Steering Council meeting, 15 Sep 2025

Agenda

• Team to WG Structure update
• DEP 10 Refactor
• New Features Process
• Building for future Steering Councils
• AI Working Group / Team

Action items

• Tim: Preliminary review of DEP 10 adjustments
• Tim: Create security team WG PR
• Emma: Draft blog post on 6.x Features - still need to setup a meeting with the fellows about that
• Frank: Write blog post about packages eco-system
• All: Start process of reviewing new-features ideas, propose an action and request feedback
• All: Collect preferences for 6.1 release [and now Django on the Med roadmap]
• Sovereign Tech Fund
  • Emma: Get one or more project(s) ready (maybe Admin or at least list of places to start)
  • Check with fellows if billing scheme is ok
  • Plan another meeting with Lexi once the above is done

Team to WG Structure update

• Should be able to create a PR in the next week or two for the Security team to review

DEP 10 Refactor

• Started by converting from formal language to less formal
• Trying to reduce the scope as much as possible to start, then re-add based on what’s needed

New Features Process

• Several things moved forward!
• If we don’t react fast enough on that repo (ie: within a month or 2) people go back to the forum, fragmenting the conversation, which isn’t ideal
  • Want to plan this for off-weeks once a month
  • Expect an hour of time for these meetings
• Who can help with this?
  • Tim is currently working on other topics and can’t help with triaging new features
  • Potentially create a new team
  • Potentially have past SC members help
  • Potentially have a feature review office hour
  • Settled on continuing with the process as is for at least another month
• Had our first case of, “this is a bug, not a feature”!
• Want to highlight things that need attention from the community
  • Start with a forum thread announcement
  • Will relay each post to the social media team for better reach amongst the community
• We’ve asked several people to write DEPs for new features
  • We realize this isn’t ideal, we want to make this easier by simplifying the DEP process or helping people, but we lack capacity at the moment
  • We may have time to look into simplifying the DEP process in October
  • Only two issues need the full DEP process (User Model and Modernized admin)

takeFirst new feature discussion

• Will remove lock on Wed
• CoC WG informed us to prepare a prepared response when locking things and to notify the CoC WG when we take such an action
• We also need a prepared response when unlocking things

Building for future Steering Councils

• Need to document standardized actions for the next Steering Council
• Can create a Google Doc with tabs for various actions
• Share links to the folder in the readme and pinned slack message

AI Working Group / Team

• The slop PRs and security reports are problematic, but can work around it by asking people to disclose that
• People are using it and it’s not going away, which suggests we should have a stance on it
• There are valid concerns
  • There are ethical concerns about how LLMs were built
  • Parts of the community may be upset with any adoption
• Are we jumping on an immature technology?
• Will teams serve as a motivator / enabler for people to contribute to the community