Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Why you should run for the DSF Board, and my goals for the DSF in 2025

Applications are open for the 2025 Django Software Foundation Board of Directors – you can apply until October 25th Anywhere on Earth.

So, I want to do two things:

Why you should run for the DSF Board

It feels like we’re at a bit of an inflection point for the Django community. We’ve got a ton of new people coming into the community – e.g. Black Python Devs and Djangonaut Space are both doing amazing work bringing new people into the community. And yet, at the same time, we’ve got something of a vacuum at the leadership level — many long-time leaders have stepped away or are less involved, and there are some big questions about the overall direction of the project.

I’m not concerned about any of this: we’ve been here before, a few times, in the project’s history, and we’ve always adapted and come out better. Quite the opposite: this feels more like a moment of opportunity than anything. New people being fresh eyes and perspectives, and invite us to question all of the ossified “we’ve always done it this way” practices.

One of the places someone could have the most impact is by serving on the DSF Board. Like the community at large, the DSF is at a transition point: we’re outgrowing the “small nonprofit” status, and have the opportunity to really expand our ambition and reach. In all likelihood, the decisions the Board makes over the next year or two will define our direction and strategy for the next decade.

If this all sounds exciting to you – please apply!. There are no hard qualifications; anyone with an interest can run. That said, I do think you need either some experience in the Django community – maybe six months at a mimumum – or prior experience running a nonprofit.

For more on the kind of person who’d make a good board member, see this post by Thibaud Colas over on the Django forum. (Thibaud is a fellow board member, and our Secretary. His term, like mine, continues into 2025, so if elected you’d be serving with him, too.)

To Thibaud’s list I’ll add one thing: serving on the board over the last two years has been delightful! The past and current board members I’ve served with have been awesome to work with; it’s been really a very chill and pleasant time. There’s been none of the headaches or drama that you might imagine could exist on a nonprofit board. When we’ve disagreed it’s been polite and collegial, and resolved easily. I obviously can’t guarantee that the 2025 board will be the same, but I’d be shocked if it were any different. We have a really high calibre of leaders in this community, and our community has always put a high value on professionalism and collaboration skills. I’d be very surprised if the 2025 board wasn’t as delightful as the 2024 and 2023 boards were.

If you’re more interested in technical leadership than community leadership – we’ve got an opportunity for that, too. We’ll shortly be holding elections for the Steering Council, the body that guides the technical direction of the project, and there’s a similarly-sized opportunity for impact there. Keep an eye on the Django blog for more info, and subscribe if you want to read my thoughts — I’ll be writing something about my hopes for the next Steering Council here shortly.

My goals and priorities for the DSF in 2025

Here’s what I wrote a year ago in my candidate statement for 2024:

The Django community is super-vibrant and new people are joining the community all the time, but it’s very hard for people to “level up” and move to any sort of leadership position at the DSF or among the core team. We just don’t have very many opportunities for people to have an impact, and we don’t have good “onramps” to that work.

So, this term [e.g. 2023], I (with the rest of the board) started building some of these opportunities onramps! The recently-announced working group and membership changes are the start of this, and if re-elected I’d want to continue working in this direction. It’s now easier for people to join the DSF, and easier for them to spin up working groups to do impactful work. But now we need to start defining these groups, funding them, and continuing this growth.

This work continued in 2024 — not as quickly as I’d like, but we’ve made some progress. The Social Media and Fundraising Working Groups are real bright spots to me — there’s a lot of “new blood” in those groups, they’re starting to get real things done, and the energy is exciting.

To take a step back, though, the big picture for me has been trying to move the Board towards a more “executive”-style board. That is: historically, the Board has been what’s usually called an “activist” board: when DSF stuff needs doing, board members do it directly. That’s super-common for smaller nonprofits, and it’s not a bad thing per se, but it doesn’t scale well.

So that leads me to my big goal for 2025: hire an executive director. I talked about this in my DjangoCon talk, so see that for the justification but, short version: it’s the next step in moving the DSF forward. Since that talk, I’ve had a few conversations with donors about closing the funding gap between where we are now and where we need to be to hire an ED, and I’m fairly optimistic that momentum is forming and we’ll be able to open a position in 2025!

A few other goals I have:

  • Continue to develop Working Groups — and get increasingly hands off with them. Getting them to a point where they’re mostly self-sustaining, and don’t need much Board involvement, would be lovely. One major tactical goal: we don’t currently take advantage of the budget option for working groups, so in 2025 I’d love to see one (or more) of the working groups ask for and be given direct spending authority.

  • Build better working relationships around the broader Django/Python community. There’s no burnt bridges or anything, we’re all friendly, but the DSF hasn’t done the best job keeping open and active lines of communications with other groups like DEFNA, the PSF, etc. We’re starting to set up regular syncs and shared channels, but it’s a new muscle for us and it’s weak. I’d like to spend the next year building better and more systemic lines of communication that’ll last well past my service on the board.

  • Documenting the DSF’s policies, procedures, roles, responsibilities, etc. I’ll quote from Sarah Boyce:

    We have limited community docs on the different roles that folks are doing in the community, especially on “how much time is involved in X”.

    I love that Will Vincient published personal notes about a month and a year on the DSF Board.

    I feel having this for almost everything (Accessibility team, Ops team, Steering Council, security team, DjangoCon organising team, Code of Conduct team, etc.) will help folks learn about these positions and want to put their name forward for them. Onboarding documentation is also very useful.

    I’ve started to do a bit of this internally, but want to continue, and there’s no reason these documents should be internal-only.

  • Write improved and clearer grant guidelines (and revisit funding amounts). This is, for me, on of the real pain points among undocumented DSF things. We have loose policies, some of which is written publicly, but for at least half of our grant applications, the Board spends way too much time trying to parse out if and how much to fund a thing.

    Plus, I’ve heard some feedback from grant recipients that funding hasn’t kept pace with increasing event costs, and they’ve been disappointed with our grants; and I’ve also heard confusion from groups who don’t know if they would qualify or how much to ask for.

    I think there are some relatively simple fixes here: documenting our grant policies a bit more clearly, answering some of the common sticking points, and updating our funding amounts (there’s some room in the budget here, I think). Put this all in a public document, both for grant applicants and for future reviewers.

  • Continue on as as Treasurer — If someone on the incoming board is super interested I’d be happy to hand off the role, but after being reluctantly talked into it last year I’ve found it surprisingly rewarding. I don’t have huge plans for the role (beyond the documentation stuff I wrote above). Most of the work here next year will be just regular tactical stuff, nothing major, though I do have a few mechanical finance things that need doing (working with our new tax prep folks on getting up to speed on the DSF; setting up a new HYSA after our previous one shut down; etc.)

  • Keep reading and listening to what other people want out of the DSF. I’ve been super happy to see several people writing publicly about what they want from the DSF: Sarah Boyce, Tim Schilling, and Carlton Gibson. I’ve been influenced by what they wrote, and by similar private conversations I’ve had with several folks in the community. I hope to read more posts like these, and hear from more people about what they want to see out of the DSF. I don’t think that highly of my own opinions; if I hear good arguments for different priorities, I’m likely to be easily swayed.

Questions? Feel free to reach out

If you have questions about running on the board, I’m very happy to try to answer them: get in touch. I’d also love to read your thoughts about what the DSF should get up to in 2025; if you’re not comfortable sharing them publicly that’s fine, send ’em to me instead.