"State of Django" Panel
Willison, Simon
Godwin, Andrew
Makarudze, Anna
Wiles, Frank
Triplett, Jeff
Coronel, Josue Balandro
Michel, Katherine
Idrissa, Kojo
DjangoCon US 2018 - "State of Django" Panel by Simon Willison Join us for a panel on the State of Django: the state of the Django codebase, but also the state of the Django community as represented by organizations like the Django Software Foundation, Django Girls, and DEFNA. Moderated by Simon Willison, our panelists will discuss: how we can continue to grow the Django community and create a welcoming space for beginners the priorities for the continued development and maturation of Django ways to improve Django events and bring them to new regions worldwide success stories from Django communities concrete steps toward better and more effective diversity and inclusion efforts and much more. It’s been a long time since we gathered leaders of the Django community on one stage to have an open-ended discussion about Django’s present and future, and we hope you’ll join us for this special event. Panelists Andrew Godwin Anna Makarudze Frank Wiles Jeff Triplett Josue Balandrano Coronel Katherine Michel Kojo Idrissa Rachell Calhoun
 So, hi. Yeah, this is the original idea for this panel was to be a sort of state of Django talking about the code. And then we realized that the Django community is far more interesting than the sort of nuts and bolts of the Django framework itself. So we've assembled a panel of representatives from a whole bunch of exciting projects that help make up that Django ecosystem. And I've actually started thinking about this more in terms of this is a what can the Django project learn from the Django community panel. So in that light, we've got a fantastic group of panelists. I'll ask them to introduce themselves briefly and then we'll start the conversation. So, Andrew, could you introduce yourself to the room? Hello. Thank you so much. I am Andrew Godwin. I am a Django core developer. I mostly know of my work on things like channels and migrations and south in the past. Hello, everyone. I'm Anna Makaruzzi. I'm a developer from Zimbabwe. I am with Django Girls Foundation, the DSF as well as the Python community in Zimbabwe and Africa. Hi, I'm Frank Wiles. I'm the president and founder of Repsis and president of the Django Software Foundation Board. I'm Catherine Michael. I also go by Katie. I'm a web developer and community manager for Eldarian. I'm a deaf board member, the DjangoCon website chair and a DSF member. Hello, I'm Jeff Triplett. I am the deaf president and co-founder, PSF director, DjangoCon U.S. principal organizer for the last four years and a consultant at Repsis. Hello, I'm Kojo Idrisa. You've seen way too much of me this week. I am the deaf North American ambassador. I am also the orientation, lightning talks and sprints chair for DjangoCon U.S. and other things. Hello, yeah. Hi, my name is Josue Valandrano-Coronell. I work for the Texas Advanced Computer Center and I'm also one of the newest deaf board members. Hello, my name is Rachel Calhoun. I'm a Django developer, also associated with Django Girls Soul and Django Girls and Pilates Grand Rapids, Michigan. Okay, let's have another welcoming applause for our panelists. So I wanted to start by talking about Django Girls because honestly I think Django Girls is an incredibly inspiring project and we're very lucky that it chose to attach itself to Django as a community. I feel like it's one of the most vibrant and exciting parts of the Django ecosystem. So Rachel, could you give us some of the latest highlights on how the Django Girls organization is shaping up? Yeah, so I've got a little side up. So we have 69 upcoming events, 671 past events and total number of applicants, 43,885. And people that have actually attended the event past 16,000. And that's in 94 different countries. So, yeah. And last year there was the impact report and we sent out surveys to try to see where people are now because we hadn't been tracking that. And from the responses we got 21% of participants that came to our workshop. They started into tech after that and now they're working in tech. I just think that's astonishing. So Anna, could you give us an update on how Django Girls is shaping up in Africa? We have many events happening mostly in Nigeria. I think Nigeria has recorded the highest number of events, but we have events happening across Africa. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana and many other countries. So Django Girls has been instrumental not only in impacting women, in reducing them to technology and coding, but it has also helped us grow our communities. Because every other country that's developing their Python community, they are starting by organizing Django Girls and then they move on to PyCons and other events. So it has really been helpful for us as a continent in developing the Python community and advancing the use of Python in Africa. So I understand the DSF funds Django Girls events. Could you talk us through some of how that works? Yeah, so actually it's one of the bigger uses of DSF funds. It kind of goes paying for the fellows and then funding Django Girls events and then funding other types of Django events and specific types of development. But yeah, it's been really successful. We actually have had to move to kind of having it be part of a consent agenda for the DSF board meetings so that we don't end up taking up most of our board meetings saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to all these Django Girls events. Fantastic. So on that sort of topic, I feel like one of the things that Django Girls brings to the Django community is a fantastic focus on education and sort of helping people get started with learning how to achieve their goals in web development with Django as the sort of substrate there. So I open question to the panel. How can we double down on that and become the open source community with the best possible education experience for newcomers? I'll kind of start us off, I guess, because I am a career changer. So I've kind of experienced both ways as a participant, as an organizer and as a coach. So obviously resources. There's a Django Girls tutorial, that's great, but then what next? And I think that's something we could improve on. Roadmap, more resources, or just a way to go after that. Luckily I had people around me to help me with that, but not everyone is like that. And that's the next thing, is mentorship. It's hard to find them, so if you're a developer, I encourage you to reach out and help junior developers or people that are interested in getting into tech. Right, help them out, yeah. And I've sort of followed on from that. What makes a good mentor? Like... There we go. I think one of the things that is important as far as mentoring people is the fact that you actually care about that person's advancement and their improvement as far as their skills or whatever it is they're trying to do. So, oftentimes mentoring is looked at with regard to how much technical skill the mentor has, but I think the reality is if you actually genuinely care about that person making some sort of progression towards whatever the goal is they're trying to reach, that's one of the more important criteria, because if you care about that person's advancement, they'll do what you need to do to help them find the... One, help them figure out what the goal is that they're trying to achieve, and then two, help them find the resources that they need to reach that goal. So, I think that's one of the more important things. I also want to add that as a mentor, admitting you don't know things helps people understand that you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to know everything. For me, that was a huge moment when I was learning that my mentor was like, I don't know, let's Google it. And I was like, oh, okay, that's okay to not know something. And another thing is resources. Something I got from my mentors was just, you know, conferences coming up, scholarship opportunities, things like that, that you're not exposed to, and you're not really in the tech field, and if someone can share that with you, that's very valuable. Yeah, I definitely echo that. I always try, if I'm mentoring somebody, to tell them some story where I didn't know what I was doing, and it took me forever to figure out that thing. It puts people at ease. And then just kind of having that kind of beginner mind, what was stuff that tripped me up way back then, and being able to kind of just do that empathy of, yeah, I've been there too, I remember what that was like. Haswe, did you have a documentation and tutorial project that you were developing? Yes, well, actually one of the efforts that we're doing at DevNet is trying to open a little bit more resources for people that would like to create events. So, I mean, it does have to do with the topic at hand right now, which is trying to teach other people, right, about everything that we can, about software programming and Django and all of that. So, a lot of that actually happens in all of these different types of events. And not all of those have to be really big events, like for instance, this one could be smaller events, like the ones that Django Girls actually also do, different type of tutorials and stuff like that. One really good resource actually, it comes from Django Girls, which is the handbook that they have to create events. But we're trying to create more resources around that and just different guidebooks on how to create different types of events. So, if anybody has any questions about how to actually start with that, you can contact us. I'd like to add that we'd love to have assistance with this. And it's been a huge boost to have Post Sway join the board because he has kind of spearheaded this and we're doing a lot of new outreach, not just in local communities, but also internationally. And it's really exciting because we're hoping to move beyond DjangoCon. It's been a new goal for us in the past year or so to move beyond DjangoCon to also do outreach in local communities. So, yeah, this is a great opportunity to talk about events because certainly Django Girls is a very events focused organization. Deafner has been doing an amazing job with DjangoCon and trying to push into further events. So, sort of open questions to the panel is why aren't there more DjangoCon around the world right now? That's mostly the DSF boards doing. So, we own the trademark around Django and DjangoCon and so we are the ones who let you have a DjangoCon. And the board's position on that has been the same for a long time that running a conference is very hard and most people don't realize really how hard it is and how much work goes into it. Deafner spends most of the year organizing this and with a group of, you know, a dozen or more people working on it throughout the year just to make it happen. And so, if you're wanting DjangoCon Fredonia in your country, the worst thing you could do would be to have a conference that starts off and goes very badly for whatever reason and you will never end up having DjangoCon Fredonia again, you won't be able to get sponsorship and you won't be able to buy tickets. So, it's important that whoever starts one has a lot of event planning experience and can show that they've got kind of lines on sponsorship lined up and before we would grant one. And that's why there's only a couple of them. So, we're going to go to the sort of DjangoCon brand. At the same time, we're actively interested in encouraging as many of those smaller Django groups that aren't a takes a year to plan a conference thing to pop up as possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want to have Django weekend or, you know, Django Day in your city, go for it, you know, and let us know how we can help. But the larger conferences, we're kind of keeping the DjangoCon name close hold. So, one thing that I've certainly realized is this DjangoCon is probably the most diverse technical conference I've ever been to, which I think speaks poorly to my previous choice of conferences. But I would like to ask the deaf members on the panel, how did you pull this off? Because this is not an accident. So, pretty much, that's a hard question, actually, kind of getting out of the way for a lot of people who want to help. I think if we look back four or five years ago, there was a much smaller group of people running the conference. And so, one of the things we wanted this to be is a community-ranked conference. And so, we tend to err on the side of giving you more access to do things you want to do. And so far, it's worked out pretty well for us. Every year, too, is an iteration of the previous year in seeing what worked, what didn't work. That's been pretty successful. Honestly, as somebody who doesn't like to do public speaking, I have no problem not being on stage, which is why Kojo is on stage for hours and hours each day, which is great. So, I think that was a big factor. We have a really good actionable code of conduct, too, so it's easy to keep nice people here because we can ask people who aren't nice to leave. So, I think that also was a factor as well, and thank you for the compliment, too. So, I would say, as the person who is on stage all the time, one of the things, and I have said this to attendees here, and as one of the members of a former Deaf and Abord member and a JangoCon US organizer of that group, I think I am one of the more extroverted introverts. And so, I have said this to people as I interact with them. The entire team has a very serious focus on trying to make JangoCon as inclusive as possible. So, not just trying to reach out to people of different groups, but trying to create a conference environment such that when people from a variety of different groups come to JangoCon, you feel comfortable, you feel welcomed, because we really, legitimately, truly want you to be here. We want you to have the actual best JangoCon experience you can have. And I am the big visual one who is saying it to people and kind of in your face all the time, but there is a whole other group of organizers that you might not see as much who feel the exact same way. And so, that's why you get that feeling here, because we are all on the same page about that. The organizers are, okay, I've never been an organizer for a different conference, so I don't know what other experienced people have, but the organizers are absolutely constantly trying to find ways to make it more diverse and to bring underrepresented people in. And it is such an important part of it. I have experienced it myself, and it has just drastically improved my own life from Jeff encouraging me to become the website chair. And that is, I wouldn't have thought of that for myself. And it was something I wanted to do, and it helped me learn and help me mentor other people. And they are doing this, everyone is doing this in the community as far as I can tell among the organizers. Kojo, you've been working as the events ambassador for North America. What are the sort of the patterns, the sort of themes that you've noticed in those conversations you've been having? Well, honestly, one thing that I've noticed is that I think we as the Django kind US folks need to maybe get a little bit better at marketing-wise, is that people often think that Django kind is just for talks about Django. And so some people don't necessarily realize that I've spoken to people and asked them to submit talks to Django, kind of like, oh, I don't do a lot of Django, but the reality is Django is an open source web framework written in Python. And so Python talks, acceptable web-related talks, or even about other web frameworks or about JavaScript front-ends, acceptable. It's open source, mostly by volunteers, so talks that are related to the community and helping people maintain their volunteer efforts by not burning themselves out or dealing with their mental health issues or having a culture that is inclusive and welcoming to people, all of those are valid Django contacts. And as I've gone to different events, literally all around North America and also Australia, I think that those sorts of values are represented in the different communities that I've been to. So I'm interested in hearing more. One of the things I find fascinating for Django is how international the community has become. So I'd be interested in hearing more about some of the event plans in Mexico and Africa from Josue and from Anna. Yes, well, actually there's been some effort also to try and bring all of these different types of events to Mexico. Right now, the one thing that we have is Python Day in Mexico. That's going to happen next month. But the other thing that also is going to happen, but this is going to happen until next year, and it's kind of like a first step is to create a PyLatin, which is Latin American. So that's going to be the first step to actually start to have more events like this one, and then eventually probably a DjangoCon. Maybe we're going to start with something like