DSF Board 2024 Elections – New board members 👋

Django Internals
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Following our 2024 DSF Board Election Results, here are quick introductions from our two new board members, Sarah Abderemane and Thibaud Colas, elected for a two-year term for 2024-2025.

Collage: Sarah on the left, Thibaud on the right
Collage: Sarah on the left, Thibaud on the right900×506 92.8 KB

Collage: Sarah on the left, smiling, in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors. Thibaud on the right, in a field, looking in the distance with a boy on his shoulders.

Sarah Abderemane

Sarah Abderemane, also known as @sabderemane , is a software developer in France. She currently works at Kraken Tech, part of the Octopus Energy group, contributing to solutions to climate change. She works mainly on the backend, but also likes to work on the frontend in her spare time.

She organizes the Django Paris meetup and is an active member of the Django community: she is one of the organizers of the Djangonaut Space program, a member of the Django Accessibility team and maintainer of djangoproject.com.

Outside of open source and work, she is passionate about dance, likes customizing things like mechanical keyboards, and loves to travel to discover new cultures.

Social media and blog:

Thibaud Colas

Thibaud Colas (pronounced /tee-bo/, @thibaudcolas) is a developer based in the UK, working for Torchbox on the Wagtail open source CMS as part of the core team. For Wagtail, Thibaud also contributes to efforts around accessibility, developer relations, as well as participation to programs like Outreachy and Google Summer of Code.

For Django, Thibaud has been involved with organizing and volunteering at events like Django Girls and DjangoCon Europe. More recently, he helped start the accessibility team, and has joined the Djangonaut Space program as a navigator.

Outside of work, Thibaud spends most of his time with two little tornadoes that are 5 and 2 years old. He also enjoys watching sumo and baking macarons. To learn more about Thibaud, check out his personal website thib.me, @thibaud_colas on Twitter/X, @thibaudcolas@fosstodon.org on Mastodon.

Meeting our new board members

Sarah and Thibaud will be taking part in a mini Django contributions sprint and lead discussions on the “Future of Django” as part of Django Cologne’s 50th Meetup.

Re-posted on dangoproject.com – we thought we’d publish this on the forum in case anyone has questions for new board members. And we’ll take words of encouragement too :smile:

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Congrats again to both of you! I really enjoyed this introduction where I learned new things about both of you.

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congratulations to you both @thibaudcolas @sabderemane . if one day i too want to be appointed somewhere in this huge django organization, what would you advise me to do?

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good question! My advice on what to do would be to:

  1. Be clear about your motivations to contribute to open source formally or informally. It can be very rewarding but also thankless at times.
  2. For Django specifically, identify ways to contribute based on your interests and skills, and how other contributors operate. See for example our Community page.
  3. Find ways to work with other people, as that’s the best way to both grow as a contributor, and build your network. Organizing events either locally or online is great for that (meetups, Django Girls workshops, etc).
  4. Once you’re clearer about your place in the Django universe, you can consider which of the “formal” contributor commitments might be appropriate for you.

I might write some day about “how to speedrun being elected on the DSF Board” specifically if there’s interest :stuck_out_tongue:. Hope this helps, let us know if you have other questions about your experience / the DSF / the board.

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1- My vision is clear: to work in a large itech company. So I’m strengthening my resume by starting with this tiket https://github.com/django/django/pull/17515. Then I’ll take another one and so on.
3- I have a feeling that this will be my biggest challenge: fitting in. @sarahboyce , I’m thinking of following in your inspiring footsteps, but on the titok social network by producing French-language content. If you have any suggestions for me, I’d love to hear them.
4- However I like to code

Finally, your suggestion “how to speed up your election to the DSF Board of Directors” is pertinent, I assure you it will be appreciated.

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Ah thank you! You should try out doing a TikTok - that’s so cool! I don’t have much advice, people like my energy :thinking: I think just go for it! It’s not as scary as it sounds

:broken_heart: there are French speaking communities which you might be interested in. I know of the Django Paris Meetup (Django Paris | Meetup Django Paris Meetup (@djangoparismeetup@fosstodon.org) - Fosstodon) and Django Cameroon (https://djangocameroon.site - socials at the bottom). Also check out the list of djangogirls events in case one is coming up you could volunteer at (Django Girls - start your journey with programming).

With contributing code, my first PRs to Django had hundreds of comments - this all really normal. It takes persistence and I can see how much you’re pushing! That’s really great! Sustained effort over a longer period of time will see opportunities within Django open up to you. Whether you get invited to join the Review and Triage team, you run to be a member of the Steering Council, you become a mentor for Djangonaut Space, you talk at a DjangoCon :tada: - there are a lot of options! Do whatever brings you joy :orange_heart:

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(If anyone wants to meet Sarah and I in person – we’ll be at Django Meetup Cologne’s 50th edition leading a discussion on the “Future of Django”, and taking part in a mini sprint – come say hi!)

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There’s never anything like this back home in Niger. I’ll be there online. If the communication is in English then please provide a French translation for the rest of us.

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Bonjour @HamaBarhamou

If there is never anything in Niger, you can try to create a meetup with friends or even something bigger, this is the best way to meet other djangonauts :slight_smile: I would be happy to do a presentation in french if this is happening.

For the communication, it will be in English, it’s not easy to provide translation for each language unfortunately, but I think you can use otter.ai to translate into french with live transcriptions if you are coming online.

Excited to see your future contributions!

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Thank you for the teaching. I’m working on organizing a first little get-together at home to see how it’s going to evolve.

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I’ve spoken to a few people in my community and have had positive feedback. Could we have your availability beyond two weeks to set a date for our first django meeting. We want to set a date that’s convenient for everyone and do some communication work around the event.

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