Thibaud is a Django Software Foundation Board Member (Secretary) and serves on the Django accessibility team. He is also on the core team for Wagtail and works at Torchbox. We discuss the current status of Django, the upcoming DSF Board elections, opportunities available for community members, and more.
Will Vincent 0:00
Did you know you can sponsor this podcast and reach 1000s of engaged developers? Well, you can look at the sponsor us section on the Django chat.com website for more information.
Carlton Gibson 0:08
Hi, welcome to another episode of Django chat podcast on the Django web framework. Carlton Gibson joined us over by will Vincent, hello, Will,
Will Vincent 0:21
Hi, Carlton.
Carlton Gibson 0:22
Hello. Will, today, we've got with us, Tebow Carles, who's a DSF board member and wagtail core team member, and all around Django hero. Hello. Tigo, how are you?
Thibaud Colas 0:29
Hi, folks. I'm doing good. Freshly back from German converse, good to be here.
Carlton Gibson 0:34
So you've recovered from the jet lag, yeah. Honestly, not
Thibaud Colas 0:37
just yet, but close enough. Coco,
Will Vincent 0:42
so we want to talk about a lot of things, but I think the big one is board elections for the Django Software Foundation are on the 25th which will be nine days from when this comes out. So maybe we could talk about you're a new board member, or what do you want to say about the upcoming elections? And then we want to ask about what it's been like one year into your term. Ooh,
Thibaud Colas 1:03
okay, I guess can maybe start a few years back like what it feels like to go through the journey of becoming a board member. So for me, I work at an agency in US called torchbox. We do quite a bit of open source at torchbox, but it's definitely only one part of the many things that you do as a dev there. And it took me, I guess, quite a few years to understand that with open source, there's plenty that's happening outside of those jobs. And I guess, find different ways to be involved as a contributor, and then for the main ship and then leadership. So I guess the Django board specifically took me quite a while to realize that even the DSF was a thing separate from the Django project, and that it had elections going for its leadership positions. And I guess I think once you get there, you start to project yourself in those kinds of roles. You wonder if you have the time, and so on. And, yeah, I guess the time is right now for the board, for the next year, so very keen that we do a better job at explaining what the DSF and the board does, and also practically the step by step process of becoming a board member. Yeah, where should I? Where should I spend more time? What do you think is helpful to know about.
Carlton Gibson 2:21
Well, so the current election, the seven members in the board, right in the current elections for four of those positions, yep, right. So there's quite a, quite a big opportunity for people,
Thibaud Colas 2:31
yeah, it's, it's, I think, the, definitely, the biggest we've had a year in years. So for me, my involvement only started with the DSF about a year ago with the board elections then and board has seven members, but we follow a staggered term, which is why last year we had three people up for election, three, three positions, and this year four and yeah, I guess we're the group that gets to decide the direction of the foundation, at least where the funding goes, how actively we look for it, how we coordinate other people. So those four new members that's a majority on the board, effectively, they'll be able to have quite a big say in where the DSF spends its time and resources. Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 3:16
I wanted to ask you both, because you will, you used to be on the board, right? And Tebow, you're currently on the board. So, I mean, what's so I'm interested in Django. I want to help push Django forward. What am I signing up for? If I say, if I run for the board? So
Will Vincent 3:30
Tebow, you go first, because you're, you're living it. And then I'll, I'll talk about what it was like a couple years ago, sure, sure. Yes.
Thibaud Colas 3:37
So I guess in my mind, there's the business as usual of operating a medium sized international charity foundation, and then there is things that you might want to do on top of that, as someone who's keen to move forward the community. So like day to day, the biggest thing the board does is super simple, is meeting once a month to decide on grants, where we spend our funding, any current events, how we respond to them as the boards, day to day management of the foundation. And the biggest thing that the foundation does, by far, just to be super clear, is funding the fellows, fellows who are paid employees of the Foundation, who work on Django the board itself, aside from hiring the fellows and making sure they keep happy, we don't manage them day to day. That separates. So yeah, as a board member, once this kind of business as usual is taken care of, you get to decide, Okay, do I want to spend more time on the fundraising side of things? Do I want to spend time with initiatives like Django Girls, the Django cons regular space to achieve specific goals within our community, drawing on goes for even more, more blue sky things so. So for me, for example, the blue sky things are making Django as accessible as possible, reducing the carbon footprint of Django projects out there, and, yeah, just the marketing side of things, making Django more. But to see with other frameworks, yeah, will your blue sky things I assume are quite different by then, or maybe there's some similarities? No,
Will Vincent 5:08
I'm really excited to hear. I think I agree with your overview and the fact that you have those things, accessibility, marketing, global footprint, I strongly think everyone on the board should have blue sky areas that they want to do in addition to the day to day, because it can be easy to get caught up in the day to day things. And one of the things I noticed about the board is that most people don't know about it, and even people at Django cons who know that a board exists have no idea what it does on a regular basis. And so some, as with many things in Django, there's so many roles that people are doing that don't have any recognition or acknowledgement. So that's one thing I've tried to do, is talk about what the board does. Because I realize, how would anyone know if we, if we on the board, don't talk about it? But so what was different when I joined Well, one thing was we had one year terms. So we added the staggered two year terms because we noticed that it was really it took a year to understand what the board actually was doing day to day, and then that second year to start implementing and making changes. So staggered terms was better. It also with annual elections, sometimes people would show up, finally, get their feet wet, and then maybe not be elected in the next election, right? So even as someone on the board thought this is a great person, I want them to be around, they, you know, didn't market themselves or or whatever reason. And so someone else came on the board and they didn't really get a chance. Get a chance to make an impact on the board. So that was a big reason for the two year terms. But I'm curious how it is now. Because when I was on the board, there were three there were three roles. So there was president, well, four roles, President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer, and then there were three other members and the president. So for me, it was Frank Wiles and then Anna. They did the most work by far. The Secretary did did a bit of work. The Treasurer did a lot of work. The Treasurer before me was a little bit of a like the professor of the Dark Arts at, you know, Hogwarts, because the role is just unmanageable. And so that was one of the things I just wrote about it, that we on the board were able to make it a little more manageable, I hope. Anyway. So yeah, I agree. I think the board does a lot of things, and I think you should go onto the board and be on the board having at least one blue sky area in addition to the day to day, because the day to day can easily consume your your time. And I think it's also less less rewarding to just be keeping the lights on for Django, rather than having initiatives that you want to push and see through. But Carlton, you know, one of the big things I noticed in T but I'd like you to talk about this is that the fellows and the board are very separate. I mean, the fellow, you know, the Treasurer pays the fellows, and the fellows write reports, but there's a fellowship working group that ostensibly is in charge of the fellows. The board doesn't tell the fellows what to do. So, you know, if not for the fact that I knew Carlton so well, I feel like it's easy for there to be a little bit of a little bit of a lack of communication between the board and the fellows. It's,
Carlton Gibson 8:25
it's one of the things that over the years, like the fellow role, when I was doing it was totally autonomous. Basically, you were trusted to get on but there wasn't any supervision, really. There wasn't much oversight. You communicate with the people on the forum, you communicate with the contributors on them, on the list, but there wasn't, what hasn't been any direction. I think that's something that, you know, a lot of people have voiced. We need more direction to be able to push forward. We need to solve this, this problem of a sort of technical vacuum. And so the fellows are very the fellowship program is structured such that the fellows can continue, then keep the framework going, and we can keep making the small changes. Like, you know, you look over the last few versions, There's been loads of nice features gone in really nice quality of life and performance improvements, and, you know, stuff with the ORM deepening, but there haven't been these kind of major headline features. You know, Django task, tasks is hopefully coming in this release or the next release. So that's like the biggest one, but that's kind of been missing for quite a long while, I think. And so one thing I think, as an ex fellow, that I'm excited about is a push to try and provide more technical direction towards Django to help us push forward again.