One Day or something like that. I don't want to give out too many details because those might change. And there's other people also involving the whole organization of the event. But this is also helping us out, trying to figure out what other resources do we need to give out there or to make public for people that would like to start these type of events. And the whole point of these events that are going to happen in Mexico and in other countries are also to be very international. For everybody, I mean, whoever actually can go to these other countries and all that and also expose a talk or something like that or just contributing in any other way. That's the whole idea to make her a more bigger international community. So far, there have been new events, Python events coming up with every year. We started our own PyCon Zimbabwe in 2016, Nigeria, head there in PyCon, first PyCon in 2017. This year Ghana had a new PyCon and these events emanated from PyCon Namibia. The only country that had been running PyCon was South Africa. And this year was their eighth event. So we are happy that there are new PyCons coming up in Africa. But there is a plan for a Pan-African PyCon that will not only cover one country, but as many countries as can be covered, which we are planning for 2020. And we are also trying to come up with a small Django event, if possible, maybe for 2019 or 2020 as well. So those are the plans that we have in Africa for PyCon as well as Django events to have something that is continental. And that's something that we are reaching out to the rest of the world if you want to participate by helping us with events. If you have been running a continental event with value, the experience that you have had with the issues, how to handle visas, and administration issues that can come up, any information that you may have with regards to budgets, financial aid, and stuff like that, we would appreciate that very much. I just wanted to point something out. And that is that we actually have two people from Mexico who joined our board this year, Josue and Katcha. And we are also doing some Spanish language translation. Katcha has translated our website, which will go live soon. And we have done some tweets in Spanish. And I am also hoping that the documentation that is in the works for local meetups that we might be able to do a translation of that also. On that note about internationalism, in Korea I started the Jailgirls Seoul and it took off. It was a huge success, but one of the things that made it so successful was all the work going into the translations of Jailgirls tutorial. Right now it's translated into 14 different languages and it's being translated by volunteers. So please help if you can, into many others. So that was my kind of plug on the international scope. So I'd like to move us on to talking about Django Core itself. And so I'm going to call on James Bennett in a moment as a quick guest. Actually, could we get you out of here and we'll hand you a microphone. So this was discussed a little bit yesterday, but there is a proposal in the works to introduce a completely new governance model to Django. Because right now Django Core, I will be honest, does not look very much like the makeup of people in this room. And furthermore, we need to start injecting this vitality and this freshness and these new ideas into the core framework, the way the core framework itself is developed. So James is the author of the DEP, the Django Enhancement Proposal that's outlining this new governance model. James, if you could give us the executive summary from the author yourself, that would be fantastic. Okay, so the way that historically Django Development has worked is there are certain people who have commit rights to the main repository. We call those people Django Core. And they sort of get to make decisions and do what they want. There was for a long time Jacob and Adrian as sort of final decision makers. Now there's a technical board since they stepped down. The proposal is get rid of that. Shut down the private Django Core mailing list and IRC channel. Move all of the governance of Django the framework onto the public Django developers list. You may be wondering, well, if there are no more committers, how does code get into Django? The answer is already a lot of the commits that happen in Django are done by Carlton and Tim, who are the Django fellows who are paid by the DSF to do all sorts of management around the Django source code repository. The proposal is to formalize a role of a merger. This is not someone who just adds code on their own initiative. It's someone who merges pull requests from other people after discussion and consensus on the public mailing list. This does away with the need to have the sort of multi-tier. Some people have special privileges and some people don't. Everybody would be equal on the Django developers list and it would be consensus driven as to what gets into Django. The mergers would simply be a bureaucratic role. There would still be a technical board elected from the Django developers mailing list every so often to act as a final decision making backstop if we need one. Although I will say I've been on the technical board, I think now four release cycles and we've had very little work to do, so I would like to see that continue because it seems like at least the consensus model seems to be working. Any thoughts from the panel on this as a concept for governance going forward? Yeah, in fact, one of these things, I can talk about it, it's already started happening. When I launched my big proposal for like, hey, let's take Django and make it all asynchronous, I did that directly in public on the Django developers mailing list. We have the private list. The private list is not very busy but it does still exist and for many years we want to try and get rid of it. Let's not do that, go straight to public and try and get back to discussion and see if there's any objection. Much to my surprise, there was no objection. There was a near unanimous agreement for the community which is like, I am occasionally personally a little bit suspicious of, shall we say, everyone agreeing once kind of base systems, but it seems to work with Django. We foster this kind of community that works. And the technical board, you know, I'm also on it and we've had like one email in the last year, I think. It's like, there's not much content just going on right now. So in that regard, I think it's a good, maybe not the complete solution, but it's an excellent move forward for us. Anyone else got any input they want to make on this? So first of all, I think it's a great first step. My concern is just, you know, we do have a problem. It's an uncomfortable problem and I'm glad we're addressing it. I've seen the notice like there's certain parts of Django. We've noticed even Django girls like when Django hired somebody to be the fellow, the framework advanced at a pace that we couldn't advance previously. With Django girls too having a couple of ambassadors, we've seen some huge improvements now where, you know, you have somebody who's paid to work on the problems and fix things. So my only concern is that I would love to see us take another step and hire somebody who knows what they're doing with diversity and let's like head on, reach and let's fix some of the various issues by bringing the next one in. I love the stuff. I think this is good, but I would just love to see a little extra bit. You know, I've gone to the documentation and looked at the list of people who are on committees and core committers. And it's like for me, that's the face of Django. And a lot of these people go back to Lawrence Journal World or they've been around for a really long time and it's like they know the history of Django and have a lot of tribal knowledge. And for me, that was a psychological barrier of entry and just having the message that Carlton gave of welcome and saying that you're needed. For me, that makes me much more likely to contribute. And I think that we are very often surfacing the accomplishments of these same people and that we need to make the face of Django more about the diverse community we are becoming and start surfacing new people and new opportunities. And this is a really good first step. So a few people have mentioned the Django Fellows now. I'm not familiar with that program. There are two Django Fellows who are actually employed by the Django Software Foundation essentially to do the bug triage and help manage releases and the stuff which, I don't want to say the tedious stuff, but some of the sort of ongoing work that needs to be done to keep the community healthy. It's quite a rare model in open source actually and I think it's been extremely successful. I'm really impressed with the impact that's had. The question for the panel is, do you feel like the Django Fellows program is working well as it is? I kind of loaded the question there. But also, how do you see that program expanding maybe with new responsibilities or other things that might help it work even better? In short, yes. It's working really well. We've seen a steady pace of releases, security issues that come into the security mailing list or dealt with and triaged super quickly, sometimes in less than a couple of hours, where with community resources that might have been a day or two and if it was a busy holiday weekend, maybe several days. So those parts of it work really well. I think one area where we could, one, we could have more fellows if we raised more money so Django could move faster and more, or had money to put behind projects like moving to ASync or with the Mozilla grant for channels. If we had some piles of money like that, then we could employ people to work on those problems specifically. But I also think that we need to focus some energy around maintaining the third-party app ecosystem. Things like Django Debug Toolbar and all the things that the Jazz Band group takes care of. How can we support them? I know personally almost every Django project I work on uses some number of third-party apps that aren't mine and aren't anybody as part of Django Core. How can we help them? Could we have a fellow who focused on those issues, looking for pull requests and small bug fixes and be added as a maintainer across a lot of those projects? And I think that's something that we should explore. I totally agree with that. Django stands on the shoulders of its third-party apps in many cases. We claim that you have batteries included, but some of the batteries come in the form of third-party apps. Having a better... If it's bad enough for Django Core, those third-party maintainers burn out even more easily than we do. It's often a story that those apps come and get popular. Then as I know from personal experience, you get a deluge of feature and issue requests and you sort of go, and it's like, there's a massive walk away. It would be really nice to see not just maybe in front of Django itself, helping out a bit more actively in things that really help build our community in that sense as well. So on that theme of... So fellows is a concept we think other open source projects should steal from us. What are some of the ideas from other open source communities that we should be adopting? Something that I've come across recently is that I've seen other communities do kind of like a diversity audit or an open source project health audit. We are making a lot of progress naturally, but I feel that if we could look at where we think we should be and where we are and find problem areas and maybe create a strategy that we might make more progress. Kind of what gets measured changes. I think one of the great open source communities out there that we could learn a little bit from is the Postgres community. There is a huge amount of large commercial enterprises that contribute whole people and money and resources to the Postgres project. And that's part of, I think, part of its success. And the fact that it is not tied around one particular company means it's very resilient if a company falls away or becomes a bad actor that doesn't harm the project as a whole. I would really love to see companies who are using Django contribute more of their own staff's time or funds in general and have some of these, you know, Django is being used by lots and lots of people. If there was a little more contribution back from some of these companies, I think that would lift the whole project. I also think the idea of sort of expanding the concept of office hours might be useful. So my first open source contributions were to Drupal, which is the PSP project. And I literally learned how to use Git for the first time while sitting on my former system-lossed couch in Japan during Drupal's office hours, Drupal Core office hours. So they had a set of office hours. And I think they still continue to do it. There's a certain period of time, once per week, I believe, where there are people in the IRC channels available to help you learn how to make contributions to the core. And I know that somebody, I think, I believe, Mariana holds office hours as far as Python Core goes. So there are some of those things that are being done, but sort of expanding efforts like that, where a dedicated amount of time is going to be set aside for the purpose of helping people become more involved in the project in various ways. So we've talked a lot about the Django community. Let's spend a little bit of time talking about the Django framework itself. So I'm interested in what are the big ideas for Django? What are some ambitious projects that Django should take on next? And I'm going to pick a speaker completely at random and point it at Andrew. Hello. To see if he has any thoughts on what the next big evolution of Django should look like. I have many thoughts. Too much, even for a full hour panel, I think. So this is one of the things, like, if you've seen any of my talks over the past couple of years, the end is often, what is Django? My position is Django has kind of achieved what its initial goal was, which was to become this sort of good framework that was designed for, like, from a newsroom environment initially. But we had to work out what it is in future. My personal pet project these days is asynchronous stuff. If you've not seen my blog post, the plan is to take progressively more and more of Django to be async-capable. So starting with the request path, ending with the RM being fully async-capable. There's a lot of enhancements there as well. There's other small things too. We were just talking this morning, Simon, about MySQL now has great geospatial support. And so there's a huge opportunity there for adding good Django support to the MySQL backend. And there's all sorts of good ideas like this that we need to just go and find. One of the kind of problems is that many of us on the currently extant core team are a little bit sort of old, like, long on the tooth, should we say. Like, we've been around, like, we sort of settled in our ways. We got dogs. We like, you walked with our dogs. I got too many hobbies. But the point is that we need that injection of fresh talent as well to help bring those new ideas, right? But certainly in the short term, I think, like, if we want to be competitive on, to use a phrase, the world stage of frameworks, I think looking at what everyone else is doing and what people are turning towards, things like node, especially, or go. Like, having a great fluid, easy to use asynchronous story is for me one of those big ones. Like, can we position Django as, oh no, we're not only with the experienced, like, well-learned framework, but also we have all the shiny new things as well. I think this reflects back to a sort of earlier topic. How do we make, how do we take the lessons from our events world and inclusively in making, lowering the barrier to entry for new developers? How do we apply those to Django core itself? And that's an open question from the panel. So one way that we opened some stuff up in the last year or so that I don't think has maybe gotten as much news as maybe I should have tried to push forward, but who here is a member of the Django Software Foundation? Did you know that the rest of you can't be two? All you have to do is go fill out a web form and you can become a member, and then you can vote on who gets to be on the board and participate in the discussions on these mailing lists. It is not a high traffic mailing list. No one will come and beat you if you don't vote. But so, you know, please come and join and start participating. We can, you know, if we're all kind of on the same mailing list, we can throw around ideas and communicate a little better as a community. Any further thoughts on lowering that barrier to entry? Well, I liked what Carlton said earlier in his talk and just his approach to it and trying to take away that pressure. But like mentorship, we had touched on it earlier, but just for myself too, I wouldn't feel comfortable. And I know if people with 10 years experience or whatever