Community Update: Django Software Foundation with Thibaud Colas

Speaker 1: All right, thanks for having us. Hi, I'm Thibaut. I'm the president of the Django Software Foundation. We are the foundation, the nonprofits that supports the Django framework. And we have a bunch of updates and I'm joined by my foundation colleagues. If you want to see the slides, there's lots of links in there. There's the link to the slides at the bottom here Djangoproject. com slash US dash 2025. Updates, big one first. We have a new Django fellow. Jacob Walls. We're super happy to have you here, Jacob. Joining our existing fellows Natalia, Bidar and Sarah Boyce, just in case Jacob wasn't here.

Speaker 1: I think he's trying to fly the pony. Moving on, working groups and teams. If you don't know the foundation too well, we have the board of directors, and these days we're trying to get support from many more volunteers with our working groups. They're the best way to get involved with Django, in my opinion. I earmarked four in particular are in the process of getting formed. Social media events support, they're up and running. We need new members for them. We have a diversity and inclusion working group that is proposed that needs more support. And we have a proposed AI team. And uh yeah, it's a big topic. Yeah, if you're an AI enthusiast we we we want you. If you're an AI if you're an AI skeptic, we we need you.

Speaker 1: Uh We definitely need the skeptics to join that team, coordinate with the enthusiasts, and hopefully allow us to navigate these uh murky waters, or be polite. Board elections. They're coming up very soon. This is uh one of the highest profile rules of the foundation. This is the best way, in my opinion, to get things moving in the direction that you wish for. and uh support the foundation along the way because that's what needs to happen day to day. Talk to us if you want to run and we'll answer any questions. And with this I'll hand over to Frank Hey

Speaker 2: everybody. Just want to give you a little update on what all is going to land in 6. 0 if you haven't been paying attention. Some of it is already public, but um The biggest things are a security feature. We're moving Django CSP, which is a long-term third-party package that's been around for forever. It's getting moved directly into core. So that'll be just baked in. Um the other the other notable piece is uh template partials. So for, you know, which are useful on their own, but especially for you HTMX fans, uh this is particularly important that it'll be baked in. And then the The big one that we all thought would never happen uh is Django tasks. Uh there will be an async task framework

Speaker 2: baked right into Django. And that's that's the big updates there.

Speaker 3: Oh, that's my friends. That's you. Okay. So let's go back and DjangoCon US two thousand twenty-two. This is a picture of the first day of a sprints. We went for a run and uh swimming the in the ocean. And some of us also um actually went in the in the ocean to for for a swimmer and doing this type of of things we we start thinking or doing this type of activities also in another context not only at the end of um a very tiring conference after uh having delivered that a talk and maybe volunteered

Speaker 3: and organized a conference I I wrote uh um an article about that, proposing to organize some sort of sprints to be together with other people and to uh contribute actively on something without having the burden of presenting, organizing, volunteering, all these type of things And after some uh some hero speaking about that at finally we met again in DjangoCon in Europe this year in Dublin and we started talking again with Carton in particular. And uh at the end of the sprint we decided we signed a small contract between him and me.

Speaker 3: And we decided to start doing an experiment and doing actually uh the first Django sprints. Um so we organized we decided to organize this year in Palafrugal where Carton lives This is a picture of him. And uh in the sprint we 're going to organize another one where I live in Pescara. And the name of the the sprint because they are very close, they are direct fly between these two places. And the name of the sprint is Django on the Mat because we are on the Mediterranean Sea. And it's only the first experiment of a Django sprint. If things go well, maybe we it tr start organizing all around the world so people don't have to move too much and don't have to spend

Speaker 3: eleven hour in a flight and maybe can enjoy the some some time together. So the goal of the of the sprints are to share some time together with others developer working actually on something concrete without everganize other things and talk thinking about uh um um talks and other uh things to organize. And this one will be in Palafogel, which is very close to Girona. If someone wants to join, it's very convenient to uh to reach. We decided to organize in small town because the cost is very uh accessible and in some period of the year where there is no tourists around

Speaker 3: And you can find all the information on the website. Maybe this this one is very close, but the next one you can be able to join or if Things go well, we report to the DSF and the community, and this type of sprints can be organized also also elsewhere. Thank you.

Speaker 4: Hello. So I am Jacob. I'm the current treasurer and I'm gonna talk about money. So fun. Um I gave a presentation last year at DjangoCon US that dug deeper into Django's budget, Django the DSF's budget, excuse me, and I showed this chart. There's a new version that's updated for 2024. If you want to go deep into what these things are, you can watch that from last year or you can read our annual report. But The TLDR is that our budget has been roughly the same for the last five years. We have an annual budget of around $250,000 to $300,000. We spend most of that and we also make most of that. that. So there's a reasonable, you know, if when you want to think about how Django

Speaker 4: 's finances work We raise money from donations, both corporate donations and individual donations, and we spend that money mostly in paying fellows and our board assistant Catherine, who you've seen probably at the registration desk. The reason I'm bringing it up this year is um you if you look at the very bottom there, you see surplus. Uh eighteen thousand dollars, that's pretty normal. Most years we run a very small, uh a very small surplus. I'm not gonna say profit, we're a nonprofit, that money just goes into our bank account. Um We've made some different decisions in 2025. When you look at that chart in our 2025 report, you're going to see a loss. And that's like A kind of surprising and interesting change, and I feel like it's important to talk about.