Thibaud Colas 9:33
Yeah, agree. 100% to me, it's also not just direction, but simply speaking, coordination between the different groups. I think the fellows you know, they hired primarily to look after Django, the code base, bought primarily to look after the foundation, steering Council, we've not discussed yet, have their own remit as well, and it's not really like spelled out for any of those roles, how you're meant to collaborate with other people, plainly speaking. And I. I guess as a board member in part two, I know it takes quite a bit of time to get up and going with your own role, let alone consider how other people can work with you. So yeah, you mentioned will the stack of turns not being a thing like, it definitely takes three, six months to onboard as a new board member. And by then you get to decide, okay, like, how do I actually work with other people? How do I make like my own things happen? So yeah, this kind of coordination definitely requires, I think, upfront, thinking of how those groups on paper are meant to work together. Could
Will Vincent 10:31
you talk about how the roles are decided these days? Because, in my experience, you know, it's not decided. You don't just come in as president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, you know, you sort of have the first meeting, and it's, you know, there's the old board members are there for half the time and and then you come in, and then you quickly decide on who's doing what role, without understanding what it means to be necessarily. So maybe you could speak to the how do you see the four positions, and how might someone new to the board, you know, put their hand up for one of those roles?
Thibaud Colas 11:11
Yeah, I can tell you how it was. For me, it's very similar to what you just said. Spent 15 minutes on the previous boards meeting going through, you know, the day to day, and then we had this thing coming up. We had to decide our roles. And yeah,
Will Vincent 11:24
I guess that sounds familiar, yeah. Unfortunately,
Thibaud Colas 11:27
plan is very different for this selection. Each of the four roles, we're gonna write proper documentation for each of them we know, some of which we already have, but making sure that people have access to this documentation ahead of this actual meeting, making sure that if multiple people want the same position, they can prepare statements ahead of those meetings, so that they get to project themselves, and so that next phase is the other board members voting, okay, I think this or that person should be secretary. They saw that President in case multiple people want the same role. So yeah, for me, I was very keen to be president in my first year as board member, and didn't make it. So, you know, I want to make sure that the new people that we get to appoint this year, they have all the resources they can get to to give it their best job.
Will Vincent 12:18
So just to be clear, the decision is made in the meeting, in that Yep, 10 minutes, 10 minutes. At the end, it's now, let's now, let's,
Thibaud Colas 12:26
yeah, let's decide it's very tight for time,
Will Vincent 12:29
yeah. Well, I mean, so, so Chaim and I served together, and I know that one of the things we worked on before he was President, and then he was president, I think for a year, while I was there, is trying to offload some of the responsibilities of the President, because the President has a lot of administrative and kind of duties that consume them, rather than being able to, I don't know, lead or project, so I guess, what is your take on how the president role is now, and then, you know, if you're, if you, if you or someone else takes it on, what do you think it should be doing?
Thibaud Colas 13:06
Ooh, it's a tough question. I guess to me, first of all, I should say that I definitely feel like, you know, we talk a lot about the burden of volunteering in open source. To me, it does feel like, if you go for being the president of a non relation like the DSF, you kind of should know what you're getting yourself into, and have some amount of time set settled aside for that. So yeah, I definitely feel like first of all, you should expect coming in to spend, I don't know, two to five hours a week, maybe on that kind of role, and it doesn't feel too appropriate. Then I guess we have to think of options to reduce that.
