Steering Council meeting, 10 Feb 2025

Members

Approving public notes process
Fellows discussion
- Moving new features out of Trac
- Team charters to define expectations
- Fellows office hours
- Using Google Summer of Code to automate process work
GSoC update

Getting it off of Trac and off the Fellow’s area is supported
There may be another place for it besides the Forum, such as organized issue tracker / GitHub
The Fellows suggested the Forum as a place that is already in use, and that it gets more engagement than Trac or Github.
- The Fellows don’t need to be a part of the initial process definining discussion
- The Fellows should be consulted when there are details around the process when ideas are well defined and candidates to be added into Django
One option is to start ideas on the Forum and then move
- Can we gather data that shows the usage of the Forum (and GitHub, Trac by extension)
- We could use the Forum and Discord as funneling communities that feed into a long-term feature tracker

The Board is working on defining the Working Group template/skeleton for teams
- The Steering Council should reach out to see if help is needed, pending Carlton’s opinion

There are limitations to our contribution efforts
Attempting to grow the Triage and Review team through education/training
- Fellows want to do more of this
- It requires a large investment of time, so we need qualified/proven candidates
- Office hours could be a specific time for training for it to be organized and time limited
- Potentially could look to former Fellows to help here, but they’d still need to be involved in the day-to-day efforts as things change
- It’s important that we find people who have the right personality and an attention to detail
- People should be here to stick around for a while
- The Accessibility team has had two Djangonaut Space teams and could become a feeder program for that team. That may be a pattern to reproduce
  - Would require additional training/education as most Djangonauts (mentees) are unaware of the Triage and Review team and process.
To help with Triaging and Review trustworthiness, we could create a Django Score
- Would allow us to have two people whose scores add up to a threshold do something neither could do alone (approve a PR, accept a ticket, etc)
- Could start as an info-only bot
- Discussion on this to continue on Steering Council Forum with Natalia around what Fellows’ needs can be automated
- Sarah Boyce will be giving a talk on how to do Django code reviews

Fellows wanted to investigate if a group from GSoC or Djangonaut Space is interested in automating some of these items
- Fellows would be stakeholders in these projects, not mentors
Fellows want a way for more essential PRs to get more attention
Lily is potentially interested in mentoring a project like this if no one else volunteers first
It might be possible to start by closing old/stale PRs
- Some communities automatically close within a month or week, we could start older
- This requires further discussion

Emma has created a contact list for mentors and projects
- Needs help getting a hold of Simon Charette
Bhuvnesh is trying to collect the projects on the Wiki
There’s an application deadline this week for the Django org

Data gathering on use of Forum and other spaces, and implications for organizing new features
Tim to reach out to Jeff if he wants help with the skeleton/template working group for teams (pending Carlton’s opinion)
Frank and Emma- looking into how Github bots could help automate some parts of the work that currently falls on Fellow
Natalia to add process automation requirements to SC Forum thread
Emma will reach out to see if more information on GSoC needs to be solidified by tomorrow or Wednesday, or if there is more time
Tim to add discussing closing old PRs to the Steering Council backlog
Next Fellows meeting is March 2nd or just Sarah joins