Steering Council meeting, 28 Apr 2025 (with Fellows)

Members

Tim to reach out to the Website WG / Social Media team about keeping new features and reviews top of mind.
SC: review https://github.com/django/dsf-working-groups/pull/34 to see if you have any major concerns, please leave them on the PR.
SC: Provide guidance on Fellow’s 6.x features.
Frank making last meeting’s notes ready to share with the public.

Four talks on state of Django and Steering Council (Sarah, Emma, Carlton, and DSF Q&A).
New features new process:
- Considerable engagement!
Any notes from the sprints? Lily started on docs, but nothing major to report.
Natalia believes that Sarah’s talk had an impact, and more people were doing reviews.
Tim will reach out to the social media team to post about needs, perhaps new feature ideas, and Frank adds that perhaps when a large number of reviews are needed.

Let’s put some deadlines on our tasks to help hold us accountable and make it easier to justify shipping things.
Third-party page status
- Has a PR open.
- Need to review the text and links.
- For now, keep editorializing out.
- Could add this in the future.
New feature flow
- Lily added more categories.
- Natalia asked about closing issues and who has permission and not wanting to overstep a process.
  - Closing duplicate or previously denied (for good reasons) issues quickly is good.
  - Triage is not an additional duty for Fellows, that the Steering Council would like to be responsible for this.
- Potentially bots to suggest that something is a duplicate, and then the user can close it themselves if it is a duplicate.
  - Something that would search the forum, trac, mailing list for related content and provide links.
- What to do about things that perhaps fall outside of new features?
  - Specifically there’s an idea related to contributor experience rather than Django application developers. Natalia clarified that this would not be an issue for trac, but seems like the new feature repo is a good location.
- Would the council like to use a meeting time for triage?
  - Are waiting to see how things go.
  - A monthly scheduled time, but that some things may be done ad hoc.
  - May be some extra time at the end of some meetings.
- We need to make more use of labels.
DEP 10

WG definition needs agreement from us (https://github.com/django/dsf-working-groups/pull/34).
Tim will start going to these meetings as a liaison to the steering council.
Next step after agreement is Tim to reach out to other teams about transitioning to this new structure.

Discussion around who is running and maintaining GSoC year or over year.
- Perhaps a working group for next year.
- Natalia wants to know how to progress, ideally without it falling on the Fellow’s plate.
- Jacob says that changing process is possible.
- Perhaps Djangonaut Space could be part of this.
All proposals have been ranked, org is in a good place.

6.0 feature freeze is on September 17th.
Fellows need guidance on what to prioritize.
Steering Council to make a ranked list in some format, that would be helpful. A top 3 or bottom 5, or complete ranking, or whatever the steering council thinks.
Specific individuals can be brought in for specific assistance. This can be done via blog post or specific person request, like asking Carlton to join on a specific issue mentioned.

Triage process https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/triaging-tickets/
Multiple “new features” references in https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/writing-code/submitting-patches/
PRs for tweaking the django docs about:
- https://github.com/django/django/pull/19428
- https://github.com/django/code.djangoproject.com/pull/262

There’s been a request from the board to review the possibility of having sponsors have some 1:1 time with the SC. This follows what the PSF offers.
PSF sponsorship application: https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/
- Meet with the Python Steering Council.
- Opportunity to meet with the Steering Council to discuss technical aspects of Python or feedback you may have, or just a Q&A with the Steering Council. The health and sustainability of Python is critical to many organizations and we want to make sure community needs are heard and noted.
Board is putting together a new sponsorship prospectus that’s just what they do now.
- The next step is to offer meetings with the Steering Council as a perk.
Would we entertain multi-year, large $ support for new features?
- It’d be adhoc.
- We may need to advertise this to get an offer.
- Could mention “these are the X things we’re interested in, does anyone want to fund it?”
- Need to start with the list / “a fundable list”.
  - The new feature repo is the start of it.