Will Vincent 13:43
The executive director, yeah, yeah,
Thibaud Colas 13:46
exactly. We talked about this quite a bit. Oh no, don't laugh at the same time. The other thing that we've discussed quite a bit is the working groups. So the whole board, delegating their responsibility to volunteers, has been working quite well. Room for improvement, you know, but still. So yeah, I guess to me, at the end of the day, presidents, their responsibility first and foremost should be to coordinate all the other people, make sure they're happy with what they're doing. And that's like about an hour or two. Hopefully count on I wanted
Carlton Gibson 14:14
to ask about the working groups. You mentioned the work group. So the idea was that the board is only seven people. They can't possibly do all the tasks that there are to do. So we need to be the board. Needs to be more directive, rather than executive, if that means they need to be able to say, Okay, we'll set the direction. But then the working groups go off and do it. How is the working groups going? Because there was several, I saw several pull requests on the on the GitHub repository to set them up, but I don't know if they're they've managed to get well, can I
Will Vincent 14:41
provide, let me provide historical context before T boat says how it is now. So we had this discussion, you know, modeled on the PSF, the Python Software Foundation, because their board does like, decides what other people do, and then they have working groups that do the doing. And sometimes board members are on the working groups. So from my experience, we we recognize that the board, you know, couldn't do everything that needed to be done, and so we tried to take some steps to have working groups, but I think people just didn't, didn't appreciate how much time it was going to take. So if people are thinking, Oh, it's one hour a week, the amount of that amount of time is just enough to catch up on emails, it's not enough for a board member to oversee a working group, let alone to push it through. So at least when I was there, I felt like most of the working groups stalled out because you need more time just to manage them. And then sometimes it becomes easier as a board member just to do it yourself, which reinforces the bad pattern we're trying to get out of. So I think what you were saying, Thibaut, about expectations around commitment, I think we do a disservice by saying, you know, one hour a month, when I think the reality is it's at least an hour a week, and probably more like two and up, depending on the position, but you tell us how it is now, yeah,
Thibaud Colas 15:57
well, one hour a month like that's just the bare minimum. And if you don't, if you can't do that, then there's not much of a point in being a director. And, yeah, definitely one hour a week, I think, is a good, good actual, like, minimum. Yeah, the working group they I think we've had quite a rough start, to be completely honest. It takes a while, I guess, to get going with the new concept and find people out there who are interested in the specific groups make sure that, you know, they work well together. But we do have, I think, two to three working groups that are working reasonably well at the moment. First one that I've kept tabs off, that has started is the social media working group. And we've had quite a few people involved with that that had no prior DSF like foundation involvement before, and the latest one that I've been involved with somewhat, is the fundraising Working Group, which is much more critical topic. And again, we have a few board members involved, obviously, but we have two to three people who, again, Priya Stephanie, have no involvement with other DSF activities. So yeah, I guess one thing that I really like, aside from getting those extra people on board, is also the added transparency to the process. It's very clear who's a member of those working groups. It's very clear how they are meant to report to the board and the rest of the DSF, and also it's very clear what they're responsible for. So it should make it quite a bit easier for people to understand exactly how the foundation functions, and for people to find the specific areas where they can help. Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 17:30
it's there's visibility in how to get involved as well, right? Because, oh yes, I want to help. Shout about Django. Welcome join the Social Media Group. I think that's been amazing, by the way, the feature Fridays, I'm loving, I'm loving the fact that the social media accounts are actually active, and they've got a personality, and sometimes they retoo, sometimes they reply or sometimes, and it's like, okay, that's not just the blog. And then the blog posts have been more excited. And then the feature Fridays posts have been, you know, so it all just adds to a bit of, oh, actually, Django, something going on with Django. Future
Thibaud Colas 18:03
Friday is 100% credit to our social media group and bhuvnesh in particular. That didn't come from the board at all. They just picked it up, created the concept. Have been running it ever since. And yeah, people love it. I
Will Vincent 18:18
know in our notes there's been different number amounts of people who've nominated themselves or been nominated for the board, historically, sometimes as much as 30, sometimes 12. In your mind, is there a minimum level of activity, activity or involvement that makes sense to put yourself forward? Because, on the one hand, you don't. You certainly don't need to be a core contributor to Django to be on the board, and, in fact, we probably want less of that. But sometimes, when I was there, you get people who say, I just heard about Django, you know, in my college class, and I'd like to be on the board. And that's, you know, that I feel like we do a disservice by not saying there is some level of engagement probably required before you can be a serious candidate. Yeah,
Thibaud Colas 19:01
definitely. I guess in my mind, I do feel like it's a good challenge for us if we have so much interest that we have to help signpost things a bit and make it clear who has what experience. So I love that challenge. I'll happily go for the 30 candidates on the ballots if we do want to get there. I think, I guess just setting expectations, I'd want to see people who have about a year's worth of awareness of what Django and the DSF are, and also see themselves being able to commit two hours a week, say, for the next two years. So I guess it's people who have enough past to see understand what we're doing, and also enough that they know they're going to be sticking around with this for quite a bit. I
Will Vincent 19:46
like that response. All right, Carlton, you take it well, it
Carlton Gibson 19:49
just okay. So then there's two. There's two things. We've identified, two possible levels of commitment that we've identified already. One is to to run for the board, to be a board member. The other. Is it perhaps a step down from that is to find a particular working group that you want to engage with and join that
Thibaud Colas 20:05
and and it was when you say, find a working group, we do have quite a lot of things that we know aren't up to scratch with what we want. So, you know, we compare ourselves with the PSF quite a bit. PSF has 20 times our budget, but, you know, we still want to kind of meet their level of visibility and operational effectiveness. So yeah, I would say rather than just looking for specific working group, also just proposing the ones that are missing, marketing is a big one for us. That's missing at the moment, and I think there's quite a few things as well around individual members of the foundation making sure that we make the most of people who are keen to be involved with Django longer term. Yeah, that's the two ones that come to mind.
Carlton Gibson 20:47
Okay,
Will Vincent 20:48
maybe I ask a question to you. Tebow, so if I'm thinking about running for the board, I'm not, but like, hypothetically, someone, someone is, and they say on the marketing front, you know, the Django project website needs a redesign because it is a little bit old. So this is something Carlton and I worked with Paolo and his agency quite a lot on, and we didn't quite get it over the line. How would you see that playing out in a way where it actually happens, like, what? What would someone need to do in terms of is that something that a board member should do is that a working group thing? Because the problem with Django is always we're volunteers and committees, and sometimes things can get stopped, even when a majority of people want to push forward.
Thibaud Colas 21:33
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's, it's not easy. You know, it's one of the challenges with Django being so community driven. I think it's a big asset for us compared to the WordPress PDF files of the of the world. But still is a challenge community driven means coordination. So I would say, like, if you want to achieve this specific thing, the best thing you can do, by far, is still to try and get elected and get that seat at the decision table, so to speak. Obviously, you know, we don't want every single possible improvement to Django out there to require someone predicted to achieve it, but it does help in making sure that it has the right visibility in the decision making circles, and also that we're in the right place to find the funding for it. Should I require funding? So the website, for example, that strikes me as something that should be achievable within the working group. We do have a website working group that's in the process of being formed, but I would assume that it will be sped up dramatically if we had someone at the board level making this their priority,
Carlton Gibson 22:34
also having their priority helps you get elected, right? Because you've got something to say when you're in your in your candidate statement is like that. This is what I actually want to go and push forward.
Thibaud Colas 22:44
Yeah, definitely. I think it's easy for people you know, to think of their elections as just like stating who they are and stating the things they could bring to the DSF. Personally, I also like people to be quite critical, to be completely honest, and hold the previous boards to account on okay, this is what I think we should be doing, and this is where I see the gaps. And yeah, I think that people will react very well if you identify gaps that are correct compared to how they perceive it from their side, I
Will Vincent 23:10
just realized, I don't think we talked about who actually votes on this, because there's right, there's there's the board, and then there's 200 or so individual members, and then there's everyone else. So someone listening, if you're not an individual member already, you don't get a vote. You should apply to become an individual member. But I guess this, this episode is targeted at those 200 people, and then also at people who don't know that there's this individual step that you can be nominated for, and one of the primary perks is voting on board elections
Thibaud Colas 23:43
and voting on steering council elections, which I'm sure you'll discuss soon after. Definitely those people being able to understand what the foundation does, Django direction, and also, obviously registering to then be eligible for voting, that's quite critical for us.
