Steering Council meeting, 5 Jan 2026 (with Fellows)

Members

Emma: Draft blog post on 6.x Features: Rob is the only one who answered positively: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DwDLCsJ13LeYZWA9-zAFBQccF2zpjzkh/view?usp=drive_link
- Paste - plan publish - communicate with other authors on slack - Emma
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: Help with GSoC Working Group governance
- https://github.com/django/dsf-working-groups/pull/63
- Need to follow-up
Tim: Draft handover documentation for 7.x Steering Council
- Tim: Follow-up with Thibaud on election process
Tim: Rework Steering Council eligibility requirements
Tim: Iterate on Technical Governance document
Tim: Teams Charters
- Security Team - Need to settle on roles / responsibilities
- Translations - Need to reach out to Claude
- T&R - Need to follow-up
Tim: Write up message on CLA alignment
Making a general request asking for mentors
Frank: Update ecosystem page to create Tasks section, remove from experimental
- Potentially add wrapper packages to the experimental sections
Frank: Write up post on things we accomplished last year
All: Add goals/ideas for 2026 to private thread
Natalia: Remove external packages page from the docs
Natalia: Follow-up with Jake on django-tasks

Farhan has been playing with django-bolt and discovered there’s a much faster parser
https://github.com/django/new-features/issues/105
Can we advance this now, rather than waiting? It is pressing at this moment.
- Carlton replied to Farhan to confirm the scope of the smaller approach. If agreed we will advance to Trac.
Agreement to move it forward on the new features repo.

Want to add needscommunityinput or something similar
https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/volunteers-wanted-to-update-triage-workflow-docs/37937
Name will be discussed in slack. Natalia will make proposals to vote on.

Private link to longer iteration of the eligibility requirements
Tim is looking for feedback for this draft he made.
- Specifically around the indicators
Have a focus on making the word choice accessible to non-native english speakers.
Some members note that they wouldn’t have thought themselves qualified until conversations with community members, so it would be good for it to be clear for future potential applicants.

They are necessary for people working with some corporations
Likely can’t remove it, but can make it optional and less prominent
Ideally we’d go through the archives/email inboxes of PDFs to create a new archive
It is important to make sure that private information stays private, as there is personal information involved.
Potentially new precedent from Oracle and Google makes this less pressing.
Some options:
- Welcome new contributor message
- PR template
If it is optional, it needs to be clearly stated either way. Jacob brought up that it sometimes happens that people will avoid actually making a pull request because of “bureaucracy”, even if they have already done the other work.

Next Steps:
- Create the blog in the admin.
- Set a publish time
- Talk with others in Slack who might be scheduling other blog posts. The goal would be to give each post a few days of prominence when possible.
Note: We are already halfway to the 6.1 feature freeze!

https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/possible-merging-of-2-doc-pages/42819/
Natalia brought up that there is a page for external packages, and a different new page that the steering council made of recommended third party packages. She thinks that newer users might have confusion.
The external page that Natalia brought up is very old, and that page can just be removed.
Can add django-localflavor to the internationalization docs
Natalia to propose a PR