Steering Council meeting, 1 Dec 2025 (with Fellows)

Agenda

• DEP 10 Revisions
• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026
• Security topics
  • Low quality HackerOne reports
  • GitHub Security Advisories
• Translations for Django

Action Items

• Emma: Draft blog post on 6.x Features - still need to setup a meeting with the fellows about that
• Sovereign Tech Fund
  • Emma: Get one or more project(s) ready (maybe Admin or at least list of places to start)
  • Plan another meeting with Lexi once the above is done
• Tim: Facilitate discussion amongst Security Team about progressing https://github.com/django/dsf-working-groups/pull/56
• Tim: Help with GSoC Working Group governance
• Tim: Draft handover documentation for 7.x Steering Council
• All: Review new features repo on Dec 15 for GSoC opportunities

DEP 10 Revisions

• Shared with the Board
• Thibaud provided some good questions:
  • Do we want to formalize a Roadmap?
    • Is this part of the DEP?
    • A roadmap is pretty unknown at this point which makes it difficult to commit to
    • Wagtail has a great roadmap
      • Has paid development efforts which makes it easier to predict
      • Makes it easy to sponsor efforts
    • Roadmap would be dependent on who the audience is
    • 6.1 has several features identified because the PRs were progressing and seemed likely to make it in or already had
    • Tim relay that we’re going to punt on this and/or this is part of a multi-team effort
  • Adjustments to the eligibility requirements
    • Tim is going to revise these based on Thibaud’s feedback
      • Try to highlight trait, have 2-3 sentences and then have the examples
      • Potentially there is nothing wrong and trusting the community to vote for the right people. Potentially with the example of needing a CoC exclusion. Potentially ‘all DSF members are eligible unless under an active CoC ban.’
    • Need to mention that we want a mix of experiences. Potentially attempting to ensure continent representation. Potential ideas:
      • Ensured seats for Geographical diversity? (Advisory role?)
      • Ensured (e.g. 2?) “technical seats”?
  • Adjustments to the election process to be less rigid
    • Do we want to move the election process out entirely?
      • Tim will explore options here with Thibaud
    • Noted that multiple people expressed interest in helping applicants strengthen their personal statements.

Security Reports

Low quality HackerOne Reports

• There are many low quality HackerOne security reports which take up a lot of time.
• Curl library is dealing with something similar, 142 HackerOne submissions, only 8 valid reports
• HackerOne is a historic source of lower quality reports
• A proposal has been made to remove HackerOne as a source
• Have we reached out to HackerOne?
  • Not sure we have (Catherine- the board has recently become aware, and no one has reached out yet.)
  • (Catherine) Thibaud believes dropping them is correct. The rest of the board has had access to the conversation, but not necessarily seen it.
• The Steering Council supports dropping Hacker One
  • If the rest of the security identifies a concern, please relay to the Steering Council

GitHub Security Advisories

• The Security Team will be switching to GitHub Security advisories for tracking, but will use own tools for artifacts and releases

Google Summer of Code 2026

• Bhuvnesh and Apoorv were admins last year
  • Tim confirmed with them on Discord they’re interested again
  • They are open to chairing/co-chairing a working group
  • Tim offered help with the governance piece
• Challenge last year was identifying mentors and projects
  • We need to help identify mentors for projects.
  • Should have two mentors per project
  • Need to be clear about what the end goals are for new features (likely third-party package)
• From history: It’s important there’s one person who knows they are responsible for ticking off the TODOs at the given dates. (It’s not hard per se BUT it can’t be forgotten)
• Put out a call for mentors
• Review new features repo in next meeting for agreed upon / well defined ideas
  • Reach out to people who could be mentors
  • django new management command (start project) DEP is a strong candidate

Translations for Django

• Transifex has a few thousand open requests (1925 open requests)
• There’s some documentation referencing the role, but not docs about the role
• Claude would likely help with defining a team charter
  • The Charter should identify the resources, processes and be just enough to empower people to do things