experience, they might not feel comfortable. So just like if you know somebody that would like to be interested or mention it or nudge, right? Sometimes we just need a little nudge in the right direction. And then if there is interest, kind of help them and pull them off, right, to where you are, if you're in, you know, a place where you can't help somebody. I think that would definitely be helpful. Or if there was something more official, you know, a program that would be even better. Actually, I want to steal a phrase from Rachel from earlier today with regard to helping people meet their goals. So if you're going to have people making contributions to Django, again, let's be realistic. The people who are going to make contributions to Django are going to be people who use Django. The people who use Django are going to be people who find that Django helps them do the things that they're wanting to do. Whether that has become professional software engineers or to just build web applications that, you know, that are for their Boy Scout Trooper, for their Overwatch League team, or for whatever. No bias there. But the people who are going to actually contribute to Django are going to be the people who actually use Django. And so in your local communities, your local Python and Django user groups, if you can sort of make an effort to try to help draw more people in by showing them how Django can be useful to them, it can be beneficial to them, even if they're not planning to become professional software engineers, if Django is useful to them, those people become part of the community, and that widens the pool of the community. And so the volunteers, the contributors, they want to come from that community who actually find use in Django. I think that could be very helpful. Let's talk about money. So the question basically is who has money and who needs money. And Frank, I'd love it if you could fill us in on how the Django funding ecosystem works at the moment. So I think by terms of who has the largest bank account, I think the DSF wins out by a little bit. And we get our money mostly from corporate sponsorships and individual sponsorships, and then the current PyCharm promotion that's going on right now is a big source of our revenue each year. I'm very confident that if we had some big projects to spend on, we could go find the money. But right now we don't have a lot of asks, and we don't have a lot to go spend it on that makes sense to us. And so if we had a reason, I think we could go find the money. And I think that if, you know, if we had a reason, I think we would know who to go target. So if it was something async, who would benefit from that as companies, let's go reach out to them, get $5,000 from 10 companies, and we're off to the races. So I think that that's, you know, and then we use that money for the fellows, we use the money for sponsoring events, and we can use that money for other things that the community dreams up. Anyone on the panel want to say that they need the money? All right. I'll answer on behalf, first on behalf of Jungle Girls is the fundraising coordinator. Jungle Girls needs the money. We need to support our infrastructure that enables us to give the resources our volunteers are using to organize their events, support our online tutorials and stuff like that. So Jungle Girls does need the money. Then as well as a DSF director representing Africa, we also need the money for our events in Africa. So we would really appreciate sponsorship for our events. So yeah, we need the money as Jungle Girls as well as Africa needs your money. Thank you. Okay. I'm going to say from a slightly more self-serving perspective that DEFNA is a former DEFNA board member. DEFNA could use the money because one of the things, in addition to putting on DjangoCon, which hopefully you all are enjoying, DEFNA is also working to promote Django-related educational events throughout North America. And one of the ways that DEFNA does that is by providing grants to people and to groups who are doing those sorts of events. And so the more money that is available to DEFNA, the more grants that DEFNA is able to give or the larger those grants can become. And that also makes it a little more viable for people to start thinking about having their own Django-related events in their different localities. Is that a word? I don't know. Words are hard. I'm sorry. So I'd like to finish up by inviting the board to put out some calls to action. Like what are things that we as members of the Django community, what are actual action points we can be taking to address some of the issues that we've been discovering today? And I'll do this in whatever order you like. I'll start then over here. So my call to action is somewhat predictable. But it is about having ideas, right? Like right now we are on the precipice of opening up the Django, what will become the former Django call to everyone else here. And a lot of you use Django. A lot of you use Django more than I do in my job these days. You have the ideas. You have the knowledge. And the next decade of Django is to be defined by the big ideas. Like we need to know what should we work on. What high point should we aim for? Even if we do part of it or just sort of a smaller version of it, we need that kind of input. So like please come to sign up Django developers. Come and suggest big ideas. Let us discuss them. Let's renew some of the energy and think about what that next decade holds for us. For me, I would appreciate if we could get members from the American community in all over the world joining our main English, Python, Africa, so that you can meet other developers from Africa, mentor them, help them grow. And if not, we don't appreciate just the mind. We do appreciate the mind, but we also appreciate the knowledge transfer. That can happen if there is an interaction between Africa and the rest of the world. So we really appreciate learning from you. And if there is any way you can reach out to Africa and try and share the knowledge that you have, that will go a long way. Also ensuring that even the contributors to the Django project itself is diverse. So we cannot just expect to say we are opening it up to everyone and accept that the contributors will be diverse. If you are not willing to help other people who need to learn and grow and then be able to contribute to the Django framework. So I think we need to be able to offer our time as mentors for knowledge transfer to OK, so that we have a diverse group of people contributing to Django. I think that joining the DSF membership and getting involved in the community in any way, shape or form, it doesn't have to be code. Most of my contributions to Django are not in the form of code. And yours don't have to be either. It can be like people have said, mentoring, answering questions on mailing lists, fixing typos in docs, adding docs that confuse you, changing how they are written so that they are less confusing. There are lots of ways to get involved. You can volunteer at conferences to be a chair runner and session runner. There are lots of ways to get involved and just help get involved. If you see a person in our community, especially an underrepresented person who could take on a leadership role, and maybe for instance they don't think of themselves as being able to do that, please encourage them to do that and mentor them if you are able to do it. So mine is more like generic, I guess, for the framework. A couple of years ago there was this joke that was kind of going around and basically it was the idea of calling the framework boring. Please stop doing that. Essentially we have like thousands of attendees go through Django Girls every year and they are really excited because they just learn something that's new and it's exciting and they are learning how to code. And so I get that sometimes some of us have been here for a while, we've been doing Django and to us it's, you know, if there's the joke of it's boring, it's really dismissive to people. Like I think probably a third of our audience every year are people who are new to Django. It is exciting, you're learning something new. So I think, you know, setting that tone, letting people know they're welcome, let's just not be dismissive with that joke. Alright, so as the North American ambassador I have specific assignments, literally. I'm going to give a couple of examples here. The idea is to start trying to build bridges. The things that happen in Django are centered maybe in the US or in Europe and so we need to expand upon that. So I'm going to look at Marietta and point to her as an example of how it's being done right. So PICASCades, a local conference that moves between Vancouver, Seattle and hopefully Portland. So then you've got Canada and the US interacting with each other. I don't know if Ernest is here but say Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, you all are responsible for Toronto. And so I need bridges to be built between Toronto and Ontario. So wherever you're from, I'm in Texas, in Houston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, we're responsible for Mexico City, Guadalajara, San Diego, you're responsible for Tijuana. So wherever you live, go to Google Maps and just look at say what's a 4-6 hour drive from you. And if it's international, then start to try to make connections there. But even if it's not international, so for instance, Pio, Ohio, Columbus, Pio, Tennessee and Nashville, you all are responsible for Appalachia and making sure that there's more activity in those regions. And then Pio, Ohio, since Picon is in Cleveland this year and next year, start making those connections using their connections with Toronto and Ontario to spread some of that information from Toronto and Ontario into Appalachia. And then when people from Texas come to Pio, Ohio and Pio, Tennessee, we can share that with the folks in Mexico City and Guadalajara. And people on the eastern west coast, west coast you're responsible for Asia, east coast you're responsible for Europe. So get to it. Also the Caribbean. So Florida, actually, I'm going to say most of the Gulf Coast, we're responsible for the Caribbean, but also if Pio Caribbean January and February, if you live in the northern part of North America, you want to go to the Caribbean in February. So keep that in mind. Good call, Kenneth. Well along those same lines, also the whole thing about creating events, local to wherever it is that you live, that's a really good idea. But also if you don't have any idea on how to start or maybe you're just not sure if you want to do it or not, you can come and talk to us. That's also something that we do at DevNet. And that's something that we want to do even more, which is give you more information, more details and guide you on how to do these things. Because we know that it's not easy. But so the only thing is that we also need your feedback to see what is it, what's the information that's missing, that it should be out there. And it's not there. All right, I'm going to speak on behalf of like Jangle Girls and what you can do to help us with that community. Money for your local events. We're in 94 different countries and a ton of cities, so check what there is. If you don't have money or you don't want to give money, give your time. Organize events, be a coach. You can do it. We have organizers' manuals online to follow, so it's basically copy-paste. And also help maintaining the tutorial and keep it up to date or translate it, as I said earlier. We need you. Well, we're out of time, so thank you very much to our panel. Thank you.
 So, hi. Yeah, this is the original idea for this panel was to be a sort of state of Django  talking about the code. And then we realized that the Django community is far more interesting  than the sort of nuts and bolts of the Django framework itself. So we've assembled a panel  of representatives from a whole bunch of exciting projects that help make up that Django ecosystem.  And I've actually started thinking about this more in terms of this is a what can the Django  project learn from the Django community panel. So in that light, we've got a fantastic group  of panelists. I'll ask them to introduce themselves briefly and then we'll start the conversation.  So, Andrew, could you introduce yourself to the room?  Hello. Thank you so much. I am Andrew Godwin. I am a Django core developer. I mostly know  of my work on things like channels and migrations and south in the past.  Hello, everyone. I'm Anna Makaruzzi. I'm a developer from Zimbabwe. I am with Django Girls Foundation,  the DSF as well as the Python community in Zimbabwe and Africa.  Hi, I'm Frank Wiles. I'm the president and founder of Repsis and president of the Django  Software Foundation Board.  I'm Catherine Michael. I also go by Katie. I'm a web developer and community manager for  Eldarian. I'm a deaf board member, the DjangoCon website chair and a DSF member.  Hello, I'm Jeff Triplett. I am the deaf president and co-founder, PSF director, DjangoCon  U.S. principal organizer for the last four years and a consultant at Repsis.  Hello, I'm Kojo Idrisa. You've seen way too much of me this week. I am the deaf North American ambassador.  I am also the orientation, lightning talks and sprints chair for DjangoCon U.S. and other things.  Hello, yeah. Hi, my name is Josue Valandrano-Coronell. I work for the Texas Advanced Computer Center  and I'm also one of the newest deaf board members.  Hello, my name is Rachel Calhoun. I'm a Django developer, also associated with Django Girls Soul and  Django Girls and Pilates Grand Rapids, Michigan.  Okay, let's have another welcoming applause for our panelists.  So I wanted to start by talking about Django Girls because honestly I think Django Girls is an incredibly  inspiring project and we're very lucky that it chose to attach itself to Django as a community.  I feel like it's one of the most vibrant and exciting parts of the Django ecosystem.  So Rachel, could you give us some of the latest highlights on how the Django Girls organization is shaping up?  Yeah, so I've got a little side up.  So we have 69 upcoming events, 671 past events and total number of applicants, 43,885.  And people that have actually attended the event past 16,000.  And that's in 94 different countries.  So, yeah.  And last year there was the impact report and we sent out surveys to try to see where people are now  because we hadn't been tracking that.  And from the responses we got 21% of participants that came to our workshop.  They started into tech after that and now they're working in tech.  I just think that's astonishing.  So Anna, could you give us an update on how Django Girls is shaping up in Africa?  We have many events happening mostly in Nigeria.  I think Nigeria has recorded the highest number of events, but we have events happening across Africa.  South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana and many other countries.  So Django Girls has been instrumental not only in impacting women,  in reducing them to technology and coding, but it has also helped us grow our communities.  Because every other country that's developing their Python community,  they are starting by organizing Django Girls and then they move on to PyCons and other events.  So it has really been helpful for us as a continent in developing the Python community  and advancing the use of Python in Africa.  So I understand the DSF funds Django Girls events.  Could you talk us through some of how that works?  Yeah, so actually it's one of the bigger uses of DSF funds.  It kind of goes paying for the fellows and then funding Django Girls events  and then funding other types of Django events and specific types of development.  But yeah, it's been really successful.  We actually have had to move to kind of having it be part of a consent agenda for the DSF board meetings  so that we don't end up taking up most of our board meetings saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to all these Django Girls events.  Fantastic.  So on that sort of topic, I feel like one of the things that Django Girls brings to the Django community  is a fantastic focus on education and sort of helping people get started  with learning how to achieve their goals in web development with Django as the sort of substrate there.  So I open question to the panel.  How can we double down on that and become the open source community with the best possible education experience for newcomers?  I'll kind of start us off, I guess, because I am a career changer.  So I've kind of experienced both ways as a participant, as an organizer and as a coach.  So obviously resources.  There's a Django Girls tutorial, that's great, but then what next?  And I think that's something we could improve on.  Roadmap, more resources, or just a way to go after that.  Luckily I had people around me to help me with that, but not everyone is like that.  And that's the next thing, is mentorship.  It's hard to find them, so if you're a developer, I encourage you to reach out and help junior developers or people that are interested in getting into tech.  