consider running for the JSF board? Okay, you can speak. You are muted.

Speaker 6: Uh yeah.

Speaker 5: Um

Speaker 6: just wanted to make sure there's no one else who wants to speak. I was just going to ask How's it like to be the uh uh to be sitting in that uh chair, being the director of the work? Uh maybe you can share some experiences

Speaker 3: Uh okay, um so I've been on the board since 2018. Uh 2018 I was uh I I could say just a silent member, just attended the meetings Then 2019 and 2020 I was uh the vice president, but I was mainly responsible for managing uh membership to the DSF members. So this year has been quite hectic for me at the start because uh there was so much that goes on within the DSF that I didn't know about and uh I receive more mail now because I am part of many mailing lists within the DSF. And also uh Well there are controversies like uh when first Django Con Europe was announced to be a hybrid event

Speaker 3: that really like Yeah, it was uh something uh quite something to handle, but I think yeah, I've adjusted now. Uh it's uh better to handle and um The body has been supportive. But yeah, as time goes on, you are just in the yeah, it's manageable. But it's quite uh quite a lot, yeah. Because you have to speak on controversial issues when uh nobody else wants to to say something, but you you have to do that. But anyway, uh it all works out But you can also do it also. We are all we have elections at the end of the year, so consider writing for the board

Speaker 6: Yeah, somebody needs needs to uh follow up follow up on your uh footpad, right?

Speaker 3: Yes, uh yes, someone needs to follow up, yes, so

Speaker 6: There there's a question in the chat.

Speaker 3: Oh, there's a question in the chat. Okay, oh Okay, so becoming uh a child Django co developer. We are currently working on expanding uh the meaning of uh Django code developer. uh in various directions. Uh we should include uh non -code contributions. Uh we are considering editing Django con organizers today uh co-developers we are considering organ uh adding former JSF board members to the Django code developer as well. So I think

Speaker 3: uh If you ever fall in the categories that are covered by the Django code developer, you'll be invited to join. And also you can consider also uh doing code contributions. Uh Carlton is running a pro uh program where he wants to mainto people who are outside the normal demographic for Django code contributors. So you can also consider uh running for that. But Django Core Developer just like a DSF membership is something that is uh That you that is you are given as a sign of recognition. So you have to do something that the community can uh recognize your work for and then assign you to be a Django

Speaker 3: code developer But if you are not a GSF member as yet, consider nominating yourself uh through our form on the website and then uh the GSF board can consider you for DSF membership fixed. I think it will be easier for you to be a DSF member first before becoming a Jaguar code developer. So I don't know if that answers your question, James. Oh, alright. Nice meeting you all. Bye. Going on with the conference. Bye.

Speaker 7: Bye. Nice meeting you too.

Speaker 3: All right.