Will Vincent 23:58
Yeah, I'll put a link to the individual members, because, to be honest, I didn't know about it for several years, and I think Adam Johnson nominated me for it, and and then I, I got it, and I was like, Oh, now I know about this thing. And then, you know, then I was on the board, so I got kind of pulled in. So I think the visibility and just of how it all works is important. So I'll put, I'll put a link to that the bar is, I don't want to say lower, but it's individual. Members are meant to be the whole community. So it can be community, it can be code. It's a much broader, and I would say it may be a little bit less requirements than to be a board member. I don't know, what do you two think of making a distinction between the two?
Carlton Gibson 24:43
Yeah, so individual membership is about recognizing a contribution to the Django community, but that's in, you know, the community writ large, not just the are you? It's not just that you're a committer to Django core, not just that you maintained a package or not just that you, but that you, you you helped with a meetup, or you helped with. A conference, or, you know, you gave a talk, or, you know, any What did you do that pushed forward Django in some way. That's enough, right? It's not. It's meant to be much more than just the code side of it, because the community is much more than that.
Thibaud Colas 25:16
Yeah, there's one sounds kind of gonna sound a bit petty, but one thing I really dislike about the DSF is the s why are we the Software Foundation? We should be the Community Foundation. And the bar is really high these days to contribute code to Django, like, just way higher than it should be, in my opinion, and definitely higher than a lot of people can meet without, you know, years of experience. So definitely these days, we try hard to recognize people to contribute to the community, not just the software. And I guess by the book, our definition is recognizing contributions that are substantial or sustained. Sustained meaning you do it over time. So these days, the cutoff is kind of, you've done something positive, tutorial, conference attendance, conference speaker, organizer, over maybe, like a six month period that's substantial or sustained enough for us to say, okay, great. Let's have you on board.
Will Vincent 26:12
Did you know you can sponsor this podcast and reach 1000s of engaged developers? Well, you can look at the sponsor us section on the Django chat.com, website for more information. Okay, so anyone can be nominated, but then the board reviews the nominations. Right? That's, that's how it goes. That's one of the board duties in a meeting, is looking at at least, when I was on the board, there'd be two to eight people nominated, and we'd kind of look around the room and be like, does anyone know these people? Okay, if we do, you know they're probably in if we don't, let's ask someone about it. Because, yeah, there needs to. There's some minimum of involvement in the community.
Thibaud Colas 26:52
We do it much more. I think these days that's very similar otherwise.
Carlton Gibson 26:56
Well, I was going to just swing the topic slightly. Have you got a question on the same point. Or I
Will Vincent 27:01
just wanted wondered if you could tell people, what does a 60 minute board meeting look like, in terms of what things do you go through, and then what would you want to change with the four new board members? Because I think people have no idea
Thibaud Colas 27:15
it's such, such a big topic with because I'm very keen to become president. If I can pull it off,
Will Vincent 27:25
this is good ball be the change.
Thibaud Colas 27:30
Yeah, there's loads of things in those meetings must have business as usual that I'd rather we do much more asynchronously, if we could raise the expectation that board members have to be around for more than an hour a month to up to an hour a week or more, I guess, plain and simple, nominations of individual members, grants that require our approval, any other ongoing business responses that might require the board's approval. And then topics depend quite a bit based on what the DSF does year to the year, whether that's the Malcolm tradenik prize, whether that's DjangoCon support, the elections, the campaigns we do, changes quite a bit the survey,
Will Vincent 28:12
yeah, yeah. Well, if it makes you feel better when I joined the board, the discussions around funding. Various conferences took up 3040, minutes of the day. So it was just a complete, not, not a good use of time. So one of the things we changed is we said, Okay, right? We, if we approve it, we have a set amount for, you know, like Western Europe versus in the US versus globally, just so we didn't, because people would can request different amounts, and then you're playing a game of like, Who are these people? And I would have to email someone at the PSF, because often they would submit there. And, you know, usually it's okay, but especially if it's in a location where it's somewhat remote. You know, how do you know that it's legitimate? So I so that those absolutely should be async, and we did shrink those down, I think, to 10, 1015, minutes at the end through those things. But it really doesn't need to be discussed in the meeting at all. I don't think so. It could be worse, is what I'm trying to tell you. It was worse. And definitely,
Thibaud Colas 29:16
you know, there's been discussions about the DSF having an executive director for now, we do have our assistant to the board, Catherine, who helps us a lot with this kind of research ahead of the meetings. So, yeah, it is, it is going, it is going well, it could go better. But we do have these kinds of tasks, not upfront rather than during the meeting. Okay? Carlton,
Carlton Gibson 29:37
incremental improvement is the Django way, right? We don't have to it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be a little bit better than it was before. That's That's how we roll TiVo, you said two things that I want to pick up on. You talked about, we've mentioned twice, the steering Council and but as a way into the steering Council, you just said something about contributing code being too hard, and it should for to gain code into Django being too hard. And there's this massive trade off between, we want new features, we want new new stuff, but also the stability guarantees that Django has to provide because people want to pip update it and know that their deployment isn't going to break. And we've got these, this, this trade off. What's your kind of take? How?
Will Vincent 30:17
How could we change
Carlton Gibson 30:18
the way we're doing it to make make development in Django more dynamic. I
Thibaud Colas 30:23
guess I should say, first and foremost, I appreciate the stability of Django. My My concern in trying to move things along faster is that we do need to make sure Django as a framework for Django users, stays competitive compared to the other tools out there. Just a simple example in Python, one of the big things these days is type annotations, and I think Django has yet to find its position on this. It's feeling like it's starting to be a bit late for Django to decide whether types are in or out and what to do about it. So just, yeah, I'll leave it there. Practically speaking, I do feel like we want Django to commodity for its users. And also, as far as contributors, people have a finite amount of time they get to spend on open source, and they can't tell their boss, hey, there's very simple improvement to Django. Victims are going to have to spend 10 hours on it, rather than just one hour. So we have to be careful there. I guess, from my perspective, the biggest thing we could improve that wouldn't compromise on stability, is just decision making, arriving at a picture of okay, this change is good enough, or okay, this change needs to be done in this or that way, in a few minutes discussion, rather than six weeks email thread. I appreciate you know, we're async and community driven, but it does feel like if we had a better process in place, people who more proactively curate those types of decisions will be able to shrink down that phase of the process.