Right, help them out, yeah.  And I've sort of followed on from that.  What makes a good mentor?  Like...  There we go.  I think one of the things that is important as far as mentoring people is the fact that you actually care about that person's advancement and their improvement as far as their skills or whatever it is they're trying to do.  So, oftentimes mentoring is looked at with regard to how much technical skill the mentor has, but I think the reality is if you actually genuinely care about that person making some sort of progression towards whatever the goal is they're trying to reach,  that's one of the more important criteria, because if you care about that person's advancement, they'll do what you need to do to help them find the...  One, help them figure out what the goal is that they're trying to achieve, and then two, help them find the resources that they need to reach that goal.  So, I think that's one of the more important things.  I also want to add that as a mentor, admitting you don't know things helps people understand that you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to know everything.  For me, that was a huge moment when I was learning that my mentor was like, I don't know, let's Google it.  And I was like, oh, okay, that's okay to not know something.  And another thing is resources.  Something I got from my mentors was just, you know, conferences coming up, scholarship opportunities, things like that,  that you're not exposed to, and you're not really in the tech field, and if someone can share that with you, that's very valuable.  Yeah, I definitely echo that.  I always try, if I'm mentoring somebody, to tell them some story where I didn't know what I was doing, and it took me forever to figure out that thing.  It puts people at ease.  And then just kind of having that kind of beginner mind, what was stuff that tripped me up way back then, and being able to kind of just do that empathy of,  yeah, I've been there too, I remember what that was like.  Haswe, did you have a documentation and tutorial project that you were developing?  Yes, well, actually one of the efforts that we're doing at DevNet is trying to open a little bit more resources for people that would like to create events.  So, I mean, it does have to do with the topic at hand right now, which is trying to teach other people, right, about everything that we can,  about software programming and Django and all of that.  So, a lot of that actually happens in all of these different types of events.  And not all of those have to be really big events, like for instance, this one could be smaller events, like the ones that Django Girls actually also do,  different type of tutorials and stuff like that.  One really good resource actually, it comes from Django Girls, which is the handbook that they have to create events.  But we're trying to create more resources around that and just different guidebooks on how to create different types of events.  So, if anybody has any questions about how to actually start with that, you can contact us.  I'd like to add that we'd love to have assistance with this.  And it's been a huge boost to have Post Sway join the board because he has kind of spearheaded this and we're doing a lot of new outreach,  not just in local communities, but also internationally.  And it's really exciting because we're hoping to move beyond DjangoCon.  It's been a new goal for us in the past year or so to move beyond DjangoCon to also do outreach in local communities.  So, yeah, this is a great opportunity to talk about events because certainly Django Girls is a very events focused organization.  Deafner has been doing an amazing job with DjangoCon and trying to push into further events.  So, sort of open questions to the panel is why aren't there more DjangoCon around the world right now?  That's mostly the DSF boards doing.  So, we own the trademark around Django and DjangoCon and so we are the ones who let you have a DjangoCon.  And the board's position on that has been the same for a long time that running a conference is very hard  and most people don't realize really how hard it is and how much work goes into it.  Deafner spends most of the year organizing this and with a group of, you know, a dozen or more people working on it throughout the year just to make it happen.  And so, if you're wanting DjangoCon Fredonia in your country, the worst thing you could do would be to have a conference that starts off and goes very badly for whatever reason  and you will never end up having DjangoCon Fredonia again, you won't be able to get sponsorship and you won't be able to buy tickets.  So, it's important that whoever starts one has a lot of event planning experience and can show that they've got kind of lines on sponsorship lined up and before we would grant one.  And that's why there's only a couple of them.  So, we're going to go to the sort of DjangoCon brand. At the same time, we're actively interested in encouraging as many of those smaller Django groups that aren't a takes a year to plan a conference thing to pop up as possible.  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want to have Django weekend or, you know, Django Day in your city, go for it, you know, and let us know how we can help.  But the larger conferences, we're kind of keeping the DjangoCon name close hold.  So, one thing that I've certainly realized is this DjangoCon is probably the most diverse technical conference I've ever been to, which I think speaks poorly to my previous choice of conferences.  But I would like to ask the deaf members on the panel, how did you pull this off? Because this is not an accident.  So, pretty much, that's a hard question, actually, kind of getting out of the way for a lot of people who want to help.  I think if we look back four or five years ago, there was a much smaller group of people running the conference.  And so, one of the things we wanted this to be is a community-ranked conference.  And so, we tend to err on the side of giving you more access to do things you want to do.  And so far, it's worked out pretty well for us.  Every year, too, is an iteration of the previous year in seeing what worked, what didn't work.  That's been pretty successful.  Honestly, as somebody who doesn't like to do public speaking, I have no problem not being on stage, which is why Kojo is on stage for hours and hours each day, which is great.  So, I think that was a big factor.  We have a really good actionable code of conduct, too, so it's easy to keep nice people here because we can ask people who aren't nice to leave.  So, I think that also was a factor as well, and thank you for the compliment, too.  So, I would say, as the person who is on stage all the time, one of the things, and I have said this to attendees here,  and as one of the members of a former Deaf and Abord member and a JangoCon US organizer of that group, I think I am one of the more extroverted introverts.  And so, I have said this to people as I interact with them.  The entire team has a very serious focus on trying to make JangoCon as inclusive as possible.  So, not just trying to reach out to people of different groups, but trying to create a conference environment such that when people from a variety of different groups come to JangoCon,  you feel comfortable, you feel welcomed, because we really, legitimately, truly want you to be here.  We want you to have the actual best JangoCon experience you can have.  And I am the big visual one who is saying it to people and kind of in your face all the time, but there is a whole other group of organizers that you might not see as much who feel the exact same way.  And so, that's why you get that feeling here, because we are all on the same page about that.  The organizers are, okay, I've never been an organizer for a different conference, so I don't know what other experienced people have,  but the organizers are absolutely constantly trying to find ways to make it more diverse and to bring underrepresented people in.  And it is such an important part of it.  I have experienced it myself, and it has just drastically improved my own life from Jeff encouraging me to become the website chair.  And that is, I wouldn't have thought of that for myself.  And it was something I wanted to do, and it helped me learn and help me mentor other people.  And they are doing this, everyone is doing this in the community as far as I can tell among the organizers.  Kojo, you've been working as the events ambassador for North America.  What are the sort of the patterns, the sort of themes that you've noticed in those conversations you've been having?  Well, honestly, one thing that I've noticed is that I think we as the Django kind US folks need to maybe get a little bit better at marketing-wise,  is that people often think that Django kind is just for talks about Django.  And so some people don't necessarily realize that I've spoken to people and asked them to submit talks to Django,  kind of like, oh, I don't do a lot of Django, but the reality is Django is an open source web framework written in Python.  And so Python talks, acceptable web-related talks, or even about other web frameworks or about JavaScript front-ends, acceptable.  It's open source, mostly by volunteers, so talks that are related to the community and helping people maintain their volunteer efforts  by not burning themselves out or dealing with their mental health issues or having a culture that is inclusive and welcoming to people,  all of those are valid Django contacts.  And as I've gone to different events, literally all around North America and also Australia,  I think that those sorts of values are represented in the different communities that I've been to.  So I'm interested in hearing more.  One of the things I find fascinating for Django is how international the community has become.  So I'd be interested in hearing more about some of the event plans in Mexico and Africa from Josue and from Anna.  Yes, well, actually there's been some effort also to try and bring all of these different types of events to Mexico.  Right now, the one thing that we have is Python Day in Mexico.  That's going to happen next month.  But the other thing that also is going to happen, but this is going to happen until next year,  and it's kind of like a first step is to create a PyLatin, which is Latin American.  So that's going to be the first step to actually start to have more events like this one,  and then eventually probably a DjangoCon.  Maybe we're going to start with something like One Day or something like that.  I don't want to give out too many details because those might change.  And there's other people also involving the whole organization of the event.  But this is also helping us out, trying to figure out what other resources do we need to give out there  or to make public for people that would like to start these type of events.  And the whole point of these events that are going to happen in Mexico and in other countries are also to be very international.  For everybody, I mean, whoever actually can go to these other countries and all that  and also expose a talk or something like that or just contributing in any other way.  That's the whole idea to make her a more bigger international community.  So far, there have been new events, Python events coming up with every year.  We started our own PyCon Zimbabwe in 2016, Nigeria, head there in PyCon, first PyCon in 2017.  This year Ghana had a new PyCon and these events emanated from PyCon Namibia.  The only country that had been running PyCon was South Africa.  And this year was their eighth event.  So we are happy that there are new PyCons coming up in Africa.  But there is a plan for a Pan-African PyCon that will not only cover one country,  but as many countries as can be covered, which we are planning for 2020.  And we are also trying to come up with a small Django event,  if possible, maybe for 2019 or 2020 as well.  So those are the plans that we have in Africa for PyCon as well as Django events  to have something that is continental.  And that's something that we are reaching out to the rest of the world  if you want to participate by helping us with events.  If you have been running a continental event with value,  the experience that you have had with the issues, how to handle visas,  and administration issues that can come up,  any information that you may have with regards to budgets, financial aid,  and stuff like that, we would appreciate that very much.  I just wanted to point something out.  And that is that we actually have two people from Mexico who joined our board  this year, Josue and Katcha.  And we are also doing some Spanish language translation.  Katcha has translated our website, which will go live soon.  And we have done some tweets in Spanish.  And I am also hoping that the documentation that is in the works  for local meetups that we might be able to do a translation of that also.  On that note about internationalism,  in Korea I started the Jailgirls Seoul and it took off.  It was a huge success, but one of the things that made it so successful  was all the work going into the translations of Jailgirls tutorial.  Right now it's translated into 14 different languages  and it's being translated by volunteers.  So please help if you can, into many others.  So that was my kind of plug on the international scope.  So I'd like to move us on to talking about Django Core itself.  And so I'm going to call on James Bennett in a moment as a quick guest.  Actually, could we get you out of here and we'll hand you a microphone.  So this was discussed a little bit yesterday,  but there is a proposal in the works to introduce a completely new governance model to Django.  Because right now Django Core, I will be honest,  does not look very much like the makeup of people in this room.  And furthermore, we need to start injecting this vitality and this freshness  and these new ideas into the core framework, the way the core framework itself is developed.  So James is the author of the DEP, the Django Enhancement Proposal  that's outlining this new governance model.  James, if you could give us the executive summary from the author yourself,  that would be fantastic.  Okay, so the way that historically Django Development has worked  is there are certain people who have commit rights to the main repository.  We call those people Django Core.  And they sort of get to make decisions and do what they want.  There was for a long time Jacob and Adrian as sort of final decision makers.  Now there's a technical board since they stepped down.  The proposal is get rid of that.  Shut down the private Django Core mailing list and IRC channel.  Move all of the governance of Django the framework onto the public Django developers list.  You may be wondering, well, if there are no more committers, how does code get into Django?  The answer is already a lot of the commits that happen in Django are done by Carlton and Tim,  who are the Django fellows who are paid by the DSF to do all sorts of management  around the Django source code repository.  The proposal is to formalize a role of a merger.  This is not someone who just adds code on their own initiative.  It's someone who merges pull requests from other people after discussion  and consensus on the public mailing list.  This does away with the need to have the sort of multi-tier.  Some people have special privileges and some people don't.  Everybody would be equal on the Django developers list and it would be consensus driven  as to what gets into Django.  The mergers would simply be a bureaucratic role.  There would still be a technical board elected from the Django developers mailing list  every so often to act as a final decision making backstop if we need one.  Although I will say I've been on the technical board, I think now four release cycles  and we've had very little work to do, so I would like to see that continue  because it seems like at least the consensus model seems to be working.  Any thoughts from the panel on this as a concept for governance going forward?  Yeah, in fact, one of these things, I can talk about it, it's already started happening.  When I launched my big proposal for like, hey, let's take Django and make it all asynchronous,  I did that directly in public on the Django developers mailing list.  We have the private list. The private list is not very busy but it does still exist  and for many years we want to try and get rid of it.  Let's not do that, go straight to public and try and get back to discussion  and see if there's any objection.  Much to my surprise, there was no objection.  There was a near unanimous agreement for the community  which is like, I am occasionally personally a little bit suspicious of,  shall we say, everyone agreeing once kind of base systems,  but it seems to work with Django.  We foster this kind of community that works.  And the technical board, you know, I'm also on it and we've had like one email in the last year, I think.  