Steering Council meeting, 10 Mar 2025

Agenda

• Sovereign Tech Fund
• Past Steering Council meetings
• Review draft forum/blog posts for personas and sovereign tech fund
• Teams to working groups
• Code of Conduct communication
• New feature idea initial steps

Action items

• Emma: respond to Lexi about Sovereign Tech Fund, planning a meeting, ideally during a steering council meeting.
• Frank: continue to work on setting up meetings with past steering council members
• Lily: continue to work on surveys and announcements. Will make a forum post soon.
• All: review feature idea document

Sovereign Tech Fund

• There’s a question of who is performing the work
  • We’d like the project to be completed by a person/people doing the work are very experienced and deeply familiar with Django. The goal is to not add extra work for the fellows in any sort of mentorship role being needed. However, someone else as a trusted mentor might be needed.
  • When looking at Google Summer of a Code as a comparison, there is a halfway point checkmark, and those who don’t meet the standard, they are removed and only receive one third of the funding. Perhaps something similar could be done with this project, perhaps with more frequent check-ins.
  • Should strive for transparency in that everything should be visible on github, and frequent ‘show and tell’ check ins, perhaps as often as every week.
  • Some of these check-in to correspond with social media blasts.
  • Option questions yet about tech fund:
    • Can multiple proposals be sent and accepted?
    • What size of project should be selected?
    • Do we want to solicit other community ideas?
    • https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/fund

Review blog forum/blog post drafts for personas and sovereign tech fund

• Wait on the Sovereign tech fund post until we meet with Lexi
• Personas post

Teams to working groups

• GitHub project for tracking action items
• Starting with accessibility team
• Have a PR with the draft.
• Needs the accessibility team to fill in open questions
• Checking to see if they want to do anything extra with this iteration
• Waiting to see how this goes before proceeding with other teams

Code of Conduct communication

• No update as of meeting
• DRF may have been experiencing something similar as the Fellows leading to the issues and discussions being shut down
• Ideas discussed
  • Set something up at a Django community level that extends to other projects?
  • Allow opt-in options for maintainers, since there isn’t centralization in a lot of community aspects.
  • Can the DSF enforce a code of conduct policy with the trademark policy?
  • Potentially the steering council’s role to step in when needed or asked for, especially if banning is warranted.

New feature idea initial steps

• See the WIP document
  • There’s detail around what the steps and actions are for “is this idea good for Django” and “is this expected in Django”
  • Need help on “Can this be done?” section AKA we’re in agreement this is desired, but how do we go about it?
• Needs further review and discussion from steering council members
• Emoji reactions need strong review on wording
• Need an explanation on the review process to soften it