session by Jacob. Jacob is going to be talking about if we had $1 million, what could the

DSF do with four times its budget? Give a hand for Jacob.

[ Applause ]

>> Howdy, folks. I'm Jacob. I'm on the board of the Django Sofra Foundation, and I'm our

treasurer. This talk today has three parts. I'm going to talk about the DSF's budget,

what it looks like today, where our money comes from, how we spend it. I'm going to

imagine a world in which that budget magically gets quadrupled, and suddenly we have a million

dollars to play with. What might we do? And I'm going to talk about what we might be able

to do to get from here to there. There's also a secret fourth part to this talk, but we'll

get to that. So what does our budget look like today? This

is a visualization of our finances as they stand today. This is not an audit. This is

not exact. This is a rough, simplified average of what our cash flow looks like over the

last five years, including an estimate for 2024. It's actually fairly stable, but it's

not really intended to give you a down-to-the-dollar accounting. It's more intended to give you

a broad understanding of where the money comes from and where it goes.

So where does the money come from? We get money from two sources. We get money from

companies that make donations as corporate sponsors. These are mostly large donations

measured in the hundreds or in the thousands of dollars per year. And we get about $160,000

in corporate donations, of which the bulk come from our top-tier platinum and gold sponsors.

We also get about $90,000 a year in small individual donations. These are individual

donations, $5, $20, sometimes up to $100 a year, but quite small.

So where does that money go to? Where do we spend it? We spend the bulk of our money paying

people. So that's our fellows, Natalia and Sarah, right there.

[ Applause ]

Yes. And also our board admin, Catherine, who is probably sitting out front. You've

almost certainly seen her at registration.

So we spend most of our money paying people to work on Django, to keep the foundation

healthy. The easiest way of thinking about the broad picture of the DSF's funding is

we turn donations into sort of health of the project and of the foundation. The primary

thing the fellows do is triage tickets, review pull requests, sort of keep the project flowing,

keep the project moving forward. And the primary thing that our board admin, Catherine, does

is keep the foundation flowing and keep the foundation healthy.

So at a very simplistic nature, big companies give us money. We turn it into the health

of the project. Not a bad oversimplification. We do also give out grants, about $35,000

a year on average to events. Those range from small events like Django girls' workshops

all the way up to large events like this one.

So let's imagine what we could do with four times this money. I've chosen a million dollars

in part just because it's a convenient round number. It's conveniently four times our current

budget. But it's also really achievable. There are companies in our community who could write

us a million dollar check today and not experience any financial hardship for doing so. It's

an achievable number given the scale of what Django does and the scale of who uses Django.

And it's an amount of money I can imagine spending. I can't really imagine what we would

do with $10 million. That's a ridiculous number. But I can imagine what we'd do with one. So

let's start there. So what would I do?

So at this point I need to be really clear. I'm not speaking for the DSF. I don't think

I'm going to say anything particularly spicy here. I don't know. Other board members in

the room, they can tell me if I'm right about that. But this is not a plan or a proposal

or a hypothetical budget even. This is what I would do. None of these are particularly

new ideas, but they're my priorities. In reality, what we would actually do would look, I think,

probably somewhat close to this, but also substantially different. Since I finished

writing this talk, I've come up with five different things I could put on this list

instead.

So I would hire an executive director. We have reached the limit of what a volunteer

board can do. I can't imagine effectively spending four times our budget without someone

whose full-time job it was to do that ethically and successfully. I also can't imagine raising

a million dollars without someone whose job it was to work with sponsors and work with

community fundraising efforts. I just can't imagine a world in which we get to this point

without a professional working on the project. I'll talk more about that later.

I want to expand the fellowship program. I think the fellowship program has been hugely

successful and one of the secrets to Django's stability and longevity over the last decade

or so. I think at a million dollars, we could easily afford three full-time fellows. That's

doubling the current bandwidth. Maybe the spiciest part of this talk, there's this policy

soft policy that's been in place that fellows don't work on features. I'd get rid of that.

I'd want to expand the grants program. $35,000 a year in grants is not really that much given

the size and the scope of our community. We regularly give grant requesters less than

they ask for. I'd want to do more and bigger event grants. I would love to do feature grants.

Imagine you wanted to work on some cool feature. I just watched Karen's talk, so HTMX is on

the brain. You have an idea for better Django HTMX integration, but you need to take six

weeks off of work to make that happen and you'd like a little bit of money to make that

a financially feasible thing to do. Imagine if you could approach the DSF with a proposal

and we'd fund it. Lastly, I want to steal an idea from the

Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation issues what they call hardship grants. If you're

a member of the Rust community and you're experiencing some sort of financial hardship,

you've lost your job and are having trouble making rent, you have a medical incident,

whatever, you can apply for a hardship grant from the Rust community and from the Rust

Foundation and they'll give you some money to help out. What an incredible example of

caring for your community. Really, what is the DSF for other than to try to care for

our community? I would love to do something like that.