It's like, there's not much content just going on right now.  So in that regard, I think it's a good, maybe not the complete solution,  but it's an excellent move forward for us.  Anyone else got any input they want to make on this?  So first of all, I think it's a great first step.  My concern is just, you know, we do have a problem.  It's an uncomfortable problem and I'm glad we're addressing it.  I've seen the notice like there's certain parts of Django.  We've noticed even Django girls like when Django hired somebody to be the fellow,  the framework advanced at a pace that we couldn't advance previously.  With Django girls too having a couple of ambassadors,  we've seen some huge improvements now where, you know,  you have somebody who's paid to work on the problems and fix things.  So my only concern is that I would love to see us take another step  and hire somebody who knows what they're doing with diversity  and let's like head on, reach and let's fix some of the various issues  by bringing the next one in.  I love the stuff. I think this is good, but I would just love to see a little extra bit.  You know, I've gone to the documentation and looked at the list of people  who are on committees and core committers.  And it's like for me, that's the face of Django.  And a lot of these people go back to Lawrence Journal World  or they've been around for a really long time and it's like they know the history of Django  and have a lot of tribal knowledge.  And for me, that was a psychological barrier of entry  and just having the message that Carlton gave of welcome and saying that you're needed.  For me, that makes me much more likely to contribute.  And I think that we are very often surfacing the accomplishments of these same people  and that we need to make the face of Django more about the diverse community  we are becoming and start surfacing new people and new opportunities.  And this is a really good first step.  So a few people have mentioned the Django Fellows now.  I'm not familiar with that program.  There are two Django Fellows who are actually employed by the Django Software Foundation  essentially to do the bug triage and help manage releases  and the stuff which, I don't want to say the tedious stuff,  but some of the sort of ongoing work that needs to be done to keep the community healthy.  It's quite a rare model in open source actually and I think it's been extremely successful.  I'm really impressed with the impact that's had.  The question for the panel is, do you feel like the Django Fellows program is working well as it is?  I kind of loaded the question there.  But also, how do you see that program expanding maybe with new responsibilities  or other things that might help it work even better?  In short, yes. It's working really well.  We've seen a steady pace of releases, security issues that come into the security mailing list  or dealt with and triaged super quickly, sometimes in less than a couple of hours,  where with community resources that might have been a day or two  and if it was a busy holiday weekend, maybe several days.  So those parts of it work really well.  I think one area where we could, one, we could have more fellows if we raised more money  so Django could move faster and more, or had money to put behind projects like moving to ASync  or with the Mozilla grant for channels.  If we had some piles of money like that, then we could employ people to work on those problems specifically.  But I also think that we need to focus some energy around maintaining the third-party app ecosystem.  Things like Django Debug Toolbar and all the things that the Jazz Band group takes care of.  How can we support them?  I know personally almost every Django project I work on uses some number of third-party apps that aren't mine  and aren't anybody as part of Django Core.  How can we help them?  Could we have a fellow who focused on those issues, looking for pull requests and small bug fixes  and be added as a maintainer across a lot of those projects?  And I think that's something that we should explore.  I totally agree with that. Django stands on the shoulders of its third-party apps in many cases.  We claim that you have batteries included, but some of the batteries come in the form of third-party apps.  Having a better...  If it's bad enough for Django Core, those third-party maintainers burn out even more easily than we do.  It's often a story that those apps come and get popular.  Then as I know from personal experience, you get a deluge of feature and issue requests and you sort of go,  and it's like, there's a massive walk away.  It would be really nice to see not just maybe in front of Django itself,  helping out a bit more actively in things that really help build our community in that sense as well.  So on that theme of...  So fellows is a concept we think other open source projects should steal from us.  What are some of the ideas from other open source communities that we should be adopting?  Something that I've come across recently is that I've seen other communities do kind of like a diversity audit  or an open source project health audit.  We are making a lot of progress naturally,  but I feel that if we could look at where we think we should be  and where we are and find problem areas and maybe create a strategy that we might make more progress.  Kind of what gets measured changes.  I think one of the great open source communities out there that we could learn a little bit from is the Postgres community.  There is a huge amount of large commercial enterprises that contribute whole people and money and resources to the Postgres project.  And that's part of, I think, part of its success.  And the fact that it is not tied around one particular company means it's very resilient if a company falls away  or becomes a bad actor that doesn't harm the project as a whole.  I would really love to see companies who are using Django contribute more of their own staff's time  or funds in general and have some of these, you know, Django is being used by lots and lots of people.  If there was a little more contribution back from some of these companies, I think that would lift the whole project.  I also think the idea of sort of expanding the concept of office hours might be useful.  So my first open source contributions were to Drupal, which is the PSP project.  And I literally learned how to use Git for the first time while sitting on my former system-lossed couch in Japan during Drupal's office hours,  Drupal Core office hours.  So they had a set of office hours.  And I think they still continue to do it.  There's a certain period of time, once per week, I believe, where there are people in the IRC channels available to help you learn how to make contributions to the core.  And I know that somebody, I think, I believe, Mariana holds office hours as far as Python Core goes.  So there are some of those things that are being done, but sort of expanding efforts like that,  where a dedicated amount of time is going to be set aside for the purpose of helping people become more involved in the project in various ways.  So we've talked a lot about the Django community.  Let's spend a little bit of time talking about the Django framework itself.  So I'm interested in what are the big ideas for Django?  What are some ambitious projects that Django should take on next?  And I'm going to pick a speaker completely at random and point it at Andrew.  Hello.  To see if he has any thoughts on what the next big evolution of Django should look like.  I have many thoughts.  Too much, even for a full hour panel, I think.  So this is one of the things, like, if you've seen any of my talks over the past couple of years, the end is often, what is Django?  My position is Django has kind of achieved what its initial goal was,  which was to become this sort of good framework that was designed for, like, from a newsroom environment initially.  But we had to work out what it is in future.  My personal pet project these days is asynchronous stuff.  If you've not seen my blog post, the plan is to take progressively more and more of Django to be async-capable.  So starting with the request path, ending with the RM being fully async-capable.  There's a lot of enhancements there as well.  There's other small things too.  We were just talking this morning, Simon, about MySQL now has great geospatial support.  And so there's a huge opportunity there for adding good Django support to the MySQL backend.  And there's all sorts of good ideas like this that we need to just go and find.  One of the kind of problems is that many of us on the currently extant core team are a little bit sort of old, like, long on the tooth, should we say.  Like, we've been around, like, we sort of settled in our ways.  We got dogs. We like, you walked with our dogs.  I got too many hobbies.  But the point is that we need that injection of fresh talent as well to help bring those new ideas, right?  But certainly in the short term, I think, like, if we want to be competitive on, to use a phrase, the world stage of frameworks,  I think looking at what everyone else is doing and what people are turning towards, things like node, especially, or go.  Like, having a great fluid, easy to use asynchronous story is for me one of those big ones.  Like, can we position Django as, oh no, we're not only with the experienced, like, well-learned framework, but also we have all the shiny new things as well.  I think this reflects back to a sort of earlier topic.  How do we make, how do we take the lessons from our events world and inclusively in making, lowering the barrier to entry for new developers?  How do we apply those to Django core itself? And that's an open question from the panel.  So one way that we opened some stuff up in the last year or so that I don't think has maybe gotten as much news as maybe I should have tried to push forward,  but who here is a member of the Django Software Foundation?  Did you know that the rest of you can't be two?  All you have to do is go fill out a web form and you can become a member, and then you can vote on who gets to be on the board  and participate in the discussions on these mailing lists.  It is not a high traffic mailing list. No one will come and beat you if you don't vote.  But so, you know, please come and join and start participating.  We can, you know, if we're all kind of on the same mailing list, we can throw around ideas and communicate a little better as a community.  Any further thoughts on lowering that barrier to entry?  Well, I liked what Carlton said earlier in his talk and just his approach to it and trying to take away that pressure.  But like mentorship, we had touched on it earlier, but just for myself too, I wouldn't feel comfortable.  And I know if people with 10 years experience or whatever experience, they might not feel comfortable.  So just like if you know somebody that would like to be interested or mention it or nudge, right?  Sometimes we just need a little nudge in the right direction.  And then if there is interest, kind of help them and pull them off, right, to where you are, if you're in, you know, a place where you can't help somebody.  I think that would definitely be helpful.  Or if there was something more official, you know, a program that would be even better.  Actually, I want to steal a phrase from Rachel from earlier today with regard to helping people meet their goals.  So if you're going to have people making contributions to Django, again, let's be realistic.  The people who are going to make contributions to Django are going to be people who use Django.  The people who use Django are going to be people who find that Django helps them do the things that they're wanting to do.  Whether that has become professional software engineers or to just build web applications that, you know, that are for their Boy Scout Trooper,  for their Overwatch League team, or for whatever.  No bias there.  But the people who are going to actually contribute to Django are going to be the people who actually use Django.  And so in your local communities, your local Python and Django user groups,  if you can sort of make an effort to try to help draw more people in by showing them how Django can be useful to them,  it can be beneficial to them, even if they're not planning to become professional software engineers,  if Django is useful to them, those people become part of the community,  and that widens the pool of the community.  And so the volunteers, the contributors, they want to come from that community who actually find use in Django.  I think that could be very helpful.  Let's talk about money.  So the question basically is who has money and who needs money.  And Frank, I'd love it if you could fill us in on how the Django funding ecosystem works at the moment.  So I think by terms of who has the largest bank account, I think the DSF wins out by a little bit.  And we get our money mostly from corporate sponsorships and individual sponsorships,  and then the current PyCharm promotion that's going on right now is a big source of our revenue each year.  I'm very confident that if we had some big projects to spend on, we could go find the money.  But right now we don't have a lot of asks, and we don't have a lot to go spend it on that makes sense to us.  And so if we had a reason, I think we could go find the money.  And I think that if, you know, if we had a reason, I think we would know who to go target.  So if it was something async, who would benefit from that as companies, let's go reach out to them, get $5,000 from 10 companies, and we're off to the races.  So I think that that's, you know, and then we use that money for the fellows, we use the money for sponsoring events,  and we can use that money for other things that the community dreams up.  Anyone on the panel want to say that they need the money?  All right.  I'll answer on behalf, first on behalf of Jungle Girls is the fundraising coordinator.  Jungle Girls needs the money.  We need to support our infrastructure that enables us to give the resources our volunteers are using to organize their events,  support our online tutorials and stuff like that.  So Jungle Girls does need the money.  Then as well as a DSF director representing Africa, we also need the money for our events in Africa.  So we would really appreciate sponsorship for our events.  So yeah, we need the money as Jungle Girls as well as Africa needs your money.  Thank you.  Okay.  I'm going to say from a slightly more self-serving perspective that DEFNA is a former DEFNA board member.  DEFNA could use the money because one of the things, in addition to putting on DjangoCon, which hopefully you all are enjoying,  DEFNA is also working to promote Django-related educational events throughout North America.  And one of the ways that DEFNA does that is by providing grants to people and to groups who are doing those sorts of events.  And so the more money that is available to DEFNA, the more grants that DEFNA is able to give or the larger those grants can become.  And that also makes it a little more viable for people to start thinking about having their own Django-related events in their different localities.  Is that a word?  I don't know.  Words are hard.  I'm sorry.  So I'd like to finish up by inviting the board to put out some calls to action.  Like what are things that we as members of the Django community, what are actual action points we can be taking to address some of the issues that we've been discovering today?  And I'll do this in whatever order you like.  I'll start then over here.  So my call to action is somewhat predictable.  But it is about having ideas, right?  Like right now we are on the precipice of opening up the Django, what will become the former Django call to everyone else here.  And a lot of you use Django.  A lot of you use Django more than I do in my job these days.  You have the ideas.  You have the knowledge.  And the next decade of Django is to be defined by the big ideas.  Like we need to know what should we work on.  What high point should we aim for?  Even if we do part of it or just sort of a smaller version of it, we need that kind of input.  So like please come to sign up Django developers.  Come and suggest big ideas.  Let us discuss them.  Let's renew some of the energy and think about what that next decade holds for us.  For me, I would appreciate if we could get members from the American community in all over the world joining our main English, Python, Africa,  so that you can meet other developers from Africa, mentor them, help them grow.  And if not, we don't appreciate just the mind.  We do appreciate the mind, but we also appreciate the knowledge transfer.  That can happen if there is an interaction between Africa and the rest of the world.  So we really appreciate learning from you.  And if there is any way you can reach out to Africa and try and share the knowledge that you have, that will go a long way.  Also ensuring that even the contributors to the Django project itself is diverse.  