Follow-up to my reply in Updating our DEP process / DEP 1 – I wanted to start a new thread for people interested in taking part in two informal exercises for contributors.
If you’re interested in participating to either of those exercises, please comment or “like”: below.
““Roadmap”” workshop
This would involve brainstorming and voting on ideas for things to happen in the Django universe (core, community, packages). Similar in some ways to Django feature vote spreadsheets of the past, but more community-driven / non-binding, in the spirit of Jeff Triplett’s DjangoCon US Talks I’d Like to See.
If all goes well, the items would arrive on a lovely impact-effort matrix / quadrant chart. If there is time, we’ll also be able to discuss timeframes and ways to take things forward (“is this a good GSoC project”, “does this need a DEP”, “should we look for another MOSS-style grant”, etc). Perhaps even discuss risks / gaps (shifting expectations on static typing, deployment, bus factor on a specific module, etc).
Who knows, we might even identify some quick wins for new contributors like Djangonaut Space to take through!
““Sprint”” retrospective
This will be an occasion to air out any pain points in a safe space. Agile-style, we’d record our different pain points on working together as contributors, and also note things that work well. It’ll be a very straightforward start/stop/continue, mad/sad/glad type of thing (see the Metroretro templates). We’ll collate all participants’ entries. We’ll vote to identify common themes or how much people “relate”. We’ll draft actions. If all goes well, the actions will arrive on a lovely impact-effort matrix / quadrant chart.
Preparing for those sessions
I’ll send specific instructions once I know how many people are interested – in the meantime, please share this thread with your contributor friends. Particularly the ones who might be grumpy about open source but can express that constructively.
Personally I’d like to do a few specific things as prep:
- Trial all of this with people interested in helping organize or mentor for Google Summer of Code first. I’ll reach out to past participants separately to this thread. Not sure how many people here know but Django participates every year, with the Fellows leading the charge. This is a very demanding program for organizers and mentors due to how popular Django is and the limited time available from volunteers, so I think the “Retrospective” exercise in particular would help a lot.
- As a board member, I believe I have access to preliminary results of the 2023 Django Developers survey. I’ll make sure to review what I can from there, see if there are any particular nuggets of wisdom.
- There was a membership survey done in September - Octoboer 2022, for DSF individual members. I don’t recall seeing this as a member back then or whether/how the results were used, but as a board member I now have access to this, so will make sure to review ahead of time and follow up on how to get the results shared if possible and not already done. Here’s a copy of the form if you were interested in seeing the fields on there.
There’s also quite a bit of “overview” documentation I’d like to draft ahead of time to bring others up to speed, time-permitting:
- An overview / list of all Django’s GSoC projects over the last 20 years
- Annual report-style material for all years of the DSF’s history
- Perhaps reach out to Jeff and others who publish things like DjangoCon US Talks I’d Like to See to get their takes on “2024” hot topics.
Practical examples
As part of my onboarding as a new board member, I’ve been meeting with contributors (8 so far, thank you for your time!) and noting some of their ideas. Here are the kinds of things I’d hope those exercises would help us discuss:
- Templates
- Either make it as fast as Jinja or switch to Jinja
- Multiline template tags
- Forms
- Accessible by default
- Admin
- New admin
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Global search
- HTMX
- Front-end
- Docs for popular front-end tech
- ORM
- Composite fields
- Common table expressions
- Developer experience
- startapp / startproject improvements
- Better deployment docs
- Security
- 2FA / passwordless built-in
- Auth rate limiting built-in
- Better CSP support
- Other
- Better async support
- Static types (see Pydantic/FastAPI/Starlette)
- Contributors experience
- Better docs
- Official demo / test project
- Directory of contributors / Django people
- Governance
- Jazzband governance
- Bus factor in specific areas of Django
- Rails-style keynote content
- Consensus process
I’ll be sending emails / DMs with instructions at the end of the day, if you know someone who might be up for this but hasn’t expressed their interest yet, now’s the time.
I’d like to facilitate this with more people in the future if there is interest, but for this time around I’d really like to start as a meeting – so we need to make sure there’ll be time for everyone to speak.