Steering Council meeting, 3 Aug 2026 (with Fellows)

Members

Action Item Review
DEP 19 membership vote
DEP 20 Annual Release Cycle
What to do about “Django Core Developer”
DjangoCon US goals
Fellows:
- DEP 19 and enabling mergers to merge
  - Does anything in the DEP need implementation/docs?
- Naming check on RAISE fetch mode: https://github.com/django/django/pull/21696
- FYI: DEP: table expressions in ORM: https://github.com/django/deps/pull/113

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: Teams Charters
- Translations Team - Need to reach out to Claude
- Mergers Team - Modify list of approvers to include Steering Council members
Carlton: DEP 20
- Final clean ups
- Short sentence describing new release process
- Short blog post draft with clear transition timeline statement.
Tim: Add link to teams page for historical core contributors page
New Features improvements
- Revisit the language around closing, so we can close things
- Create a curated view of issues for people to participate in a high-impact area
- Create new project board views with documentation/blog post with how to participate in new feature process

DEP 10 stipulates that we must vote on whether we think the membership should vote on adopting any DEP that changes the governance. The board must do the same.
Steering Council votes that this does not require a membership vote.

https://github.com/django/deps/pull/109
Carlton: Needs a decision by the SC
- Agreed upon by the SC
What if the Board hires an executive director and a lot of money is acquired and multiple more Fellows are hired, does that change anything, like the release schedule?
Sarah shared that she would like the same schedule, just more features each schedule.
People discuss if the current numbering has the flexibility to change within that. Carlton notes that as long as first number increments, it will still sort properly.
Seems consensus on YYYY rather than YY
2028.0 in January 2028 replacing 7.0
Carlton will write a very short explanation for the users, and will use Sarah’s image:

![][image1]

https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/revive-or-retire-the-django-core-developer-status/45509
This term drop was identified in DEP 19 by Tom. The term Django Core Developer is dropped in this DEP.
Do we want to have some higher tier recognition level? If so, is “Core” the tier of recognition that we want?
Do we want it to be purely on code? Should other experience factors into it? How many people should it apply to? Should it retire? Should there be multiple terms? Should Fellow be renamed to something else? Developer in Residence?
Sarah notes that highly active people are asked to join the Triage/Review team.
- Having people join teams individually allows teams to select members avoiding the board and SC
Add link to teams page for historical core contributors page, defer the rest
Carlton to follow-up on the thread