The 2025 DSF Board Nominations are open! The directors of the foundation serve a staggered term of two years. Of seven directors of the Foundation, four positions are open. Nominations are open to all, until October 25, 2024.
There is way more information on the linked blog post, and a link to the nomination form. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here, or you can email foundation@djangoproject.com.
I would add that for this upcoming election, I think it is important that new Board Members come in with a sense of purpose about WHAT they want to achieve. The DSF Board exists to support Django and a big part of that is keeping the lights on, processing donations, paying the Fellows, supporting conferences, and dealing with minor issues in the community.
But it COULD/SHOULD also tackle bigger issues that are not new but need a push. To me, the biggest one is adding an Executive Director, which @jacobian spoke about in his talk at DjangoCon US this past week. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of debate against adding one, rather it is a question of raising the money and then doing a proper job search/vetting process.
So, to me, a very big area of focus is that. If you are interested in being on the board and have thoughts/experience around this issue, I would strongly recommend you include it in your personal statement!
Thank you @wsvincent! I agree it’s essential for candidate board members to get a clear picture of what they would want to do when elected. And in addition, the more people share their thoughts over blog posts or just replies here, the better.
keeping the lights on
From my perspective as a board member, a healthy amount of time to “keeping the lights on” within the volunteer board model is about 1-2h per week per board member. Anything above that can go towards specific initiatives / interests. For example for me that’s putting Django back in growth mode, climate action, accessibility / inclusivity in our community.
To me, the biggest one is adding an Executive Director, […] There doesn’t seem to be a lot of debate against adding one.
That’s definitely a thing that’ll only happen if enough of the directors concentrate on it. I don’t recall having many board discussions about it. I’d want to know more about how this would work compared to the past DSF’s Director of Advancement role.
I love this! Hope other people do the same I’ve responded to some of your points with my “current board member” perspective directly in your Gist since that format makes it possible.
Also, there’s only 15 days left for people to put themselves forward! If you’re thinking about it – reach out to another Django community person, discuss it with them, and then do it!
Sharing some of the questions I got in private, and my answers, for others’ benefit. Specifically on the theme of eligibility and who should / shouldn’t go for it.
Do I need a certain number of years of experience to nominate myself?
Nope, no official requirement there. Personally I’d say 6 months of experience is a good minimum to make sure you understand what Django and its community are about.
Is there any other requirement I have to satisfy in order to nominate myself?
The only requirement is to submit the form we shared, providing your “reason for nomination” so when time for voting comes, people have a sense of why you would be a good fit as a board member.
How do I know if I’m a good fit?
My take is what’s most important by far is having the motivation to take that kind of governance position. The DSF is both a large open source community and a mid-size non-profit. It’s not all glamorous, we need motivated people Aside from that I’d say some experience with the Django community / specific communities also helps a lot to have a good sense of who you’d be working with / on what.
Aside from motivation (and time), we also want a board that’s representative of our wider community. There’s currently no specific requirement there either, just want to encourage people to think of who is and isn’t represented on the board.
What’s your advice for people who are interested?
My main advice is to go for it if:
You won’t feel bad if you’re not elected. That’s the most likely outcome. There are a lot of big names in the community that’ll get elected just by virtue of name recognition.
You have a clear idea of what you’d want to do if elected.
You have enough time to commit to the DSF board activities (I’d recommend 1 to 2h/week as a minimum)
I’d also recommend to ask people you know and trust in the Django community, whether they’d think it could be a good fit for you or not. Always helps to get advice from people who know your personal outlook on things, and circumstances.
there’s 40 hours left for people to nominate themselves! At this point we need more applications from women and non-binary people in particular, to hopefully get more representation amongst our candidates than last year (2 of 12). If you could use more time to submit your nomination please let me know in DMs or over at foundation@djangoproject.com.
Here are a few other bits of information for anyone who wants to learn more.
What’s the next steps after the nominations close?
(dates subject to change if there are any snags in the process)
From now till Sunday: I’ll reach out to the candidates if needed to confirm their details.
On Tuesday 29th, in the morning UTC – voting starts. We’ll publish our ballot of candidates, and send a voting link to all DSF Individual Members via email.
We use RankedVote. It supports quite advanced voting algorithms that seem to work pretty well for our needs. From the voters’ perspective, you get a list of candidates in a random order, and then have to move them all in order of preference.
With 132 voters and 3 people to elect, the threshold to get elected was to get 34 votes
Jacob got elected right away because 44 voters had him as their first choice
Redistribution time: 44 votes is 10 over the required number, so 10 ballots redistributed based on people’s next choice (I believe)
Elimination time: at that point even with those 10 ballots redistributed there’s no clear winner, so the algorithm switches to eliminating candidates with the lowest vote count and the ballots cast for them get transferred based on those voters’ next choices
Repeat until another winner emerges
So Sarah got elected next as votes transferred to her
The process of excess vote redistribution raises some questions. The description, here as well as on the site, just says that excess (in this case, 10) ballots get redistributed. But how are these (10) chosen from all (here, 44) ballots for the winning candidates? How is it set which ballots stayed with Jacob (or, later, Sarah), and which ballots participated again?
As an example – if the choice is chronological (first ballots received stay with the candidate), and I think my first choice is going to be popular, this gives me incentive to delay my vote…
…and they got back to me already. It’s as you suspected; they say:
RankedVote’s algorithm is organizing the votes chronologically. So, the 10 that get redistributed are likely the last 10 they received. This places a slight bias in the results towards a voter voting later in the election.
It’d be interesting to quantify how big of a difference this could make but until then I won’t lose sleep over it.
I’ve responded to some of your points with my “current board member” perspective 
I decided to start a whole new thread so the announcement is more visible: