Hey folks -
Over in the DSF Working Groups repo I’ve started a thread for discussing the creation of “regional councils” — groups from regions not well-represented within the DSF Board with mechanisms for them to help inform and guide the DSF to make better decisions about issues.
If folks have thoughts, please share them over there!
opened 05:19PM - 20 Nov 24 UTC
Django's a global project, but global representation on the DSF Board has histor… ically been pretty bad, heavily weighted towards US and EU directors and officers. This can (and has) led to uninformed decisions that have worse outcomes in some regions than others, to overlooking the way certain decisions play out across the world, and just generally a lack of apropriate perspectives at the DSF.
So here's a sketch for one way we might think about addressing this through regional working groups. This isn't my idea; it was first suggested to me by @kjaymiller, and I've since had my thoughts shaped by discussions with @webology, @cgl, @ckirby, and probably others that I'm forgetting.
This issue is more of a temperature-check than a formal proposal so far. I want to have a bit of discussion, hear feedback from the community, and — most importantly — see if there's a small core of people from around the world who can help get this off the ground. I can help guide this into existence but the whole thing depends on global volunteers and if so it's a non-starter if there aren't at least a few folks from not-the-US who can help me get this started.
---
Broadly speaking, the idea is:
- **Form a set of "regional councils"**: groups of people from various regions around the world that have historically not been well-represented within the DSF. I don't know precisely what these "regions" would be -- like, in corporate contexts, we often talk about EMEA ("Europe, the Middle East and Africa") and APAC ("Asia/Pacific") regions, but that seems _vastly_ too broad for the DSF's purposes. But also individual countries seem too small and unwieldy (maybe? I'm really uncertain here) to be able to get actionable feedback to the DSF from. So I'm going to hand-wave what "region" means right now, and ask for help figuring that out if we move this forward.
- **Membership would be super-broad** - if you live in the region you're eligible to join that region's council, full stop. Each region would elect its own chair/co-chair, I think.
- **The councils will serve as resources for the DSF to get help on issues involving that region**. I see this as a two-way street: the DSF would be able to ask questions ("hey we're thinking of {New Policy}, how would this play in your region?"), and the regional councils (individually or collectively) could suggest changes to the DSF.
- **Some form of council representation at DSF board meetings** — some representatives of the region(s) would be invited as non-voting attendees to the DSF board meetings. There are some tactical problems that need to be solved here -- there's a scaling problem, we can't invite _everyone_, and there are some sensitive matters the board needs to discuss privately or with an agreement of confidentiality -- but these are solvable problems.
- **(Perhaps) some form of formal voting power for certain decisions** — e.g. I can see the regional council for Region X getting a formal vote in granting a DjangoCon license to that region. Lots of messy details here but directionally I like the idea of regions getting voting power on issues affecting them.
- **(Perhaps) delegation of membership decisions** -- e.g. instead of the board deciding, each council gets to own membership admission within its region (under the overall rules set by the board). This overlaps with vague ideas we've had to delegate this to a membership working group, unclear which is the better model.
I think that's the big picture. Questions/comments/concerns/thoughts?
4 Likes