Carlton Gibson 31:54
Okay, that's interesting. I
Will Vincent 31:56
just want to follow up for people applying like, is there a good resource on, like, what each role, I know, sorry, I'm going backwards, but I'm just thinking about the fact your secretary, we haven't asked you, what the Secretary actually does. Like, is for someone coming in, is there an up to date? Like, I know there's internally. There was at one time documents on, like, what does the role maintain? But is there a place so people know what's expected of a secretary versus a vice president, versus a treasurer versus a president? Definitely,
Thibaud Colas 32:27
we need to still get better at this. So definitely, by the time that's the upcoming board members, look at those roles. This will all be public, and there'll be a definition of what the Secretary does, what each of the officer roles does do. Sorry, I do want to stress again that people do get to decide. As board members, we're all equally elected. We get to decide what those roles entail. But I think there's definitely value in documenting a baseline of what those roles should do. So Secretary, for example, the biggest discovery for me a few months into the role, was realizing I was meant to be in charge of social media communications, amongst other communications. So Carlton, you mentioned the flavor of the social media responses and so on. You've probably seen my work right there trying to, I guess, make it, you know, more casual, more two way rather than a one way broadcast. So yeah, we know
Carlton Gibson 33:27
that's working really well, great. Steering
Will Vincent 33:29
Council. Do we still want to keep talking about that? Yeah,
Carlton Gibson 33:32
no, absolutely. We wanted to talk about the steering council. So okay, so we want to make the decision making process quicker or smoother in Django in order to help speed up the way the contributions are processed or can be processed. Is that something which falls to the steering Council? What is the steering Council? Is that the locus of that kind of decision making? Or should it be something somewhere else? I don't
Thibaud Colas 33:59
think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer here. I guess, as you said, in the Django world, we do try and make those kinds of improvements incrementally, both to the code and to the organization around the code. So to me, it does feel like, okay, up to that point, the steering Council does formally, in the definition of what they do, they're meant to be actively steering the direction of the projects. So I do look at this, this role, and think, Okay, we have to incrementally get them to do better at that. I guess on paper, I would expect that the board is ultimately responsible for the direction of Django as a whole. But you know, we want to be very careful when we separate the decision making for people who have the expertise technically and for those who have the expertise as far as community building. So yeah, I don't think the student council has to do this to get back to your question, but it does strike me as the best instrument we have at this point in time to do this. Obviously. Really helpful when people who aren't on the council step in and try and, you know, people like you Kelton, spend lots of time curating possible things that feel like they are within the realm of visibility. Connect the dots on who should talk to whom to get things going. But it strikes me that, yeah, there's definitely a case for people who do this to have a specific job title, air quotes. And
Carlton Gibson 35:24
there's going to be a steering council election as well. Like, not the first of all, we've got the Board election, and then there's a steering council election coming up soonish, sometime in the audience, right?
Thibaud Colas 35:33
Yeah. And mechanism there is quite similar, to be completely honest. Like will mentioned, there's a need for people who are working on Django to be registered as individual members in order to be eligible to vote on those elections. So definitely do do that. Submit your self nomination as usual members so you get to vote in those elections. And then that's we have a phase where we ask for candidates steering Council, compared to the board, does have quite specific eligibility requirements, which some people have expressed an interest in changing, but it does feel appropriate for there to be some amount of requirements of understanding of the direction of open source in Django and of, you know, technical aspects of the project. And then once we have those candidates that are eligible to be elected, the secretary of the board, which is me, will put together the ballots and have a membership vote on who they want for the next council. And we don't want a repeat of the last election. We want good amounts of eligible candidates to choose from, and we want them, I guess, again, in my opinion, to be quite critical of the current state of Django and to give us a vision of how they devolve decision making the whole Django community and the steering Council specifically.
Carlton Gibson 36:53
Yeah, I mean, so just for people who don't know, last time there was the steering council election came on the back of the board election, and we didn't, I don't, we didn't do the outreach, we didn't do the messaging. I don't know, but we only had four people standard. There's meant to be five people on the steering Council, so it's been short handed for this entire cycle, and we need at least five people. We needed to be fully, fully stuffed one. So, you know, if you're involved in Django, do think about it. I think there's a real tension with the steering Council, because it's ultimately, as the it currently stands, it's responsible for the technical direction of Django, and so it does require at least some members who are, you know, deeply involved in the technical development of Django currently, but if we limit it to people who are deeply involved in the current technical direction of Django. We're going to have a very homogenous board. It's not going to represent the wider community very widely, very well. Contrast to the DSF board, DSF board has been quite diverse historically. Last 10 years or so, you look at it, it's had a quite diverse profile, whereas the steering Council, because it's been restricted to old core contributors, but essentially has been all white men, and that's not Django, because you go to a DjangoCon, and that's not the audience, and that's not the user base. So how I keep asking about how we can balance the trade offs, but how can we balance this need for sort of technical awareness or technical familiarity with what's going on in Django, with a desire to have a steering Council that's representative the wider user base.
Thibaud Colas 38:32
I guess, definitely, in my mind, step one is to be transparent about the fact that we have this issue of diversity in our decision making. The ball is very diverse. Steering Council, very much not so. And once we've agreed that we do have this as a problem, make practical steps both, you know, as far as the the process, the theory of what the steering Council does, and practically reaching out. You know, you mentioned outreach being an issue in the past elections, possibly this feels like something that's quite a simple win for us. You know people who are on the board, people who are having those discussions, they have the network, and they'll know the individuals who might be able to fill those gaps. I guess something, something else in my mind is definitely thinking of this beyond the past expertise with Django core and looking at the wider ecosystem of Django, it definitely feels right to me that we'd have people on the steering council that might represent more commercial interests companies that use Django day to day as users. I'm sure they have very competent technical decision makers there. Thinking of my background with the whitetail project, I do have quite a few colleagues, so Matt Westcott and sage Abdullah, for example, that have been making technical decisions as far as quite a prominent package for years, if not decades. By now, I see no reason that those people couldn't also stand for elections for Django core and to some extent. Is, you know, the whole Django package community,
Will Vincent 40:03
anything else on the board or the steering Council? There are some other things we want to talk about. But what is there anything else you want to say on those or ask Carlton?
