As of a few weeks ago, I’m the President of the Django Software Foundation for 2025.

I know, right! You might be wondering what that means, I do too. Truth is a lot of the roles and responsibilities at the Foundation have a nebulous definition. But we’ll figure it out.

What it means for me

More than anything, it’s an honor to be in such a role, and a mandate for me to do more of what I’ve already been doing at the Foundation. Plain and simple, I want to keep Django and its community on an upward trajectory. Make it more of the Django Community Foundation than Django Software Foundation. Help our people navigate today’s societal challenges and be a driving force in our industry.

My statement for the officer elections

While members of the Board of Directors are elected by the DSF membership, the officers are elected by the Board. I’ve been pretty critical of Django and its governance in the past, like in my personal statement for the 2024 Board elections. I kept that theme going in my statement for the officer elections. Here is how I put it:

Operationally, the Django community as a whole isn’t functioning as well as it could be. We have motivated individuals, excellent ideas, but lacklustre coordination. In the Foundation in particular, our brilliant volunteers need a better baseline of organization to do their best work. And we need this too when partnering with others, or when hiring.

In my second year on the board, I’d like to help improve this by taking on more responsibilities as President of the DSF. This will be behind-the-scenes work to map out organization maturity gaps (docs, infosec, fundraising, etc), and coordinate with new and existing contributors to resolve them. And external-facing work too: creating more sustainable relationships with our partners, and accountability and transparency towards our community.

I believe Django and the Foundation need that kind of (constructive) criticism to grow. And transparency from its leaders. We have a good community-driven project, and a thousand ways in which it could be better. I’m elated and honored to be part of that.

My plans

I’ll strive to find the right balance between working on the issues I care about (accessibility, Django’s carbon footprint, diversity, social equity) – and working on the fundamentals of organizational maturity and governance. And the business as usual of a non-profit like ours. I’m sure I will drop the ball on some of those, and hope to be able to count on my Foundation colleagues to call that out and help me make it work. We have an outstanding team so I know it well.

I don’t see myself sustaining this kind of sustained levels of volunteer involvement with the non-profit open source world beyond 2025, so we’ll also need to work on creating more opportunities for high-impact contributions so others step in. I’m sure we’ll get there. Onwards! 🌈