So we cannot just expect to say we are opening it up to everyone and accept that the contributors will be diverse.  If you are not willing to help other people who need to learn and grow and then be able to contribute to the Django framework.  So I think we need to be able to offer our time as mentors for knowledge transfer to OK, so that we have a diverse group of people contributing to Django.  I think that joining the DSF membership and getting involved in the community in any way, shape or form, it doesn't have to be code.  Most of my contributions to Django are not in the form of code.  And yours don't have to be either.  It can be like people have said, mentoring, answering questions on mailing lists, fixing typos in docs,  adding docs that confuse you, changing how they are written so that they are less confusing.  There are lots of ways to get involved. You can volunteer at conferences to be a chair runner and session runner.  There are lots of ways to get involved and just help get involved.  If you see a person in our community, especially an underrepresented person who could take on a leadership role,  and maybe for instance they don't think of themselves as being able to do that, please encourage them to do that and mentor them if you are able to do it.  So mine is more like generic, I guess, for the framework.  A couple of years ago there was this joke that was kind of going around and basically it was the idea of calling the framework boring.  Please stop doing that.  Essentially we have like thousands of attendees go through Django Girls every year and they are really excited because they just learn something that's new and it's exciting and they are learning how to code.  And so I get that sometimes some of us have been here for a while, we've been doing Django and to us it's, you know, if there's the joke of it's boring,  it's really dismissive to people.  Like I think probably a third of our audience every year are people who are new to Django.  It is exciting, you're learning something new.  So I think, you know, setting that tone, letting people know they're welcome, let's just not be dismissive with that joke.  Alright, so as the North American ambassador I have specific assignments, literally.  I'm going to give a couple of examples here.  The idea is to start trying to build bridges.  The things that happen in Django are centered maybe in the US or in Europe and so we need to expand upon that.  So I'm going to look at Marietta and point to her as an example of how it's being done right.  So PICASCades, a local conference that moves between Vancouver, Seattle and hopefully Portland.  So then you've got Canada and the US interacting with each other.  I don't know if Ernest is here but say Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, you all are responsible for Toronto.  And so I need bridges to be built between Toronto and Ontario.  So wherever you're from, I'm in Texas, in Houston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, we're responsible for Mexico City, Guadalajara, San Diego, you're responsible for Tijuana.  So wherever you live, go to Google Maps and just look at say what's a 4-6 hour drive from you.  And if it's international, then start to try to make connections there.  But even if it's not international, so for instance, Pio, Ohio, Columbus, Pio, Tennessee and Nashville, you all are responsible for Appalachia  and making sure that there's more activity in those regions.  And then Pio, Ohio, since Picon is in Cleveland this year and next year, start making those connections using their connections with Toronto and Ontario  to spread some of that information from Toronto and Ontario into Appalachia.  And then when people from Texas come to Pio, Ohio and Pio, Tennessee, we can share that with the folks in Mexico City and Guadalajara.  And people on the eastern west coast, west coast you're responsible for Asia, east coast you're responsible for Europe.  So get to it.  Also the Caribbean.  So Florida, actually, I'm going to say most of the Gulf Coast, we're responsible for the Caribbean,  but also if Pio Caribbean January and February, if you live in the northern part of North America, you want to go to the Caribbean in February.  So keep that in mind.  Good call, Kenneth.  Well along those same lines, also the whole thing about creating events, local to wherever it is that you live, that's a really good idea.  But also if you don't have any idea on how to start or maybe you're just not sure if you want to do it or not,  you can come and talk to us.  That's also something that we do at DevNet.  And that's something that we want to do even more, which is give you more information, more details and guide you on how to do these things.  Because we know that it's not easy.  But so the only thing is that we also need your feedback to see what is it, what's the information that's missing, that it should be out there.  And it's not there.  All right, I'm going to speak on behalf of like Jangle Girls and what you can do to help us with that community.  Money for your local events.  We're in 94 different countries and a ton of cities, so check what there is.  If you don't have money or you don't want to give money, give your time.  Organize events, be a coach.  You can do it.  We have organizers' manuals online to follow, so it's basically copy-paste.  And also help maintaining the tutorial and keep it up to date or translate it, as I said earlier.  We need you.  Well, we're out of time, so thank you very much to our panel.  Thank you.
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So, hi. Yeah, this is the original idea for this panel was to be a sort of state of Django talking about the code. And then we realized that the Django community is far more interesting than the sort of nuts and bolts of the Django framework itself. So we've assembled a panel of representatives from a whole bunch of exciting projects that help make up that Django ecosystem. And I've actually started thinking about this more in terms of this is a what can the Django project learn from the Django community panel. So in that light, we've got a fantastic group of panelists. I'll ask them to introduce themselves briefly and then we'll start the conversation. So, Andrew, could you introduce yourself to the room? Hello. Thank you so much. I am Andrew Godwin. I am a Django core developer. I mostly know of my work on things like channels and migrations and south in the past. Hello, everyone. I'm Anna Makaruzzi. I'm a developer from Zimbabwe. I am with Django Girls Foundation, the DSF as well as the Python community in Zimbabwe and Africa. Hi, I'm Frank Wiles. I'm the president and founder of Repsis and president of the Django Software Foundation Board. I'm Catherine Michael. I also go by Katie. I'm a web developer and community manager for Eldarian. I'm a deaf board member, the DjangoCon website chair and a DSF member. Hello, I'm Jeff Triplett. I am the deaf president and co-founder, PSF director, DjangoCon U.S. principal organizer for the last four years and a consultant at Repsis. Hello, I'm Kojo Idrisa. You've seen way too much of me this week. I am the deaf North American ambassador. I am also the orientation, lightning talks and sprints chair for DjangoCon U.S. and other things. Hello, yeah. Hi, my name is Josue Valandrano-Coronell. I work for the Texas Advanced Computer Center and I'm also one of the newest deaf board members. Hello, my name is Rachel Calhoun. I'm a Django developer, also associated with Django Girls Soul and Django Girls and Pilates Grand Rapids, Michigan. Okay, let's have another welcoming applause for our panelists. So I wanted to start by talking about Django Girls because honestly I think Django Girls is an incredibly inspiring project and we're very lucky that it chose to attach itself to Django as a community. I feel like it's one of the most vibrant and exciting parts of the Django ecosystem. So Rachel, could you give us some of the latest highlights on how the Django Girls organization is shaping up? Yeah, so I've got a little side up. So we have 69 upcoming events, 671 past events and total number of applicants, 43,885. And people that have actually attended the event past 16,000. And that's in 94 different countries. So, yeah. And last year there was the impact report and we sent out surveys to try to see where people are now because we hadn't been tracking that. And from the responses we got 21% of participants that came to our workshop. They started into tech after that and now they're working in tech. I just think that's astonishing. So Anna, could you give us an update on how Django Girls is shaping up in Africa? We have many events happening mostly in Nigeria. I think Nigeria has recorded the highest number of events, but we have events happening across Africa. South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Ghana and many other countries. So Django Girls has been instrumental not only in impacting women, in reducing them to technology and coding, but it has also helped us grow our communities. Because every other country that's developing their Python community, they are starting by organizing Django Girls and then they move on to PyCons and other events. So it has really been helpful for us as a continent in developing the Python community and advancing the use of Python in Africa. So I understand the DSF funds Django Girls events. Could you talk us through some of how that works? Yeah, so actually it's one of the bigger uses of DSF funds. It kind of goes paying for the fellows and then funding Django Girls events and then funding other types of Django events and specific types of development. But yeah, it's been really successful. We actually have had to move to kind of having it be part of a consent agenda for the DSF board meetings so that we don't end up taking up most of our board meetings saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to all these Django Girls events. Fantastic. So on that sort of topic, I feel like one of the things that Django Girls brings to the Django community is a fantastic focus on education and sort of helping people get started with learning how to achieve their goals in web development with Django as the sort of substrate there. So I open question to the panel. How can we double down on that and become the open source community with the best possible education experience for newcomers? I'll kind of start us off, I guess, because I am a career changer. So I've kind of experienced both ways as a participant, as an organizer and as a coach. So obviously resources. There's a Django Girls tutorial, that's great, but then what next? And I think that's something we could improve on. Roadmap, more resources, or just a way to go after that. Luckily I had people around me to help me with that, but not everyone is like that. And that's the next thing, is mentorship. It's hard to find them, so if you're a developer, I encourage you to reach out and help junior developers or people that are interested in getting into tech. Right, help them out, yeah. And I've sort of followed on from that. What makes a good mentor? Like... There we go. I think one of the things that is important as far as mentoring people is the fact that you actually care about that person's advancement and their improvement as far as their skills or whatever it is they're trying to do. So, oftentimes mentoring is looked at with regard to how much technical skill the mentor has, but I think the reality is if you actually genuinely care about that person making some sort of progression towards whatever the goal is they're trying to reach, that's one of the more important criteria, because if you care about that person's advancement, they'll do what you need to do to help them find the... One, help them figure out what the goal is that they're trying to achieve, and then two, help them find the resources that they need to reach that goal. So, I think that's one of the more important things. I also want to add that as a mentor, admitting you don't know things helps people understand that you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to know everything. For me, that was a huge moment when I was learning that my mentor was like, I don't know, let's Google it. And I was like, oh, okay, that's okay to not know something. And another thing is resources. Something I got from my mentors was just, you know, conferences coming up, scholarship opportunities, things like that, that you're not exposed to, and you're not really in the tech field, and if someone can share that with you, that's very valuable. Yeah, I definitely echo that. I always try, if I'm mentoring somebody, to tell them some story where I didn't know what I was doing, and it took me forever to figure out that thing. It puts people at ease. And then just kind of having that kind of beginner mind, what was stuff that tripped me up way back then, and being able to kind of just do that empathy of, yeah, I've been there too, I remember what that was like. Haswe, did you have a documentation and tutorial project that you were developing? Yes, well, actually one of the efforts that we're doing at DevNet is trying to open a little bit more resources for people that would like to create events. So, I mean, it does have to do with the topic at hand right now, which is trying to teach other people, right, about everything that we can, about software programming and Django and all of that. So, a lot of that actually happens in all of these different types of events. And not all of those have to be really big events, like for instance, this one could be smaller events, like the ones that Django Girls actually also do, different type of tutorials and stuff like that. One really good resource actually, it comes from Django Girls, which is the handbook that they have to create events. But we're trying to create more resources around that and just different guidebooks on how to create different types of events. So, if anybody has any questions about how to actually start with that, you can contact us. I'd like to add that we'd love to have assistance with this. And it's been a huge boost to have Post Sway join the board because he has kind of spearheaded this and we're doing a lot of new outreach, not just in local communities, but also internationally. And it's really exciting because we're hoping to move beyond DjangoCon. It's been a new goal for us in the past year or so to move beyond DjangoCon to also do outreach in local communities. So, yeah, this is a great opportunity to talk about events because certainly Django Girls is a very events focused organization. Deafner has been doing an amazing job with DjangoCon and trying to push into further events. So, sort of open questions to the panel is why aren't there more DjangoCon around the world right now? That's mostly the DSF boards doing. So, we own the trademark around Django and DjangoCon and so we are the ones who let you have a DjangoCon. And the board's position on that has been the same for a long time that running a conference is very hard and most people don't realize really how hard it is and how much work goes into it. Deafner spends most of the year organizing this and with a group of, you know, a dozen or more people working on it throughout the year just to make it happen. And so, if you're wanting DjangoCon Fredonia in your country, the worst thing you could do would be to have a conference that starts off and goes very badly for whatever reason and you will never end up having DjangoCon Fredonia again, you won't be able to get sponsorship and you won't be able to buy tickets. So, it's important that whoever starts one has a lot of event planning experience and can show that they've got kind of lines on sponsorship lined up and before we would grant one. And that's why there's only a couple of them. So, we're going to go to the sort of DjangoCon brand. At the same time, we're actively interested in encouraging as many of those smaller Django groups that aren't a takes a year to plan a conference thing to pop up as possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you want to have Django weekend or, you know, Django Day in your city, go for it, you know, and let us know how we can help. But the larger conferences, we're kind of keeping the DjangoCon name close hold. So, one thing that I've certainly realized is this DjangoCon is probably the most diverse technical conference I've ever been to, which I think speaks poorly to my previous choice of conferences. But I would like to ask the deaf members on the panel, how did you pull this off? Because this is not an accident. So, pretty much, that's a hard question, actually, kind of getting out of the way for a lot of people who want to help. I think if we look back four or five years ago, there was a much smaller group of people running the conference. And so, one of the things we wanted this to be is a community-ranked conference. And so, we tend to err on the side of giving you more access to do things you want to do. And so far, it's worked out