Steering Council introduction

Speaker 1: So if you want to follow along, uh please scan the QR code. Uh today I should be speaking at a relatively nice speed. To tomorrow I will be showing also a QR code and I will be much, much faster. So be ready when you see me tomorrow. So uh I'm Kind of here to tell you my name. My name is Emma. And I've been doing open source Python and Django for a long time. I am a member of the PSF and the DSF. Uh on the Left side of the screen, you can see places where I write stuff. On the other side of the screen, you can see places where I write code.

Speaker 1: And you can see that I work for Levit, which is the small company in Belgium that I founded. We do mostly Django stuff. And for um bigger projects I also uh work with Squads. Squads is a group of teams. of highly experienced people helping um gen regenerative startups and companies doing stuff. But the reason I'm here before you today is probably not because of that, it's because I've been elected to the steering council. Uh along with some other people.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Um this was last December. Thank you if you voted. If you didn't vote, uh maybe you can think about voting because all you need to be able to vote for a DSF uh board or the steering council is to be a DSF personal member. And probably a lot of you here qualify to be a DSF personal member And so when I say that I've been elected along other people , these are the other people. So there's Carlton that you've uh seen talk today as well. There's Lily. Lily, are you there? Lily isn't

Speaker 1: Yeah, Lily 's all the way over there. So if you uh we are the three European uh members of the steering council. So if you're seeing us in the old way and want to ask us questions, please please feel free. Um there's also Tim Schilling and Frank Riles. Um and they're all US-based, so they're not here today. So the steering council, what do we do? Overall has been written in depth ten and twelve, which personally I find rather difficult to read, so I've asked uh Oyama to uh give me a summary of what we're supposed to be doing.

Speaker 1: And uh this is uh mainly providing guidance and making decisions about the direction of the projects. Being representatives of the community , establishing policies and enforcing them, and also mostly communicate and collaborate with the community. So basically my role is to talk with all of you. Um so for how long uh are we have we been elected? Uh Steering Council members are elected uh for a release cycle, so you might know that Django goes for For example, for the 6.

Speaker 1: x release going to be 6. 0, 6. 1, and 6. 2. 6. 2 is going to be the LTS, and then we're going to move on to 7. x. And uh that takes about two years. But we did get a bit of a head start because the previous uh steering console stepped down. So we have a bit over two years to try to improve things Uh so have we done anything yet? Yes, we have. Um we did help a little bit with the five point two release. uh and a few other things. But if you're really curious and want to uh see what we've been up to, we've been keeping public meeting notes of all the meetings we've had

Speaker 1: And all the decisions that have been taken, all the actions that were needed and that have been executed, or maybe not yet from us. One of those actions was to um approve a new merger. So if you remember Sarah's talk Uh you remember that there is a bottleneck of mergers, so we approved uh Marius to be uh um merger as well, Marius being one of uh the former fellows One of the things that we have done that might not look very big but that sounds very important is that now if you want to write a depth, you could you can do that in Markdown.

Speaker 1: So just for a fence, uh who here has ever looked at how uh the debt process goes? Can you raise your hands Yeah, that's about thirds of the people. Keep your hand up if you have ever written one. And keep your hand up if it has ever been accepted. So yeah, I think Tom is the only one uh with his hand up. So um it's a small step that's now you can do that in Markdown, but it is for the for for a lot of people it might be something that's going to make your life easier and maybe next year if I ask the same question

Speaker 1: instead of a third of the people raising their hands I will have half of the room raising their hands. Um so are we working on anything else right now? What are we doing Uh one of the things we're doing is trying to better understand our community. Uh Coltern mentioned that uh we probably only have access to 0. 1 % of everybody who uses Django. And we would like to try to understand at least that one person, that point one percent, but possibly more. So one of the things that we have been doing is that we put up uh a post on the forum to ask people

Speaker 1: um to try to see if we have been able to categorize all the personas that we think might be using and contributing to Django. This is a short URL to the to the link to the forum. Please go there, uh see if you see yourself, if if you see your own clients, your own company represented in those personals, and if you don't see them then please make sure to to add whatever we we might have missed. Because knowing in what direction to push Django for the future is also knowing Who uses Django and for what purpose?

