Steering Council meeting, 4 May 2026 (with Fellows)

Agenda

• Logical properties and values in CSS
• Accessibility team leeway on code improvements
• DEP 20: Annual Release Process (link)
• DEP 19: New technical governance (link)
• DEP 18: Email providers (link)
• Google Summer of Code

Action items

• Emma: Draft blog post on 6.x Features: Rob is the only one who answered positively
  • Paste - plan publish - communicate with other authors on slack - Emma
  • Share on #marketing channel in Slack
• 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: Technical Governance document
• Tim: Teams Charters
  • Security - Transitioning last open items to team discussions
  • Translations Team - Need to reach out to Claude
• Carlton: Annual release DEP
• Review DEP 18 by end of week

Logical properties and values in CSS

• New features, requested by Accessibility team
• Regarding gritQL
  • Was there a discussion on this, why this in particular?
    • Can ask on new-features to ask for clarification on justification
• Seems like a positive
  • Concerns around backwards compatibility where we change the definitions of styles (Customisations)
    • Would require heads up and ideally we don’t do this, but the admin is an exception to the backwards compatibility policy
  • It’ll be helpful to mention this early on in a blog post that this is happening, who will be impacted, what expect things.

Accessibility team leeway on code improvements

• They are discussing linting rules and the GritQL rules, but are spending time on “how do we do this from a process” perspective. Feels like we’re letting processes get in the way of people doing positive work.
• Natalia wants to assure accountability. That there will be support there.
• The team doesn’t have the capacity to be a required aspect of the whole contribution process. The team does not want to be a blocker, which was information that came from within the accessibility team.
• This is part of the volunteer nature. Sarah brings up the ‘wave’ nature of this. People surge in involvement, and then disappear, which is natural in volunteering. It can be a problem if Accessibility team review is required or strongly desired.

DEP 20: Annual release process

• Discussion has been both positive and constructive
• A few decision points to settle. How many versions of Python to support:
  • Green only vs Plus last yellow Python support
    • Carlton: I genuinely don’t know which way is best here. Leaned to Plus Last Yellow because of e.g. Linux distributions.
    • There is the deadsnakes PPA for ubuntu which provides all versions of python as .deb packages
    • General sentiment is that “Green Only (whilst appealing) is too aggressive”.
  • Version numbering
    • We WON’T all agree on this (everyone has a favourite)
    • But we CAN all live with any option we choose.
    • “What colour?”
    • YYYY vs YY v N
      • CalVer or Like-SemVar
    • Discussion wasn’t conclusive, as predicted ☺️

DEP 19: New technical governance

• Document structure: Do we need to move the final place to this into the docs as the source of truth to allow incremental updates?
  • https://github.com/django/deps/pull/107#discussion_r3104952597
  • https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/internals/organization
  • Right now, docs would work well.
    • https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/6.0/internals/organization/#:~:text=governance%20of%20other%20technical%20teams%20within%20the%20Django
• Transparency in decision making process
  • https://github.com/django/deps/pull/107#discussion_r3142528926

DEP 18: Email providers

• The PR is ready to merge
• Natalia: Mike has been doing stellar work

Google Summer of Code

• All four project proposals were accepted!