pretty well for us. Every year, too, is an iteration of the previous year in seeing what worked, what didn't work. That's been pretty successful. Honestly, as somebody who doesn't like to do public speaking, I have no problem not being on stage, which is why Kojo is on stage for hours and hours each day, which is great. So, I think that was a big factor. We have a really good actionable code of conduct, too, so it's easy to keep nice people here because we can ask people who aren't nice to leave. So, I think that also was a factor as well, and thank you for the compliment, too. So, I would say, as the person who is on stage all the time, one of the things, and I have said this to attendees here, and as one of the members of a former Deaf and Abord member and a JangoCon US organizer of that group, I think I am one of the more extroverted introverts. And so, I have said this to people as I interact with them. The entire team has a very serious focus on trying to make JangoCon as inclusive as possible. So, not just trying to reach out to people of different groups, but trying to create a conference environment such that when people from a variety of different groups come to JangoCon, you feel comfortable, you feel welcomed, because we really, legitimately, truly want you to be here. We want you to have the actual best JangoCon experience you can have. And I am the big visual one who is saying it to people and kind of in your face all the time, but there is a whole other group of organizers that you might not see as much who feel the exact same way. And so, that's why you get that feeling here, because we are all on the same page about that. The organizers are, okay, I've never been an organizer for a different conference, so I don't know what other experienced people have, but the organizers are absolutely constantly trying to find ways to make it more diverse and to bring underrepresented people in. And it is such an important part of it. I have experienced it myself, and it has just drastically improved my own life from Jeff encouraging me to become the website chair. And that is, I wouldn't have thought of that for myself. And it was something I wanted to do, and it helped me learn and help me mentor other people. And they are doing this, everyone is doing this in the community as far as I can tell among the organizers. Kojo, you've been working as the events ambassador for North America. What are the sort of the patterns, the sort of themes that you've noticed in those conversations you've been having? Well, honestly, one thing that I've noticed is that I think we as the Django kind US folks need to maybe get a little bit better at marketing-wise, is that people often think that Django kind is just for talks about Django. And so some people don't necessarily realize that I've spoken to people and asked them to submit talks to Django, kind of like, oh, I don't do a lot of Django, but the reality is Django is an open source web framework written in Python. And so Python talks, acceptable web-related talks, or even about other web frameworks or about JavaScript front-ends, acceptable. It's open source, mostly by volunteers, so talks that are related to the community and helping people maintain their volunteer efforts by not burning themselves out or dealing with their mental health issues or having a culture that is inclusive and welcoming to people, all of those are valid Django contacts. And as I've gone to different events, literally all around North America and also Australia, I think that those sorts of values are represented in the different communities that I've been to. So I'm interested in hearing more. One of the things I find fascinating for Django is how international the community has become. So I'd be interested in hearing more about some of the event plans in Mexico and Africa from Josue and from Anna. Yes, well, actually there's been some effort also to try and bring all of these different types of events to Mexico. Right now, the one thing that we have is Python Day in Mexico. That's going to happen next month. But the other thing that also is going to happen, but this is going to happen until next year, and it's kind of like a first step is to create a PyLatin, which is Latin American. So that's going to be the first step to actually start to have more events like this one, and then eventually probably a DjangoCon. Maybe we're going to start with something like One Day or something like that. I don't want to give out too many details because those might change. And there's other people also involving the whole organization of the event. But this is also helping us out, trying to figure out what other resources do we need to give out there or to make public for people that would like to start these type of events. And the whole point of these events that are going to happen in Mexico and in other countries are also to be very international. For everybody, I mean, whoever actually can go to these other countries and all that and also expose a talk or something like that or just contributing in any other way. That's the whole idea to make her a more bigger international community. So far, there have been new events, Python events coming up with every year. We started our own PyCon Zimbabwe in 2016, Nigeria, head there in PyCon, first PyCon in 2017. This year Ghana had a new PyCon and these events emanated from PyCon Namibia. The only country that had been running PyCon was South Africa. And this year was their eighth event. So we are happy that there are new PyCons coming up in Africa. But there is a plan for a Pan-African PyCon that will not only cover one country, but as many countries as can be covered, which we are planning for 2020. And we are also trying to come up with a small Django event, if possible, maybe for 2019 or 2020 as well. So those are the plans that we have in Africa for PyCon as well as Django events to have something that is continental. And that's something that we are reaching out to the rest of the world if you want to participate by helping us with events. If you have been running a continental event with value, the experience that you have had with the issues, how to handle visas, and administration issues that can come up, any information that you may have with regards to budgets, financial aid, and stuff like that, we would appreciate that very much. I just wanted to point something out. And that is that we actually have two people from Mexico who joined our board this year, Josue and Katcha. And we are also doing some Spanish language translation. Katcha has translated our website, which will go live soon. And we have done some tweets in Spanish. And I am also hoping that the documentation that is in the works for local meetups that we might be able to do a translation of that also. On that note about internationalism, in Korea I started the Jailgirls Seoul and it took off. It was a huge success, but one of the things that made it so successful was all the work going into the translations of Jailgirls tutorial. Right now it's translated into 14 different languages and it's being translated by volunteers. So please help if you can, into many others. So that was my kind of plug on the international scope. So I'd like to move us on to talking about Django Core itself. And so I'm going to call on James Bennett in a moment as a quick guest. Actually, could we get you out of here and we'll hand you a microphone. So this was discussed a little bit yesterday, but there is a proposal in the works to introduce a completely new governance model to Django. Because right now Django Core, I will be honest, does not look very much like the makeup of people in this room. And furthermore, we need to start injecting this vitality and this freshness and these new ideas into the core framework, the way the core framework itself is developed. So James is the author of the DEP, the Django Enhancement Proposal that's outlining this new governance model. James, if you could give us the executive summary from the author yourself, that would be fantastic. Okay, so the way that historically Django Development has worked is there are certain people who have commit rights to the main repository. We call those people Django Core. And they sort of get to make decisions and do what they want. There was for a long time Jacob and Adrian as sort of final decision makers. Now there's a technical board since they stepped down. The proposal is get rid of that. Shut down the private Django Core mailing list and IRC channel. Move all of the governance of Django the framework onto the public Django developers list. You may be wondering, well, if there are no more committers, how does code get into Django? The answer is already a lot of the commits that happen in Django are done by Carlton and Tim, who are the Django fellows who are paid by the DSF to do all sorts of management around the Django source code repository. The proposal is to formalize a role of a merger. This is not someone who just adds code on their own initiative. It's someone who merges pull requests from other people after discussion and consensus on the public mailing list. This does away with the need to have the sort of multi-tier. Some people have special privileges and some people don't. Everybody would be equal on the Django developers list and it would be consensus driven as to what gets into Django. The mergers would simply be a bureaucratic role. There would still be a technical board elected from the Django developers mailing list every so often to act as a final decision making backstop if we need one. Although I will say I've been on the technical board, I think now four release cycles and we've had very little work to do, so I would like to see that continue because it seems like at least the consensus model seems to be working. Any thoughts from the panel on this as a concept for governance going forward? Yeah, in fact, one of these things, I can talk about it, it's already started happening. When I launched my big proposal for like, hey, let's take Django and make it all asynchronous, I did that directly in public on the Django developers mailing list. We have the private list. The private list is not very busy but it does still exist and for many years we want to try and get rid of it. Let's not do that, go straight to public and try and get back to discussion and see if there's any objection. Much to my surprise, there was no objection. There was a near unanimous agreement for the community which is like, I am occasionally personally a little bit suspicious of, shall we say, everyone agreeing once kind of base systems, but it seems to work with Django. We foster this kind of community that works. And the technical board, you know, I'm also on it and we've had like one email in the last year, I think. It's like, there's not much content just going on right now. So in that regard, I think it's a good, maybe not the complete solution, but it's an excellent move forward for us. Anyone else got any input they want to make on this? So first of all, I think it's a great first step. My concern is just, you know, we do have a problem. It's an uncomfortable problem and I'm glad we're addressing it. I've seen the notice like there's certain parts of Django. We've noticed even Django girls like when Django hired somebody to be the fellow, the framework advanced at a pace that we couldn't advance previously. With Django girls too having a couple of ambassadors, we've seen some huge improvements now where, you know, you have somebody who's paid to work on the problems and fix things. So my only concern is that I would love to see us take another step and hire somebody who knows what they're doing with diversity and let's like head on, reach and let's fix some of the various issues by bringing the next one in. I love the stuff. I think this is good, but I would just love to see a little extra bit. You know, I've gone to the documentation and looked at the list of people who are on committees and core committers. And it's like for me, that's the face of Django. And a lot of these people go back to Lawrence Journal World or they've been around for a really long time and it's like they know the history of Django and have a lot of tribal knowledge. And for me, that was a psychological barrier of entry and just having the message that Carlton gave of welcome and saying that you're needed. For me, that makes me much more likely to contribute. And I think that we are very often surfacing the accomplishments of these same people and that we need to make the face of Django more about the diverse community we are becoming and start surfacing new people and new opportunities. And this is a really good first step. So a few people have mentioned the Django Fellows now. I'm not familiar with that program. There are two Django Fellows who are actually employed by the Django Software Foundation essentially to do the bug triage and help manage releases and the stuff which, I don't want to say the tedious stuff, but some of the sort of ongoing work that needs to be done to keep the community healthy. It's quite a rare model in open source actually and I think it's been extremely successful. I'm really impressed with the impact that's had. The question for the panel is, do you feel like the Django Fellows program is working well as it is? I kind of loaded the question there. But also, how do you see that program expanding maybe with new responsibilities or other things that might help it work even better? In short, yes. It's working really well. We've seen a steady pace of releases, security issues that come into the security mailing list or dealt with and triaged super quickly, sometimes in less than a couple of hours, where with community resources that might have been a day or two and if it was a busy holiday weekend, maybe several days. So those parts of it work really well. I think one area where we could, one, we could have more fellows if we raised more money so Django could move faster and more, or had money to put behind projects like moving to ASync or with the Mozilla grant for channels. If we had some piles of money like that, then we could employ people to work on those problems specifically. But I also think that we need to focus some energy around maintaining the third-party app ecosystem. Things like Django Debug Toolbar and all the things that the Jazz Band group takes care of. How can we support them? I know personally almost every Django project I work on uses some number of third-party apps that aren't mine and aren't anybody as part of Django Core. How can we help them? Could we have a fellow who focused on those issues, looking for pull requests and small bug fixes and be added as a maintainer across a lot of those projects? And I think that's something that we should explore. I totally agree with that. Django stands on the shoulders of its third-party apps in many cases. We claim that you have batteries included, but some of the batteries come in the form of third-party apps. Having a better... If it's bad enough for Django Core, those third-party maintainers burn out even more easily than we do. It's often a story that those apps come and get popular. Then as I know from personal experience, you get a deluge of feature and issue requests and you sort of go, and it's like, there's a massive walk away. It would be really nice to see not just maybe in front of Django itself, helping out a bit more actively in things that really help build our community in that sense as well. So on that theme of... So fellows is a concept we think other open source projects should steal from us. What are some of the ideas from other open source communities that we should be adopting? Something that I've come across recently is that I've seen other communities do kind of like a diversity audit or an open source project health audit. We are making a lot of progress naturally, but I feel that if we could look at where we think we should be and where we are and find problem areas and maybe create a strategy that we might make more progress. Kind of what gets measured changes. I think one of the great open source communities out there that we could learn a little bit from is the Postgres community. There is a huge amount of large commercial enterprises that contribute whole people and money and resources to the Postgres project. And that's part of, I think, part of its success. And the fact that it is not tied around one particular company means it's very resilient if a company falls away or becomes a bad actor that doesn't harm the project as a whole. I would really love to see companies who are using Django contribute more of their own staff's time or funds in general and have some of these, you know, Django is being used by lots and lots of people. If there was a little more contribution back from some of these companies, I think that would lift the whole project. I also think the idea of sort of expanding the concept of office hours might be useful. So my first open source contributions were to Drupal, which is the PSP project. And