DSF Board, AMA after 8 months

How did you become a DSF board member?

I was elected by DSF members. If you want to learn more about DSF membership, you can check the django website and if you think you or someone else are suitable, please apply. I started to serve on the board from January 2024, and my term will end in December 2025. Each board member have 2 term year and we have 4 specific officer roles:

• President
• Vice President
• Treasurer
• Secretary

I don’t have any specific role, I was planning to see how it’s going and then see what I can do. And also, how it will go with my current tasks and (huge) to-do list.

What’s different from your expectations?

I think coming back from Djangonaut Space organization I was expecting some similarities in terms of communication and organisation but it wasn't the case. I was expecting more asynchronous communication and interaction since we might all be busy for many reasons.

A bit more defined things like who should answer emails and what about spams for example.

1h of board meetings a month is not enough to me and some topics are not really discussed outside the meetings.

What do you think needs to happen in the future to set the board and the DSF up for long term success?

Put more effort in fundraising, I believe having more money will help to take actions in more domains.

Also, have a better link with the community. Sometimes we have issues where having feedback and support from the community would be helpful to address them.

How many of your DSF board specific initiatives are things that could be done NOT being a board member?

For example, solving the problem of onboarding and nurturing new contributors is tackled by Djangonaut Space on our own initiative. But approving grants and selecting a DjangoCon Europe team can only be done by board members.

So many things can be done without being a board member actually 😁

• Help people in the forum or discord
• Moderate the forum and discord
• Initiate a working group
• Participate to a working group
• Help with the content of the Django’s website
• Submit people as DSF members
• Create a local Django community (ie: Django Paris meetup)
• Search for community around the world to add to the local community page
• Contribute to djangoproject.com / code.djangoproject.com website
• Contribute to the Django Discord bot
• Contribute to Django core to improve processes
• Contribute to a Django team (ie: Triage and review team)
• Talk to people who could be part of a working group
• Volunteer in Django/DSF presence in events (ie: help run a Django booth)

Small ways to get involved: If I only have 5 hours per month I can contribute, where do you need people?

They are many ways to contribute depends on the things you are more interested:

Immediate actions

• Help social media WG to provide content or review content
• Help Djangonauts on the forum or on discord, answer questions
• Retweet/retooth Django posts

Might need review / futures actions

• Help on moderation (for example Reddit /r/django)
• DSF Fundraising WG might need extra help to reach potential sponsors
• If possible, come on the DSF office hours to help answers or contribute to the conversation
• I would like at some point to have a content team for the website and help would be helpful here

If you are interested in any of those actions please fill this form, so I can reach you later if there are any specific needs.

If and how the DSF is setting and tracking goals for diversity and inclusion?

We have a public statement for diversity and some ongoing DEI improvements.

Currently it’s more to define what is the existing state and the evolution with statistics to be able to set goals.

The actions that had been taken is mostly to show how diverse the community is in the Django world, which means: the website, elections, the members and Django communication tools:

• The local community page
• Recognize DSF members from all over the world
• Small initiatives to help to get a good representation of the diversity of the community in DSF board elections
• Talk about the current DSF members
• …

Could be even more, having Django participate in the Outreachy program and so on.

What are the tasks and time commitments?

Regular tasks as a baseline and then ad-hoc tasks/personal initiatives with rough times

We have a meeting each month and it lasts one hour. During this time, we are reviewing all current and new business with all members and the assistant Catherine.

Except that, we have async communication on slack.

Since I don't have a specific role, it's mostly promotion and representation of the Django Software Foundation and following DSF working groups as a board of liaison. We have a contact form so I have to check emails and reply if I can.

In more ad-hoc tasks/personal initiatives, I don’t know precisely the time but I think it depends on the task, if it’s research on a topic or doing something for a working group. I’m involved in 3 working groups, which means that there might be meetings or actions that I may have to do related to that.

It’s hard to explicitly define times, but I think I could say around 5+ hours a month, depending on the need and my health.

What areas do you think the board could improve on and where does it lack skills/expertise?

I think the board could improve in promotion: get sponsors, offer sponsorship package in function of the level of sponsoring, get contacts…

And I believe in terms of legal considerations and marketing we are lacking expertise. For example Django is known from developers for its stability and smooth upgrades, this is something which is not promoted, or at least poorly by saying it’s “boring”.

Any "behind the curtain" stuff? Any pain points?

Should I really share behind the curtain stuff? 😁

I think the major pain point for me was communication and documentation.

Many things are not documented or partially and with all different boards I imagine things have been lost over time. It’s hard to understand everything when you are new.

Also, I would have preferred to have the tasks shared or potentially allow/push people to ask for help if no time or whatever reason, especially when they have a role which can ask a lot. It took me a lot of time to figure out who writes our news pages. Access and the processes to ask for access are not always clear to me. This kind of thing should be documented somewhere.

How does the board decide things (do you vote on everything)?