Thibaud Colas 40:12
No, that's no, I guess, I guess, to me, I should say, like, at the end of the day, I think we all need to realize that even with Django being community driven, it's not going to drive itself. To drive itself. And we do need people, specific people, to step in and go for those roles. And I want to say, like again, in the world of open source, we do tend to think of this as a service to the community, but to me, it's also quite clear what would happen if we didn't have a functional steering council or a functional board? And I think I want people involved who see that side of things as well and help drive us further away from the pitfalls of commercial, VC funded, open source, and still allow us to navigate like this current set of challenges. So, yeah, we community driven, but we do need competent and motivated individuals, and we'll be looking for you if you don't come for us.
Carlton Gibson 41:10
I nice one reason, one of the Why did I get into open source at all is because I was building a business around based on Django, and, you know, I needed the packages that I was contributing to, I needed to know they were going to keep working. And it's, you know, you've got an interest in Django, then, you know, keep it going. You said something about staying competitive. And I was trawling through the Django developers mailing list, like, a day or two ago, and I found a decade old issue, deco plus old issue saying that if we didn't have a better front own story to right now immediately, that Django was doomed. Oh, do we really need to stay I mean, don't we just, don't we just stay competitive? Naturally, doesn't happen over time.
Thibaud Colas 41:57
Do you want Carson?
Carlton Gibson 42:01
No, no, no, let's if
Thibaud Colas 42:02
you look at the numbers on the stack overflow developer survey, for example, it is very clear that Django is working very well for current Django users. It is not so clear that people who don't already use Django do start using it and keep with it, we're very popular with people who are new to coding, and they take the Django Girls tutorial, and they're very happy having their first experience with them. But beyond that, we do have quite a few frameworks out there that have marketing teams with budgets in the millions, and that use it to gain that mind share. And on the technical merit standpoint, you could argue that Django has the tools that people need to build websites, but I would say that that's true to the extent of, you know, sites that have following a specific pattern. I guess for front end specifically, there's been lots of discussions, API, first API, maybe single page applications and so on. Personally, I do quite like React. There I said it, and I do believe there are quite a few.
Carlton Gibson 43:12
Are you on the right? Show? Tebow, I
Thibaud Colas 43:15
do believe there are quite a few things that we'd be better off if we stole from the hype crazed front end ecosystem, one of them being UI components in templates. And there is some innovation there in package ecosystem, but I really think it's about time we move some of this innovation from packages to Django. Okay.
Will Vincent 43:38
I mean, it's interesting specifically seeing what Laravel is doing in terms of what Django, if it were for profit, and we wanted to buy Lamborghinis for ourselves, what we could do, because they're pretty they're pretty good with the marketing and making changes. You know, they have hosting option. They have a starter starter kit. But we've also seen from WordPress rails a little bit, that when you have a one figure at the top, it can go badly quickly. So I guess that is the tension. Yeah,
Thibaud Colas 44:13
it is the tension. But to me, there's definitely like, we can, we can get the best of both worlds. Like, for me, it's interesting, because I do have my current experience with wagtail, which is a quite a successful Django package, package that's built by big community now of different companies, and those companies definitely find ways to collaborate for their own commercial interests, but not at the detriment of the open source ethos. So yeah, I do think that there is ways for us to be more explicit. And even if Django were to stay community driven, find occasions for those commercial interests to help us financially with things that would make a difference for the users.
Carlton Gibson 44:53
I think as well, if we want to solve our community goals, we have to find a way of pulling more money in. Because. It's the bottom line is, even if you widen. So okay, the the old Django core was all white men and but even if you widen to the third party package system, it's still men. And why is that? And that's because of economic privilege, right? Men are the economic privilege to be or European or North American men, global North men are privileged to be able to spend the time it takes to maintain a package. And we have, you know, plenty of contributors beginning, but it's that sticking with it over time that we can't do without helping to put some, put some lubricant in those, those tight points of, you know, the economic vice right? We have to do that, otherwise we won't achieve our diversity goals. Yeah. Well, and
Will Vincent 45:45
what used, what you said, Tebow, we had a discussion with Marietta wejaya, who's Python core developer that we actually recorded before this, but it will come out after, because we want this episode to be out for the board elections. But she was talking about how Python is structured, and for Python, most of the board is people at big corporations, you know, Microsoft, meta, so that helps with funding, and that helps with the decision making. And we were talking to her about the fact that Django is doesn't have that at all. I mean, if you look at Django cons, you look at most of the board, it's generally individuals, you know, consultants, small startups, I guess torchbox, wagtail would be as corporate as we get, but, but those stakeholders are really missing in a way that, you know, in terms of funding, but also that perspective of, I mean, there's so many multi billion dollar companies built with Django, and yet they're, as far as I can see they're completely absent from any technical or community discussions, and I don't know if that's because they've done their own forks. I don't know if that's because they just put all their money into Python as opposed to Django, but it is hearing you talk about it and Marietta, it is a real weak spot that they're not represented and they're not contributing to Django itself yet. We know they're, you know, like, where I live in Boston, there's a company clavio, I may be saying it wrong, K, L, A, V, i, y, O, that just went public for like, ten billion and I don't know anyone there. You know, it's a Django company, and I live two miles from there, so that's a weak spot. I don't have an answer for it, but
Thibaud Colas 47:23
yeah, if you ask me, it's we should be, we should be hungrier as a community, and we should be looking for those people who have access to the big, prodigal purse of funding. I guess in my specific example, for example, the wagtail people. We do, we are able to find those companies and get them on board as feature sponsors. And I do have quite a big list of who at Google, who at NASA, who at, I don't know, Mozilla is using wagtail and for Django. And we do have this list now with the fund fundraising working group as well, and very interested to go looking for those people. So if you're listening to this, and you're already within those organizations, definitely do reach out if there's some room for us to make something happen. But if not, we will reach out to you and yeah, try and find the right stakeholders in those communities that you know, those people are interested in supporting open source, they generally are, but you need to make your projects compelling enough, you know, have the Annual Report understand what they're funding. To close the loop, well,
Will Vincent 48:24
one thing you just said is feature sponsorship, right? Like, there's a dedicated page you know how to sponsor wagtail, where you kind of lay it out, saying, Do you want a specific feature? Here's the funding, here's all these things. There's nothing like that in Django, right? Like, we want, we want metas money, but we're not going to make any promises. So that does seem like, and maybe this, I'm sorry if the working group is already doing this, but like having that list of features and saying, Hey, do you want to not just have this be in Django, but do you want the public recognition for this in the same way that there have been discussions about, you know, our fellows, like I there has to be a big corporation that would want to have, you know, Django fellows sponsored by XYZ for three to five years. It's a drop in the bucket, if we can position it correctly, and then it opens up talking about all these other things, as opposed to the current status, where we just barely raise enough to keep the lights on. And so this is all kind of wishful thinking.