Here's a way to think about what this million dollar budget might look like. We'd still

be spending the bulk of our money on people. Close to three quarters of that budget would

go towards spending on people. That's simply taking what's worked and continuing to do

it. We could also dramatically expand what we're

doing in grants. This chart has $200,000 in feature grants. Another way to think of it

is that's like a whole other fellow, except it rotates among people for specific projects.

We could triple our event budget. We could have a modest hardship grant budget. We could

do quite a bit with that amount of money. Now, you may notice that this chart is remarkably

vague about where the other $750,000 comes from. So let's talk about that.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways that nonprofits raise money. They can raise money

from major donors, a few large donations, or they can raise lots of small donations

from many small funders. I'm taking this term from Sue Gardner, who was the executive director

of the Wikimedia Foundation, the foundation behind Wikipedia. She wrote an article that

I think is fantastic. Anyone interested in nonprofit funding should read this article.

She observes that a major flaw of nonprofits is that their revenue is decoupled from mission

work, which pushes them to provide a positive donor experience at the expense of doing their

core work. The example she gives is of Medicine Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders.

The people who donate money to Doctors Without Borders are not the people that the foundation

serves. The structure of Doctors Without Borders is that rich people give money to Doctors

Without Borders, who then give money to poor people. What that means is that Medicine Sans

Frontieres is incentivized, unfortunately, to optimize for what the wealthy donors want

to see, not the experience of the downstream recipients of that money. I think Gardner

chose Medicine Sans Frontieres for the same reason that I like using them. They are regarded

as a really effective and positive nonprofit organization. This is not like, "Oh, they

suck, and they spend money in the wrong way." No, no, no. They're doing really good work,

and they still struggle with this. Wikipedia was able to make the many small

donors model work. They raised something like 95% of their budget from people donating under

$25 a year. It's really awesome, because the people giving Wikimedia money are the people

who read Wikipedia. There's this direct connection between the people experiencing the benefit

of the organization and the people giving them the money.

Could the DSF make it work? Maybe. Our community is certainly big enough. Django is downloaded

something about 3 million times a year by real people. I could get way in the weeds

about how I came up with that number. We'll talk about it later, but just go with me here.

If Pip install Django charged you $0.33, there's our budget. I think most of you would probably

pay $0.33 to install Django. That doesn't seem like a lot of money.

It's a silly example, but the point is there are enough people who use Django, and it's

used broadly enough to imagine small donations adding up. However, I think it would take

being really aggressive about grassroots funding. Everyone gets annoyed at these Wikipedia funding

drives. I can tell how old you are by whether or not you get this joke. You get annoyed

by the donation drives in your podcast feeds, but these aggressive fundraising tactics work.

They're effective. There are reasons why organizations do them.

If the DSF was serious about a small donor's strategy, you would see my ugly face on the

home page of djangoproject.com a lot. Realistically, I don't think that's something we want to

do as a community. I think we're really committed to Django being really no strings attached.

Not just free, but no strings attached. I think we feel really strongly about that,

and I think the kind of pushy nagging we'd need to do to raise money through a small

donor strategy probably isn't realistic. I also think that's probably okay. To come

back to the incentives that Gardner talks about, we're different from Medicine Sans

Frontiers in that the companies that make up our major donors do experience the direct

benefit of our foundation's work. These are by and large ... Look at the sponsor banners

around this conference. These are organizations that have built businesses and hired people

and been successful because of Django. They are experiencing that benefit directly. I

don't think we have all of the same perverse incentives. I think a major donor strategy

is probably the most realistic one for Django. When I say major donors, who am I talking

about? I'm talking about corporations. I'm talking about very wealthy individuals. I'm

talking about government grants. The most notable example of this is the Sovereign Tech

Fund run out of Germany. I'm talking about private foundation grants. The one that comes

to mind for me is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which gave a large grant to the Python Software

Foundation several years ago. How do you get these major donors to give you large sums

of money? This is where hiring an ED comes in. This is a skill. Working with large donors

is not something I know how to do. It's probably not something that anyone in this room knows

how to do. That's not because it's, "Oh, I see someone who does know how to do it. Well,

we're going to talk." My point is it's not magic. The work we do seems like magic to

people who haven't learned it, but we sit in hotel rooms and learn how to do our job.

There are people who work with major donors who also study that work and learn how to

do it and do it really effectively. I have a friend who's a major donors coordinator

for an animal shelter. I can speak to the effectiveness of her work and the seriousness

with which she takes her career. Once again, what I'm saying here is we should hire experts

and pay them to do their job. It's worked really well for us, and we can continue to

apply that to fundraising. If you like this vision and you want to see a million-dollar

DSF, what can you do to make it happen? This is the secret part four. Yes, I'm going to

ask you for money. If that annoys you and you want to leave, I will not be offended.