As I was saying before, we have a board meeting each month and we have a precise agenda that we are reviewing together:

• Grant submissions
• DjangoCon proposal
• DSF memberships
• DSF working group

All of those areas are voted on each time if there is anything to vote on, so we are making sure that we have a quorum before the start of the meeting, otherwise it will be rescheduled. We also discuss things related to the DSF organisation like bylaws, trademark etc. but things aren’t always under vote except if there is a major change. All board members can add a topic to the agenda.

What things folks should involve the board with and what can they "just do".

Some DSF working groups already exist, all members are identifiable and the way to join the working group.

Everyone can help a working group without asking a board member.

Everyone can create a DSF working group, but this needs at least one board member to follow and guide the working group (=board liaison) with the DSF board vision and for reporting. When the proposal is ready, the board liaison will bring it to the board meeting to be voted on by the board.

There are also initiatives like Djangonaut Space, Django News etc. which don’t rely on the board at all, if you have an idea which might solve something in the Django community, please do it!

The major thing which involves the board is creating a new DjangoCon since the name is registered under the Django trademark with certain criterias. You can still create smaller events without the board, and some of them are registered in the local community page.

Your personal reflections - is this a joy or a chore?

Hard to say, I have experienced both.

I was frustrated to not be able to help in some cases or see people complaining but I didn’t get the information at the board level directly where it could make a difference. So I keep notes and try to make changes but sometimes it’s even just a matter of time or actions, it doesn’t go like you wanted and you’re disappointed with the result.

I also enjoy people thanking me for some actions I have done, see them amazed with the DSF membership recognition or just see people I know from other spaces (Djangonaut Space, Discord…) taking part in Django community contributions in some way, even if it doesn’t end as expected like elections, this is really nice to see all folks from all over the world gather for one thing in common.

Where are you at with your goals? Are we on track? If we aren't, what resources would it take to accomplish them.

If we retake my personal statement from the Django blog post, this is the current state:

• Increase fundraising: in progress with DSF Fundraising WG
  • improving communication: ideas was shared with DSF social media WG, missing coordination with DSF Fundraising WG when the team have everything ready for
  • highlighting sponsors: this will be reviewed with the future DSF Website WG with coordination of DSF Fundraising WG
• Develop our community: in progress with many new DSF members and newcomers
  • specifically helping existing and new contributor: sharing the community and meeting people in other events.
• Working group for mentorship: Discussion initiated, I’m involved in too many working groups, I have now a volunteer to lead this project ✨ She will need people and resources to help her, an issue will be open soon, keep an eye on that.
• Push accessibility in the framework: in progress, we have new members and many ideas and discussions on going. This also rely a lot on DSF Website WG which will be soon kickstarted.
• Django's diversity and expand the community: in progress, have a better representation in Django like candidate elections or people shown in the website.

I believe we are on track but I can’t do that alone, especially for social media, we will need people to help us to promote and write content.

There are also topics I would like to have more people involved in:

• DSF Code of Conduct WG
• Moderation of Discord and Forum
• Future team to write content of the website
• Get folks feedbacks in order to make improvements
• Get sponsors feedbacks

What did you achieve?

I’m happy with what I have achieved, even though I was thinking I would have done more.

• Represent DSF at some events (e.g. FOSDEM)
• Django booth at EuroPython
• DjangoCon Europe lightning talk
• DjangoCon Europe DSF panel
• Handle DSF roles on discord server
• Reply to some questions on discord, forum or email
• Help to quickstart the DSF Fundraising WG
• Add local communities in local communities page
• Follow-up on draft of the DSF Website WG
• Help on the review of DjangoCon proposal of next year
• Help the social media WG
• Research on the DSF past board and history
• Help on the next Django developer survey
• Submit many people for DSF membership
• Listing of potential requests that Djangonauts would like

What would you like to achieve?

• Automate partially or completely the addition of new DSF Individual Members
• Improve fundraising to be able to take more actions
• Improve the website with the DSF Website WG
• Create a content website (WG?) team
• Create a mentorship / leadership WG
• Create a way to get feedback from the community
• Improve forms for futures elections
• Create a DSF members blog series
• Create some “did you know” social media post related to DSF

What do you wish the community knew that would make your role easier?

This is actually some time commitment if you want to do things outside of the monthly meeting. Your work and extra activities take time and some days this is hard to work on open source.

We need to increase funding but the best way to start is with you, dear lovely reader. If you are working for a company, you should ask if they are sponsoring Django if they use it and tell them why they should do that. If you don’t know what to tell for why, you can start by the fact it will help pay our Fellows, the 2 incredible women who are maintaining the tool every day they are relying on and keep the security and improvements on it.

Many things could be solved by having money, but not only. Sometimes what we are missing is people. Having mentors, having people to answer questions, people who moderate platforms, people who contribute to code source.

What made you laugh?

My onboarding, it was definitely not what I expected, even if I didn’t expect so much to be honest.

Would you do it again?

I think yes, not because this is particularly fun, but more because some things can change only at some level, and I think I can be helpful here.

If you had impostor syndrome, how do you deal with it?

Impostor syndrome is, unfortunately, my best friend, always there I don’t know why lol

I think it's a question of thinking about the best way, even if I'm not the most competent person, I think I have something to contribute, and that's why I was elected.