Nominations are open for the next Django Software Foundation Board of Directors.
Following the example of Sarah Boyce and Tim Shilling, here’s my list of DSF initiatives I’d like to see for this year.
Note: these ideas are strictly ordered. The first one must be done first, and so on. Progress can’t be made any other way. I’d rather see one (the first one) succeed, paving the way for the future, than see the others fail. And there I have to add an “Again”. Read on…
Django’s Board is (just) volunteers. They have limited time and, rightly, can only put in so much effort. They have real lives, and other things to get on with.
What this has meant for Django is that initiatives never get completed, never get followed through.
Again, that’s not a criticism of the Board, or anyone who stood on it. The reality is, we’re asking way more than will ever be realistic to expect Board members to be able to enact significant changes to Django in the time available. All we do is set the scene for unmet expectations, and feelings of guilt or failure that have no place.
Only by hiring an Executive Director — only by having someone paid to work on them — can we push forward with all the exciting ideas that are circulating.
We have so many ideas in Django, and yet so few have come to pass. I’m not really sure I can sit through one more State of Django DjangoCon talk, until an Executive Director is in place.
If there is only one thing the Board achieves in 2024/25, let it be this.
We keep Django updated. We keep pushing it forwards. But the website is dated now, and certainly doesn’t show Django in its best light.
There is much talk in the community about improving Django’s marketing, and boosting the fundraising efforts. But none of that can be done without updating the website.
Will Vincent and I spoke with potential corporate sponsors, but their feedback was that there’s very little in it for them in sponsoring Django. (The contrast was made with Vue.js, which looks modern, and where the sponsors are front and centre.)
We also spent an obscene amount of effort trying to get the website pushed forward. That’s a separate story but, it ground to a halt essentially because of a lack of drive. We need the ED to keep the momentum up, and then we need to pay an agency to do the work onwards, so it actually happens.
“Framework < Ecosystem < Community”, right. Or that’s how it’s supposed to be. But both the ecosystem and the community are almost absent from the Django website.
The homepage says stay in the loop with a signup to the essentially dormant django-users and dango-developers Google Groups. Meanwhile, the Forum and Discord (whilst mentioned) are something you have to go hunting for.
There’s no mailing list — no signup for even the most basic communications from the DSF.
There’s no page about books and courses that you can find on Django. Our community authors are doing absolutely remarkable work, and are left having to market themselves without even a word of thanks or encouragement from Django itself.
There’s no link to Django news, which is essential reading. There’s no section about podcasts and YouTube channels.
It’s like a void.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave an estimate of the Django user base in his recent DjangoCon US talk. It’s in the single-millions. (The exact figure doesn’t matter here.) It’s no secret that Django News and the Django Chat podcast have subscribers/listeners in the single-thousands.
What that means is that we reach (to an order of magnitude) 0.1% of the Django user base. That’s basically what we as an community can reach if we need to. (Later today, this week’s episode of Django Chat is about the DSF elections with Thibaud, and it’s a special: we did it because Thibaud and Sarah, in their role as Board members, asked if we could help get the word out.)
It’s clear as day that if there was a proper community section on the website both Django News and Django Chat (and all the other things out there too!) could 10x their audience without doing anything else. (The one thing every Django user does at some point or other is to find themselves on the Django website.)
But if we did that, suddenly, instead of only reaching 0.1% of the user base, we’d reach 1% of the user base. That may not sound like a lot, but it would 10x the audience for calls to action, 10x the potential attendees at DjangoCons, 10x the potential contributors, 10x the potential individual sponsor base, and so on. It would make a massive difference to the sustainability of Django.
It’s totally natural that only a small percentage of the user base engage. That will always be the case. But there’s a world of difference between small and vanishing.
And all of that is just to talk about Community. I’m going to discuss the Ecosystem in this month’s Stack Report, so I’ll leave it for now. (But, spoilers, it’s much of a mind, as you can imagine.)
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That’s it: an Executive Director, the website, and integration with the community on it. In that order. If only the first happens in the next year, that would still be a win: we’d finally be able to make progress on the rest.
If you want to help push Django forwards, you should probably run. Go nominate yourself: 2025 DSF Board Nominations. You can make the difference! ❤️