But I'm not just going to ask you for money. In fact, I'm mostly not going to ask you for

money. I'm going to ask you for even harder things. I'm going to break this up into three

ways you can help achieve this vision, or one like it. Easy things, things that you

can do in a few minutes, medium things that might be more difficult, and some high-achiever

stuff. If you've contributed in any way to the Django community, to Django's mission,

you are eligible to be a Django Software Foundation member. That means volunteering at this conference,

that means you have a history of writing blog posts or publishing YouTube videos about Django.

If you've written code for Django or a popular third-party package or even an unpopular third-party

package, you are eligible to be a DSF member, and thus you get a voice in what the real

version of that cash flow diagram ends up looking like. If you can afford to, and I

really stress that if, please donate to the Django Software Foundation. I know I've talked

about major donors, but small donations really do make a difference. They are the size, the

number of people who support your organization is a signal to donors of every size about

the health of your organization. It is one of the things we use when we talk to large

donors. You know, 100,000 people donated last year would be an amazing thing to say, right?

It would signify a real health and vibrance of our community. But once again, if donating

to the DSF causes any sort of financial hardship, please don't. I don't -- it's not that important.

It's just an open source project. If you can't afford to donate but don't want

to for some reason, I would really love to know why. Even if it's critical. Especially

if it's critical. Honestly, this might be more valuable to us as a project than a donation.

And if I come home from this conference to like six e-mails in my inbox telling me all

the ways that we suck and you're not going to give us money because of it, that would

be incredibly positive. I'm really serious about this.

Another thing you can do is you can buy PyCharm. I mentioned major donors. One of our major

donors is PyCharm. And the way that we raise money is they do a promotion where you buy

PyCharm at a discount, we get all the money. So it's a win-win and it's one of the major

ways we raise money for the foundation. Okay. Some harder things. You could ask your

company to become a corporate member. I suggest asking your company to fund us at a number

around 1% of your company's annual revenue. That's a big number. And your company will

probably say no, which I'm super interested in hearing about. We've had a lot of trouble

approaching companies for large donations, and I'd like to start collecting information

on why that is and what the objections are and how we might get over that.

Once again, the second part, telling me why your company said no, is probably more valuable

than whatever they might donate. So ask. I would love to hear about what happened next.

If you are doing any sort of estate planning, did you know you can include the Django Software

Foundation in your will? If you can't afford to make a donation now, perhaps you can leave

money to us hopefully many, many, many years down the line. I am doing my will in estate

planning right now, so this is on my mind. If anyone watching or listening online happens

to be a high net worth individual and would like to make a really large donation, we will

happily accept it, but once again, I would love to hear about why you wouldn't, why you

would want to prioritize other uses of your money. I think you're sensing a theme here.

You can introduce me to people who you think might be interested in doing any of these.

If you think your company might be interested but you don't know how to have that conversation,

I can or another one of the board members can. Make an intro. We'll see what happens.

This is the stuff for the true overachievers, but if you're super inspired and you want

to really go hard, here's what to do. You could join the fundraising working group.

This is new. We've only been around for a couple of months, but this is where when I

have said "I" in this talk, I probably should have said "we." In all reality, it may not

be me doing some of this talking, introduction, whatever. I'm going to serve as a conduit

to this working group, but this is where the discussions about fundraising are centered

at the DSF for now. Anyone's eligible to join this, member or not.

Particularly if there's something you think that's a really good idea that I haven't mentioned

today, love to hear about it. You could propose a future grant to the DSF.

We do not have a future grant program. We have never given a future grant in the past.

We will probably not accept your grant proposal, but, man, I would love to have that conversation

as a board. You would be doing us a great service whether or not we said yes. Carlton's

taking notes. You could run for the DSF board or for the

Django steering council. Both of those bodies, the board leads the DSF, the steering council

leads the open source project. Both of those bodies will have elections later this year.

Watch for announcements. Feel free to reach out to me if you have questions about what's

involved in any of those. And finally, if you're looking at this and

you're going, I think an executive director is just a brilliant idea and I'm ready to

write a check today to hire an ED, we can do that, right? We can work with a sponsor

who's particularly interested in some specific role and fully fund one of these ideas, one

of these positions. Do it as a trial, whatever. The PSF has had really great luck with sort

of companies that fund, they don't call them fellows, they call them something else. Essentially

funded developers. Developer and residents, right? So just copying the PSF here. We could

easily do something like that if you or your company is interested. This is probably the

most realistic way of sort of bootstrapping from where we are today to where we want to

be, is sort of to get someone who's interested in, you know, being the sort of supporter

to help us take the next step towards this vision. We'd love to work on a proposal collaboratively

that you could kind of toss around with your company or whatever.

All right. Let's do this. I'm excited. I am Jacobian on basically all the things. Please

reach out. I'm really serious about that. I read every email I get. I don't -- I respond

to maybe 90, 95% of them. I'm not perfect, but I try. And I'd love to hear what you all

have to say. And I think I have a couple minutes. I have three minutes for questions.

[APPLAUSE]