Thibaud Colas 49:26
We do currently have the Google Summer of Code program where we do create this list of features that are potentially available for people to step in, and we do get financial support from Google in that way to run this. So it's not nothing, but definitely I want us to look at other similar programs, like Outreachy, where there's room for there to be more funding, and also outside those programs, as you say, just have that page somewhere on a website that states, okay, like, here are the top five features that we definitely want to make happen no matter what, but we think are compelling enough for someone to step in and. Our fund.
Carlton Gibson 50:00
That's it. That just sounds really exciting. It almost makes me want to run for the board, but
Will Vincent 50:07
you have to research, you know, recirculate and refresh yourself a bit before.
Unknown Speaker 50:11
Well, we're
Will Vincent 50:12
we only have about 10 minutes left. We haven't asked at all about wagtail, torchbox, your day job, Google Summer or code, maybe just if you could, like wagtail, to me, is this amazing ecosystem that has some, you know, crossing into Django itself with you sage and others, and yet it also just feels completely like a whole other realm. So maybe, how did you get involved with torchbox and wagtail and, you know, independent of Django, if that's possible, what's, what's the future there?
Thibaud Colas 50:44
Well, first off, I hate that. It feels like a separate thing. It is a Django package like any other, and it is installable on any Django project out there. I want to make that crystal clear. But I guess it has its own success outside of Django. It is probably the most popular coin management system in the Python world, by now, has on the order of 10 to 50,000 websites bought by wagtail. It's been around for 10 years as an open source project. And yeah, I guess compared to Django, that's what makes wagtail more interesting. Is the open source project is managed by a core team that's heavily skewed on people from different organizations. So I think the wagtail core team at the moment is 21 members, half of which are affiliated, sorry, with agencies that create projects with wagtail, and the other half is organizations that use wagtail in other ways. And yeah, from those agencies, the most prominent by far is my employer, torchbox. Torchbox started wagtail in 2014 as an open source project, just like any other definitely, then it was a touchbox only project, but we've moved it quite far from that by now. And I think there's only about a third of the core team at the moment is torchbox people. So yeah, I guess me at torchbox, I'm doing products for wagtail in a kind of leadership position, and also just day to day development, day to day marketing and working on projects. An example of a project I worked on recently is the London Museum website. So, you know, I do do coding now and then. We are hiring, by the way, I should mention that we're looking for a CTO and a senior developer at toshbox. And, yeah, torchbox, I guess, is the kind of company that makes it possible to have a bit of work on, you know, for profit projects and also on open source. Hence, wagtail. So to me, it's very interesting as a point of comparison, because by virtue of wagtail having more of commercially interested companies behind it, we do have quite a bit more considered efforts on marketing and sustainability of the development of the project,
Will Vincent 52:58
Where can someone find those job listings. If they're interested in applying, definitely, we'll put a link in the show notes. But where do you do that? Toshbox.com/about/curious?
Thibaud Colas 53:11
We've had our very successful CTO Tom Dyson with the company for quite a while, one of the founders of toshbox, and with toshbox becoming employee owns as kind of a natural point for Tom to make some room for other people. And yeah, the CTO role right now is going to be very popular. I assume it's quite a cool company to work with.
Will Vincent 53:33
I would think so. Well. So we haven't even talked, I say we haven't even talked about accessibility. We have links to talks and articles you've written, and maybe we don't need to spend time on that, just because there's so much out there. But Carlton, what else were you going to say? Well,
Carlton Gibson 53:53
I was just taken by what you were saying about the wagtail core team and coming contrasting that with Django, where there was a core team, but then it all it sort of withered on the vine. And, you know, as people went off and did other things and it, what it didn't have, was a mechanism to refresh itself. And so there was, you know, the last five years before the core team was devolved, no one was added to it. There was, you know, it was just, it was dead, essentially. And so the core team was removed, and the steering council was put in its place, but the steering council didn't take on that leadership role of a core team. It didn't drive the development board. And I think that's what's been missing. And talking to you now, TiVo, I think that's and you know before, but talking to you on this show, it's like, Yes, this is what we want, and this is the exciting opportunity we have now is to give Django another burst of direction. It's managed to do very well, and it's matured very nicely. I don't think anybody I guess, 10 years ago, nobody thought it would ever get to be 20 years old, right? But it has so okay. What are we going to do on its way to 30 and 40? Well,
Will Vincent 54:57
nobody told me that when I was learning Django 10 times. Years ago. I mean, it's like anything right from the outside, it seems like this monolith, you know, this, this big stable made out of granite thing. And then you get in the inside and you're like, Oh, okay. Like, yeah. But also things need, you know, maintenance and improvement. Like,
Carlton Gibson 55:15
okay. But just give you one example. Why isn't the DS, DSF budget already bigger than it was, well, because the DS first budget was sized to keep Django going and then wind it up gracefully if that ever need needs to come to pass. But no, no, that's not ambitious enough. Let's keep it going, but also push it forward. So okay, let's Forex the budget, as Jacob was talking about at DjangoCon recently. Well, and that's explicitly,
Will Vincent 55:38
you know, Frank Wiles, who was president for a while. I asked him at one point about this, and he and he, you know, basically said, yeah, like, the point that one of the major points of the DSF was to fund Django, and if it ever died, to have enough money around to, you know, not burn all the bridges as it withered on the vine. But that, yeah, that doesn't seem to be the trajectory that we're we're on.
Thibaud Colas 56:00
I think, I think I would have definitely agreed when I became elected as a board member, but I'm hoping that we've made improvements by then. But beyond that, definitely, I think it's very helpful to us if people hold the elected officials and the student council accountable to this, we do have the responsibility to have Django grow as a framework and community, and it only helps us to have people out there remind us of that. I guess, if you want to definitely help there without running on the board, comparing ourselves to the other frameworks, like the laravels and the rails, and even comparing ourselves to wagtail can help quite a bit in understanding what's what's possible, I suppose, well,
Will Vincent 56:43
and there's like, the fellows have a report that they put up on, on the forum now, of weekly things. And I know that there's, there's minutes, there's public minutes and private minutes for the board that the Secretary is in charge of, that we try to feature on the Django news newsletter. But there is a I don't know how to say, like, not a lack of accountability, but only people on the board know how well or poorly the board is functioning. And so that's a double negative, right? Because people who are doing lots and lots of work aren't recognized, and then people who, you know, have changes in their personal, professional lives, and maybe can't make the commitment that's also not acknowledged. So there's, yeah, you know, there have been cases where people probably shouldn't have been on the board, and the mechanism to do that is not specific there. Sometimes they can be asked to step down after a while, but usually they sort of filter out again if personal and professional things come in the way. But that feels like something that could be, you know, if you miss two more board meetings in a row, maybe you're out or something could be, it could be explicit at some point. I
Thibaud Colas 57:56
definitely think it's very, very essential for us to have a better culture of feedback in open source and of letting it okay that sometimes other volunteers will criticize your work and that it's okay to take a step back. I just Just yesterday, I looked at a very ambitious proposal for a reset of the steering council that involved very specific commitments on how many meetings per week you'd have, and with whom and how often you report, and might be taking things slightly too far, but I really like the idea of us all being much more transparent about what we're doing, and I guess comparing that with you know, what people have committed to earlier on in the board, specifically, it feels to me like we need to steal lots of methodology things from the Agile world, and have OKRs as an example, have specific retrospective sessions that we share the results of so we know exactly what we set for ourselves and how we perform against that.
