First month on Django’s Steering Council

Just before Christmas, I was honoured to be elected to Django’s Steering Council for the upcoming 6.x cycle. With the holidays imminent, we didn’t kick off until the beginning of January, so we’ve been up and running for about a month now.

Here are some of my thoughts on that first month. I’ll use “we” but I’m not speaking officially, or for the other SC members, here.

We’ve been kind of quiet — making only a couple of public announcements:

• On the Django blog, just saying hello, and announcing that we’re suspending the DEP 10 voting mechanism (where there’s a clear SC consensus) to give us time to work on the governance.
• On the Forum, asking for input on improving the Triage Workflow, particularly handling New Feature requests, that has caused some pain points over the last cycle.

Nonetheless, we’ve not been idle. We’re meeting every week currently, and are trying to get our processes in place, whilst also taking on the pressing issues.

We’re aware that there are a number of specific items on the radar, that folks obviously want input on, but we’re hoping to address the higher-level questions before we get sucked into firefighting.

On both these counts, we ask for a bit of patience whilst we get up to speed. We’re working on it! Officially, we weren’t meant to start until after Django 5.2 final is released in April, so we’re ahead of the game I’d argue.

Already, there’s a repo for our meeting notes, and a Forum thread you can subscribe to for updates. There’s also a Steering Council focus GitHub project that you can check out to see what we’re working on (or have on the back burner for consideration later). Do follow along there.

My Stack Report newsletter this month was on some of the topics we’ve been thinking about: Managing Django’s Queue — do check it out if you’ve not seen it already.

It’s been a good first month. I’m excited for what we’re going to get done.