I literally learned how to use Git for the first time while sitting on my former system-lossed couch in Japan during Drupal's office hours, Drupal Core office hours. So they had a set of office hours. And I think they still continue to do it. There's a certain period of time, once per week, I believe, where there are people in the IRC channels available to help you learn how to make contributions to the core. And I know that somebody, I think, I believe, Mariana holds office hours as far as Python Core goes. So there are some of those things that are being done, but sort of expanding efforts like that, where a dedicated amount of time is going to be set aside for the purpose of helping people become more involved in the project in various ways. So we've talked a lot about the Django community. Let's spend a little bit of time talking about the Django framework itself. So I'm interested in what are the big ideas for Django? What are some ambitious projects that Django should take on next? And I'm going to pick a speaker completely at random and point it at Andrew. Hello. To see if he has any thoughts on what the next big evolution of Django should look like. I have many thoughts. Too much, even for a full hour panel, I think. So this is one of the things, like, if you've seen any of my talks over the past couple of years, the end is often, what is Django? My position is Django has kind of achieved what its initial goal was, which was to become this sort of good framework that was designed for, like, from a newsroom environment initially. But we had to work out what it is in future. My personal pet project these days is asynchronous stuff. If you've not seen my blog post, the plan is to take progressively more and more of Django to be async-capable. So starting with the request path, ending with the RM being fully async-capable. There's a lot of enhancements there as well. There's other small things too. We were just talking this morning, Simon, about MySQL now has great geospatial support. And so there's a huge opportunity there for adding good Django support to the MySQL backend. And there's all sorts of good ideas like this that we need to just go and find. One of the kind of problems is that many of us on the currently extant core team are a little bit sort of old, like, long on the tooth, should we say. Like, we've been around, like, we sort of settled in our ways. We got dogs. We like, you walked with our dogs. I got too many hobbies. But the point is that we need that injection of fresh talent as well to help bring those new ideas, right? But certainly in the short term, I think, like, if we want to be competitive on, to use a phrase, the world stage of frameworks, I think looking at what everyone else is doing and what people are turning towards, things like node, especially, or go. Like, having a great fluid, easy to use asynchronous story is for me one of those big ones. Like, can we position Django as, oh no, we're not only with the experienced, like, well-learned framework, but also we have all the shiny new things as well. I think this reflects back to a sort of earlier topic. How do we make, how do we take the lessons from our events world and inclusively in making, lowering the barrier to entry for new developers? How do we apply those to Django core itself? And that's an open question from the panel. So one way that we opened some stuff up in the last year or so that I don't think has maybe gotten as much news as maybe I should have tried to push forward, but who here is a member of the Django Software Foundation? Did you know that the rest of you can't be two? All you have to do is go fill out a web form and you can become a member, and then you can vote on who gets to be on the board and participate in the discussions on these mailing lists. It is not a high traffic mailing list. No one will come and beat you if you don't vote. But so, you know, please come and join and start participating. We can, you know, if we're all kind of on the same mailing list, we can throw around ideas and communicate a little better as a community. Any further thoughts on lowering that barrier to entry? Well, I liked what Carlton said earlier in his talk and just his approach to it and trying to take away that pressure. But like mentorship, we had touched on it earlier, but just for myself too, I wouldn't feel comfortable. And I know if people with 10 years experience or whatever experience, they might not feel comfortable. So just like if you know somebody that would like to be interested or mention it or nudge, right? Sometimes we just need a little nudge in the right direction. And then if there is interest, kind of help them and pull them off, right, to where you are, if you're in, you know, a place where you can't help somebody. I think that would definitely be helpful. Or if there was something more official, you know, a program that would be even better. Actually, I want to steal a phrase from Rachel from earlier today with regard to helping people meet their goals. So if you're going to have people making contributions to Django, again, let's be realistic. The people who are going to make contributions to Django are going to be people who use Django. The people who use Django are going to be people who find that Django helps them do the things that they're wanting to do. Whether that has become professional software engineers or to just build web applications that, you know, that are for their Boy Scout Trooper, for their Overwatch League team, or for whatever. No bias there. But the people who are going to actually contribute to Django are going to be the people who actually use Django. And so in your local communities, your local Python and Django user groups, if you can sort of make an effort to try to help draw more people in by showing them how Django can be useful to them, it can be beneficial to them, even if they're not planning to become professional software engineers, if Django is useful to them, those people become part of the community, and that widens the pool of the community. And so the volunteers, the contributors, they want to come from that community who actually find use in Django. I think that could be very helpful. Let's talk about money. So the question basically is who has money and who needs money. And Frank, I'd love it if you could fill us in on how the Django funding ecosystem works at the moment. So I think by terms of who has the largest bank account, I think the DSF wins out by a little bit. And we get our money mostly from corporate sponsorships and individual sponsorships, and then the current PyCharm promotion that's going on right now is a big source of our revenue each year. I'm very confident that if we had some big projects to spend on, we could go find the money. But right now we don't have a lot of asks, and we don't have a lot to go spend it on that makes sense to us. And so if we had a reason, I think we could go find the money. And I think that if, you know, if we had a reason, I think we would know who to go target. So if it was something async, who would benefit from that as companies, let's go reach out to them, get $5,000 from 10 companies, and we're off to the races. So I think that that's, you know, and then we use that money for the fellows, we use the money for sponsoring events, and we can use that money for other things that the community dreams up. Anyone on the panel want to say that they need the money? All right. I'll answer on behalf, first on behalf of Jungle Girls is the fundraising coordinator. Jungle Girls needs the money. We need to support our infrastructure that enables us to give the resources our volunteers are using to organize their events, support our online tutorials and stuff like that. So Jungle Girls does need the money. Then as well as a DSF director representing Africa, we also need the money for our events in Africa. So we would really appreciate sponsorship for our events. So yeah, we need the money as Jungle Girls as well as Africa needs your money. Thank you. Okay. I'm going to say from a slightly more self-serving perspective that DEFNA is a former DEFNA board member. DEFNA could use the money because one of the things, in addition to putting on DjangoCon, which hopefully you all are enjoying, DEFNA is also working to promote Django-related educational events throughout North America. And one of the ways that DEFNA does that is by providing grants to people and to groups who are doing those sorts of events. And so the more money that is available to DEFNA, the more grants that DEFNA is able to give or the larger those grants can become. And that also makes it a little more viable for people to start thinking about having their own Django-related events in their different localities. Is that a word? I don't know. Words are hard. I'm sorry. So I'd like to finish up by inviting the board to put out some calls to action. Like what are things that we as members of the Django community, what are actual action points we can be taking to address some of the issues that we've been discovering today? And I'll do this in whatever order you like. I'll start then over here. So my call to action is somewhat predictable. But it is about having ideas, right? Like right now we are on the precipice of opening up the Django, what will become the former Django call to everyone else here. And a lot of you use Django. A lot of you use Django more than I do in my job these days. You have the ideas. You have the knowledge. And the next decade of Django is to be defined by the big ideas. Like we need to know what should we work on. What high point should we aim for? Even if we do part of it or just sort of a smaller version of it, we need that kind of input. So like please come to sign up Django developers. Come and suggest big ideas. Let us discuss them. Let's renew some of the energy and think about what that next decade holds for us. For me, I would appreciate if we could get members from the American community in all over the world joining our main English, Python, Africa, so that you can meet other developers from Africa, mentor them, help them grow. And if not, we don't appreciate just the mind. We do appreciate the mind, but we also appreciate the knowledge transfer. That can happen if there is an interaction between Africa and the rest of the world. So we really appreciate learning from you. And if there is any way you can reach out to Africa and try and share the knowledge that you have, that will go a long way. Also ensuring that even the contributors to the Django project itself is diverse. So we cannot just expect to say we are opening it up to everyone and accept that the contributors will be diverse. If you are not willing to help other people who need to learn and grow and then be able to contribute to the Django framework. So I think we need to be able to offer our time as mentors for knowledge transfer to OK, so that we have a diverse group of people contributing to Django. I think that joining the DSF membership and getting involved in the community in any way, shape or form, it doesn't have to be code. Most of my contributions to Django are not in the form of code. And yours don't have to be either. It can be like people have said, mentoring, answering questions on mailing lists, fixing typos in docs, adding docs that confuse you, changing how they are written so that they are less confusing. There are lots of ways to get involved. You can volunteer at conferences to be a chair runner and session runner. There are lots of ways to get involved and just help get involved. If you see a person in our community, especially an underrepresented person who could take on a leadership role, and maybe for instance they don't think of themselves as being able to do that, please encourage them to do that and mentor them if you are able to do it. So mine is more like generic, I guess, for the framework. A couple of years ago there was this joke that was kind of going around and basically it was the idea of calling the framework boring. Please stop doing that. Essentially we have like thousands of attendees go through Django Girls every year and they are really excited because they just learn something that's new and it's exciting and they are learning how to code. And so I get that sometimes some of us have been here for a while, we've been doing Django and to us it's, you know, if there's the joke of it's boring, it's really dismissive to people. Like I think probably a third of our audience every year are people who are new to Django. It is exciting, you're learning something new. So I think, you know, setting that tone, letting people know they're welcome, let's just not be dismissive with that joke. Alright, so as the North American ambassador I have specific assignments, literally. I'm going to give a couple of examples here. The idea is to start trying to build bridges. The things that happen in Django are centered maybe in the US or in Europe and so we need to expand upon that. So I'm going to look at Marietta and point to her as an example of how it's being done right. So PICASCades, a local conference that moves between Vancouver, Seattle and hopefully Portland. So then you've got Canada and the US interacting with each other. I don't know if Ernest is here but say Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, you all are responsible for Toronto. And so I need bridges to be built between Toronto and Ontario. So wherever you're from, I'm in Texas, in Houston, Houston, Dallas, Austin, we're responsible for Mexico City, Guadalajara, San Diego, you're responsible for Tijuana. So wherever you live, go to Google Maps and just look at say what's a 4-6 hour drive from you. And if it's international, then start to try to make connections there. But even if it's not international, so for instance, Pio, Ohio, Columbus, Pio, Tennessee and Nashville, you all are responsible for Appalachia and making sure that there's more activity in those regions. And then Pio, Ohio, since Picon is in Cleveland this year and next year, start making those connections using their connections with Toronto and Ontario to spread some of that information from Toronto and Ontario into Appalachia. And then when people from Texas come to Pio, Ohio and Pio, Tennessee, we can share that with the folks in Mexico City and Guadalajara. And people on the eastern west coast, west coast you're responsible for Asia, east coast you're responsible for Europe. So get to it. Also the Caribbean. So Florida, actually, I'm going to say most of the Gulf Coast, we're responsible for the Caribbean, but also if Pio Caribbean January and February, if you live in the northern part of North America, you want to go to the Caribbean in February. So keep that in mind. Good call, Kenneth. Well along those same lines, also the whole thing about creating events, local to wherever it is that you live, that's a really good idea. But also if you don't have any idea on how to start or maybe you're just not sure if you want to do it or not, you can come and talk to us. That's also something that we do at DevNet. And that's something that we want to do even more, which is give you more information, more details and guide you on how to do these things. Because we know that it's not easy. But so the only thing is that we also need your feedback to see what is it, what's the information that's missing, that it should be out there. And it's not there. All right, I'm going to speak on behalf of like Jangle Girls and what you can do to help us with that community. Money for your local events. We're in 94 different countries and a ton of cities, so check what there is. If you don't have money or you don't want to give money, give your time. Organize events, be a coach. You can do it. We have organizers' manuals online to follow, so it's basically copy-paste. And also help maintaining the tutorial and keep it up to date or translate it, as I said earlier. We need you. Well, we're out of time, so thank you very much to our panel. Thank you.
panel was to be a sort of state of Django talking panelists. I'll ask them to introduce themselves room? Hello. Thank you so much. I am Andrew Zimbabwe and Africa. Hi, I'm Frank Wiles. I'm the the Django Software Foundation Board. I'm and a DSF member. Hello, I'm Jeff Triplett. I am DjangoCon U.S. principal organizer for the last So Anna, could you give us an update on how has also helped us grow our communities. Because Django Girls brings to the Django community is a It's been a new goal for us in the past year or been the same for a long time that running a groups, but trying to create a conference represented in the different communities that the event plans in Mexico and Africa from Josue Django events to have something that is discussion and consensus on the public mailing thoughts from the panel on this as a concept for diversity and let's like head on, reach and let's progressively more and more of Django to be talking this morning, Simon, about MySQL now has events, and we can use that money for other one of the ways that DEFNA does that is by