Leading the Django Software Foundation and Building Open Source with Thibaud Colas

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, uh my name is Kudzai and welcome to some DjangoCon US 2025 conversations. We're here in Chicago, Illinois, and I'm here with a very special guest that we're gonna have a great conversation with. Um I'm gonna ask you to introduce yourself to everyone.

Speaker 2: Yeah, hi, I'm Thibaut Colas. I'm the president of the Jingle Software Foundation. and uh product lead for the Wagtail CMS and I work at Torchbox in the UK.

Speaker 1: Oh that's super awesome. Where are you from Thipo?

Speaker 2: I'm from France. I moved to the UK about uh four years ago now

Speaker 1: Okay, so you live in the UK right now?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I moved here to work with Toshbox, makers of Wagtail, and uh yeah, stayed ever since. Work with them remotely now.

Speaker 1: That is so awesome. And correct me if I'm wrong, but Wagtail is a sponsor for Junk on USC.

Speaker 2: Wagtail is a sponsor. We have a booth. We have a few call to actions. Maybe I'll tell you about some. Yeah, really happy to be here.

Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome. So you mentioned that you're president of the Django Software Foundation, which is a really awesome channel to have. Um so you're here at DjangoCon US. Is this your is this the first DjangoCon you've attended this year

Speaker 2: Uh it's actually the third this year. I've been to Django Kong Europe in uh was it in April? Uh huh. Django Kong Africa, my first time ever in Africa in August and now the US in uh September

Speaker 1: Wow, that is a lot of uh Django cons. What makes you is that something you have to do as president or did you just feel like you wanted to do that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think as president you definitely have to be close to people and have good reports with them. You definitely don't have to attend any events if you can't or have other plans. But I think it's really good at least for me. I think it's important to get to know people face to face and spend time with them. So yeah, just really happy that I could uh make it here with um support from MikeTale.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it's really cool to see you attending the different conferences because Sometimes titles like president of the DFS which is s Django Saute Foundation, it's just like a title. But now you're here and people actually get to enter. Put a face. Yeah, put a face to it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So

Speaker 1: is this your first time attending Django Con US?

Speaker 2: It's the third time I think. Uh I've actually travelled like three years in a row here and I feel like it's really important to me to be here. Yeah. Because I only have so many opportunities to meet all the cool people in the US. This is the best time to come I think.

Speaker 1: Yeah this is a great time and we're in Chicago. What's your favorite thing about what's been your favorite thing about Chicago so far?

Speaker 2: Ooh um I think the locals have all been lovely. Yesterday I came back from my first ever NFL football game.

Speaker 1: Oh nice.

Speaker 2: And the guy who took us back to our hotel in like um like bike thing he was like not meant to do it but he just started

Speaker 1: The people have been really cool as well. I'm not from Chicago and Uh it's my first time here as well and I've just felt you know great city, great architecture and great people like you said. So that's super cool So going back to your position as president of the Django Sauti Foundation, what things did you look and say, okay, I want to change this during my tenure. Oh god. And did you have any success with those things?

Speaker 2: It's a volunteer thing. So you have quite clear plans on what you want to do and you get elected. So you present those plans to people and you just think you're going to have the time to do those things that you have kind of ambitions for. Turns out in practice there's lots of things that need happening whether you want it or not. And you have to focus on those things quite often. So the things for me I wanted to do were like accessibility, environmental impacts of Django, things like that. But it turns out what's actually I think the most important is just sustainability of the project and like adjusting the culture a bit so that we're more open to like trial and error kind of progress. So I think I've done what I wanted so far, but there's definitely like a few years worth more of things that I I'd like to get to if I can.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Are you do you plan on staying involved with uh the community in that capacity like after your tenure as president?

Speaker 2: Definitely.

Speaker 1: Like with working groups and stuff.

Speaker 2: Yeah yeah definitely because you know president is for one year. I c I could get reelected. But I think these days uh it's actually very, very doable to get lots of things done in our community without being in those elected positions Yeah. with the working groups you mentioned, which are groups that we as the board of directors delegate things to and then they can take ownership of those things. So I think I'll stay involved with like three, four working groups in a kind of marketing community space for sure.

Speaker 1: So if someone's watching this and you know they've never been involved with uh Django at an um higher organizational level and they're interested in getting involved, what advice would you give them to start that journey?

Speaker 2: I think the most important is to just know what you're in it for, like what's your personal motivations, and then try and become aware of the options you have in the community. and decide okay like what's the options that are good for me based on what I want to get out of it. And I'd say it's also really good to just keep in mind that It's a big universe, so definitely worthwhile to think of starting with something and feeling okay to move on to other things after Like for me for example, I really liked starting with uh Django Girls as a coach and organizer. And I've done it multiple times so that at some point I was like, okay, I wanna get something new. And there's just so many options to choose from that you become more aware of only after you got started with one theme.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome. You mentioned something about Wagtail earlier. Yeah. Do you want to share about that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so Wagtail is uh is built on Django. It's an open source project. that you know is definitely a big part of the community. There's about 20,000 sites built with at this point in time, about 500 Wagtail packages And um really happy to be here at this event also because this year we have our own event soon after. So it's an event called Wagtail Space and it's fully online in October and it's free and I want people to sign up for that.

Speaker 1: You guys heard that. Sign up for Wagtail Space is going to be super awesome. Timothy, I'm really glad you came and sat down with us, had this conversation, enjoy the rest of the conference, and yeah, we'll see you around.

Speaker 2: I think you could like it.