Speaker 4: I'm gonna write a blog post about this. There'll be more details in that blog post. But basically We have a we have a reasonable amount of money saved up, um, coincidentally also around $300,000 in our bank account. And like what's that money for other than to support the community? We've heard over the last year plus that the fellow role has become increasingly unsustainable, the amount of work that, you know It it used to be that we were fine with a single fellow and now we and then we had one and a half heads, and that also became too much work for them, and so we hired a third fellow. That was a no-brainer. The alternative there was letting the work become unsustainable.

Speaker 4: And the whole point of having the fellowship role in the first place is to make Django maintainership sustainable. We're also taking steps towards professionalizing the DSF. We want to eventually hire a paid executive director where we're reaching the size that relying on volunteers is simply unsustainable. I talked about that in my talk last year. We probably expect to see more grant requests over the next few months. The the PSF s uh spent its annual budget early, essentially. We haven't, so we can we have some money left to continue to give grants. We expect to see an uptick, and broadly speaking, the Django community continues to grow, so we should expect to see more grant requests. And with all of these changes The board has made a fairly explicit decision that it's okay to operate at a loss.

Speaker 4: This is fine, and we have a pretty long runway here, like measured in years. Um, but If nothing changes, eventually we're not going to keep keep this stuff up. So we need all of y'all's help and the many people not in this room to make to make these bets. into take them from experiments into permanent things that we're that we're doing. So please consider supporting the Django Software Foundation. We're a nonprofit. Donations are tax deductible for US uh organizations and people. Um your company may be interested in donating. We'd love to talk to them if they are, but also individual donations from individual people are actually really impactful. Even just a couple of bucks a month spread across the entire Django community

Speaker 4: would take us um into the black very, very quickly. And if you make a donation here this week, come see us at our booth and get a nice shiny sticker made personally by Tebo. I believe that's it. We have time for QA. Yo, we have time for QA. Amazing. Two minutes. Anyone have a anyone have questions? Right. The question is what about the status of looking for an executive director? Someone we were interested in talking with and that sort of fell through. get into too many details. So we're a little bit back to um square one on that.

Speaker 4: I think the next steps are to sort of regroup. There's a there's a subgroup of the board that's been working on this. The next step is to group and figure out next steps. Jeff and I already talked a little bit this week. So um we'd certainly welcome help from anyone in the community and wants to assist with with that. We sort of have an ad hoc group of people. So if that's something anyone here is interested in helping out with, let us know. Probably expect to see something from us about next steps publicly within the next month or so. I will also add since we have uh another minute, um so uh um Thibaut mentioned running for the board That's a fantastic thing to do, especially if you think we should be making different decisions with how we spend our money. Um that would be a good way to express that, but also just we need we need help and we need um

Speaker 4: uh we need uh uh new blood to help us move in different directions. But uh another way that you can help is by becoming a DSF member. Um and that will that will make you eligible to vote in the upcoming elections. Membership is an application process. You need to explain. Membership is available to anyone who's done some work contributing to the Django community. In a fairly broad sense. So anyone who has helped organize this conference is eligible to be a member. Anyone who's worked at a Django Girls event is eligible to be a member. Anyone who's written a bunch of blog posts about Django, who's contributed code, who maintains a third-party package, even people who maintain notable things within the greater Python ecosystem that aren't that aren't necessarily like Django specific. Um, you know, if if Carson, who gave our keynote, our first keynote, applied to be a uh DSF member, we would almost certainly

Speaker 4: uh admit him. He's could created HTMX, which is a very valuable thing to the Django community. Basically if you've helped the community in some way, you are eligible to be a member. If you apply to join aro around now within the next month or so, that that will be plenty of lead time for you to be sure to get to vote in the elections. If you put it off into the last minute and when we've announced elections, there's a like a timing and sequencing there and you might not quite be eligible to vote. So almost everyone in this room is probably eligible to be a member. So I encourage you to apply if you haven't already And you can also nominate other people if you know someone who should be a member and is too um humble to apply themselves. Uh yes, Django Project. com slash foundation. But come to our booth.

Speaker 4: Yeah, or just come to the booth. We have QR codes at the booth that will take you directly there. One more question in the back. Do we have time? Okay, yeah. I'll just repeat it. So the question was if we wanted someone wanted to go to Django on the Med and convince an employer to pay for it, do we have Do we have any advice? Um I would say w nothing formal, but like any of us on stage here would be absolutely thrilled to help with that. So like reach out and we'll and we'll see what we can do. Yeah.

Speaker 3: If you go on the website this morning carton and just shared an article from Lukash Langa that say that Django Sprint is the most valuable things an employer can can do for because it's uh you received free um uh free consultancy from best people you can see around on on on the same but you can go into the website and search for for the article I suggest you

Speaker 5: Okay, thank you so much for the community updates. If you have other questions, you could meet them in the hallway and let them know. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: Before going away we want to take a a selfie bit with all the DSM members. Also with you, Affin.