Carlton Gibson 58:56
It feels to me like there's a whole wave of new, not knew, but people, young people who weren't around 510, years ago, in the community now, who have loads of energy and loads of ambition to push Django forward. And first of all, it's like, well, those to all those people do stand, do put yourself forward, do do it. But for the for the people who were around, how do we step back and get out the way? So to allow that other than just, well, just step out. How
Will Vincent 59:26
do you gracefully deprecate yourself?
Carlton Gibson 59:27
Yeah, exactly like. Because it just feels like if we could just sort of take the battle and put it from one hand into another hand. Django has got everything it needs to go forward.
Thibaud Colas 59:37
Oh, I'll stop you right now. You're doing great at this already, things like Django news, the Django chat, Jeff triplets, office hours, people you know, stepping in leadership position. Django Girls in economic space. That's exactly what we need, for people who have been around for a while to let others step in. So to me, all those initiatives that are about making other people more visible. On spot on, you
Will Vincent 1:00:01
almost need, like, a, what do they call it, like a emeritus board or, you know, something where you're kind of out to pasture, you're retired, but you still maybe know something like you could still be called upon if, if there's because there's so much institutional knowledge that is lost, right? Yeah, that it shouldn't just be that once you step away, like you're just, that's it, right? Because I feel like there is that period, I mean, Carlton, you stepped away as a fellow, there is that you do need to kind of take a hard break from the board or steering council or whatever for a little bit, but then you're still probably around and available, and could be helpful if you're asked, but there isn't that mechanism to to ask. I don't think,
Thibaud Colas 1:00:44
yeah, we need to get much better. Sorry,
Will Vincent 1:00:47
no, yeah, I know, yeah. I don't have an answer for that, but I think
Thibaud Colas 1:00:50
we definitely need to get much better as a community at having those communication mechanisms between different groups. You know, with split split across seven different communication platforms, and it takes a while just to know who's where. And I think if we, if we spend a bit more time being more intentional about how to reach out to the different groups with have quite a few improvements there. So you mentioned past board members, definitely, as a secretary, I'll be in touch with all of them to ask them whether they intend to present themselves again for the next board elections, and also to ask for their intentions as far as after the board, what they plan to do and how we can, I guess, make the most of you know their motivation and their expertise. Yeah.
Will Vincent 1:01:35
And if I could make one suggestion, if someone's running, thinking about running for the board, so I think it's crazy. There isn't an email list for Django people. I mean, it's great that we have the Django news newsletter, but it's that's only has 4000 subscribers. If the homepage just had an email thing that was like, just be just be notified about official blog posts. There's no way we wouldn't get hundreds of 1000s of people on that. And it seems to me that it shouldn't be the Django chat podcast. It shouldn't be the newsletter to get out some of the communicate. You know, it shouldn't be all these different communities. There should be an option for something there. And so that would be, if I were going to run for the board, I would really push to to make that. I mean, technically, it's not hard to do, right? It's just sort of pushing through people who might be a little bit against that, but that's always been one of the biggest problems, is there's no consistent way to meet, to reach people, and, you know, we don't like there's no email solution, right? If you go to the homepage, you scroll to the bottom a the forum's not on there. I have a PR open I should add to put the forum there. But it's, it's the Google News, you know, Jang developers and Django users, which are already kind of outdated and also deeply off putting to probably anyone under 40.
Carlton Gibson 1:02:57
So anyone over 40 as well
Will Vincent 1:03:00
as, I mean me too, me too, but yeah, I don't know. Anyways, I just, I just throw that out there. Like, that's I Yeah, someone wants to come in the board and like, the only thing you're gonna do is put an email box on the homepage and just use whatever software you want for it. Like, that would be a win in my book. Yeah,
Thibaud Colas 1:03:18
I agree 100% discussing redesigning the homepage like just this very DjangoCon, actually, and it would make quite a big difference for us. I think Django users is about 50,000 people, and definitely I like the idea of making more use of that as a like renewed communications mailing list. We have that formatted as well this week in Whitehead works really well. And I think there's no reason that Django couldn't have that.
Will Vincent 1:03:47
And it doesn't even need to be a weekly thing, is what I'm saying. Like it can literally just be, yeah, the official posts, which come out less than that, but, yeah, okay,
Thibaud Colas 1:03:58
we'll do it. I really like this idea,
Carlton Gibson 1:04:02
right? Tell us. Tell us your favorite thing about DjangoCon us. And then we'll, we'll wrap up.
Thibaud Colas 1:04:08
It's, I mean to me, you know the tech talks I've seen, I've seen them many times, and I can see them online. So favorite thing by far is just the people. Obviously, I spend way more time in the hallway than any actual conference rooms, and the community vibes in the conference are amazing. So it does make me I'm feeling very lucky that I get to attend those events, and makes me feel great about the future of the community. I guess just one last plug, maybe is next year we have djancon Africa as well. I feel like there's lots of room for Django to grow quite a bit there. And yeah, I'm looking forward to attending that too.
Will Vincent 1:04:49
All right. Well, we'll have links to everything the show notes, but especially if you're thinking about the board, october 25 is the deadline nominate yourself or someone who you think should be on there. So thank you, Tebow for making making the time.
Thibaud Colas 1:05:02
My pleasure, of course,
Will Vincent 1:05:07
and we're at Django chat.com We'll see everyone next time bye, bye, bye bye. Did you know you can sponsor this podcast and reach 1000s of engaged developers? Well, you can look at the sponsor us section on the Django chat.com website for more information, you.