Speaker 1: Something that has come up multiple times during this conference already. is trying to improve the the visibility of uh third party packages and uh carltoon already kind of uh sold it earlier but we are working on a list That will not be Django's official list, but it will be the steering council's official list of package that we recommend. So basically those are packages that most of us are going to be uh using in all the projects. uh or in half of our projects. So um to make one more little experiment, um

Speaker 1: Raise your hand if you've heard about Django CSP So that's about third of the room. Django CSP is one of those third-party packages that is going to get uh into core. And uh the the fact that only a third of the room knows about this package is the reason why we need to have better visibility uh for for some third-party packages. Um third party packages are one thing that we want to make more visible, but uh contributors Is also something that we want to make more visible. If you are helping Django project in any way, we want to showcase that and to

Speaker 1: make that uh more visible. Other things that we've been working about, we've been uh looking into what are the next stages of uh Django tasks, uh what's going to be in core, what's not. We've been looking into possibilities for public funding for either code or reviews and talking about the possibility of fundable or sponsorable debts. Um, but uh we've also been talking about new processes Because some feedback that we've heard from the community is

Speaker 1: that uh Django's batteries are a bit leaky or completely missing. And that some people find the contributor experience not that great. Uh I've heard the word soul crushing. Uh but that that's probably not everybody. But at the me at the same time also people want to keep Django as stable as it is right now. And so we're trying to consolidate that into new processes that will Hopefully bring us the best of both worlds. One of those processes is that we want to work on a simplified depth. Making uh depth available as more done is only the first step

Speaker 1: in a series of steps to make that process more accessible, more readable for people who are not used to using academic language, for people who might not be uh uh who might be speaking English as a second language, um people who might be younger and want to to get into code or Basically all of us, as I told you at the beginning, I I use chat um Oyama to uh read the depths because otherwise they're too long and uh they're hard to make sense of. Uh we also want to um bring back uh this um notion of good ownership. So this is uh something uh Sarah mentioned earlier

Speaker 1: and other people have talked about of um getting the community involved again into more into the code the the the the integrity of Django and becoming some sort of specialist in some area of the code whether it be templates whether it be the admin, the orm and things like that. We would like um to to start rebuilding this this pool of people that are very familiar with one part of the code of Django and that we can uh maybe uh start relying on to uh do code reviews and uh say if you are part of the groups that does Django template whenever there is a pull request that involves a template

Speaker 1: you might be allowed to uh you would be allowed to approve that uh merge request and things like that. So this is something that um kind of used to exist in Django some time ago ago when we had the core team and then it kind of got lost uh except for the ORM where we still have uh quite a few people who are very knowledge knowledgeable but you are um um but uh this is something that we want to try to encourage So people getting familiar with one specify we we don't want everybody to know everything about the the the internals of Django, that would be a lot to ask. But we we would like to to build again those groups of people who know things.

Speaker 1: And uh one way we'd like to do that is that people have been asking Why is Django still not using GitHub? Well, we have created a GitHub repository that you will be able to start using this weekend. If you want to try uh right now, you can try it right now. Um But this is uh a new process to replace the the forum. So right now if you want to propose a new feature for Django, you're the the workflow that we've been pushing for years is telling you to go to the forum. And we've had some feedbacks of people saying that the forum is a black hole where ideas go to die or where consensus is never reached So we want to test a new approach.

Speaker 1: Maybe it's going to stick, maybe it's not going to stick. But we do want to try this new approach. And I'm going to show you uh what this looks like. Um yeah I cannot zoom in on that sorry Um but uh this this is basically the the the the project. You can use the the QR code to go there. And this is something where where we want to try to have a better uh visibility of new issues because the forum is not only uh used for new ideas, it's used for a lot of things So we want to try to focus uh the new ideas for Django if you have a feature week request, if you want to uh add

Speaker 1: something into Django, if you want to maybe propose to integrate a third party uh app or something go uh to that repo uh i'm going to to switch to the to the repo itself uh create Create an issue right there. That's why I created oh yeah, of course. Um so don't don't Don't go. So use that link. But yeah, the this is this is something we're trying where we will be encouraging everybody to uh give thumbs up or thumbs down to the idea so that we can have a better idea of uh the consensus on some feature request.

Speaker 1: If some people want uh if the community wants this or doesn't want this. Uh in the end, the steering council will be uh the one deciding Whether uh uh an issue whether a feature request is moving on to the next stage But we want you involve the community and have the community g tell us what what do you want to see in Django. So, in short, the six point X agenda is to uh celebrate our 20th anniversary. Uh keep going slowest and steady and trying to get us out of this lull

Speaker 1: that The Django project might have been s uh after COVID and trying to uh build things for the future and try to improve or processes and things so that Django can see another twenty years and that we can keep using it. So the the repo that I shot will officially be open this weekend If you start writing stuff there, we will not delete it, but we will not start officially looking at it until this weekend.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Unfortunately we're out of time. But if you have questions, I'm sure you can find M around here.