We will run the elections of the 2026 Board of Directors over the next three months. Tentatively, elections will start with candidate nominations on October 10th, and end with publication of the voting results on November 27th. This will be led by @tom and me @thibaudcolas as Secretary and President of the Foundation, largely executed in the same way as the elections of the 2025 Board last year.
Differences compared to last elections
We received a lot of excellent feedback on last year’s Board and Steering Council elections, and after a quick retrospective, decided to work on changing one thing in particular: candidates’ personal statements. The changes we envision so far:
Encouraging candidates to share their pronouns
Making the statement writing more accessible to people who aren’t native english speakers
Higher-quality statements. More consistent format and length. Less AI-generated fluff. More authentic voices.
Get involved
As mentioned we could use help! Here’s our planning doc: DSF 2026 Board elections – Planning for an overview of what we have planned and need help for. Specifically, we’re looking for:
Feedback on the draft election plan / timeline
Feedback on past elections so we can think of more tweaks for this one.
People who can help us with elections-related content (Q&A about the process, “what is it like to be on the Board”)
People who can help with any and all other election-related tasks (social media, testing elections tools, project management, docs)
if you want to get involved, if you have questions, if you want to run and need advice - feel free to reply in this thread, or contact me in private, or email foundation (at) djangoproject.com.
Just noting some of the feedback we received so far / other things that could be going better.
The new #elections channel on the DSF Slack seems to work well.
People are asking for more info about what the Board does (overall and day to day) than we have available currently. Our best resource is the meeting minutes but it’s lots of work to review.
Need more information about how the non-profit side of the foundation works / what it consists of
One of the nominations we received was done on behalf of someone else, could be worth clarifying further that individuals are meant to nominate themselves (getting help is fine)
Lots of statements focus more on tech skills than they should, unclear how clear it is to candidates that the Board isn’t where technical decisions are made
Geographical representation / diversity is an ongoing issue
Some candidate statements focus on tech skills, which are mostly irrelevant. Can we do something about that?
Could we have made more of an attempt to let our Individual Members specifically know about the elections via email?
On our list of candidates on the website, could we / should we have an “export to CSV” feature?
On our list of candidates on the website, it’s in a random order – could we change the randomizing so it’s stable between page reloads?
Currently the first round of emails was sent with Thibaud’s email address so no one else can see any replies sent there (2 so far). Is it possible to use another email, so there is no bottleneck on one person
Can we document how the sending of emails happens
Can we change how our elections’ vote redistribution happens, so there is no advantage however small given to late votes
Can we change our voting mechanism so you can avoid voting at all on candidates you don’t want to be elected
I had some thoughts about the candidate statements/questions which might help craft better statements (Your first question Thibaud!)
Does the board have a set of current goals that are published somewhere? For example I know personally that hiring an ED is a current goal and not many of the candidates mention this, but they do mention aspirations that I think would be more doable once an ED is hired.
Another alternative here would be a list of the challenges/in progress work. Or recommed/require candidates to read the Board meeting minutes for the last 6 months?
Related to the previous point I wonder if there is value in producing some a guidance document for personal statements. This might already exist, but if I think it would work well to have one, which outlines what ought to be included in a personal statement. From my perspective:
Briefly who you are and your experience in the Django community and other non profits/charities
Then state your clear top X (3?) goals if you were elected (or similar). Personally the more concrete the goal, the higher up the list the candidate goes as to me this demonstrates the candidates current knowledge of the community and work required to get something done.
ty! Starting this year, we did provide guidance for personal statements. We did it by splitting them into 3 fields on the candidate statement form, each with help text. See the whole form contents here. Specific fields:
A very short introduction*
Two to four sentences introducing yourself
Your skills, experience, insight and understanding*
Mention work, activities (volunteering, organising, contribution) and accomplishments that you think are relevant. Feel free to add links. Suggested length 100-250 words.
The direction you will bring to the leadership of the DSF*
Your position on key issues, challenges you can help the DSF negotiate, things you want the DSF to do, things you personally want to achieve or get involved in. Suggested length 100-350 words.
On current goals / challenges / in progress, yeah definitely more explicitly encouraging candidates to review the minutes would help. We have a set of “evergreen” foundation goals. We do have a “2025 goals” buried in our 2024 annual impact report - Our plans in 2025 and beyond. You really have to know it’s there though.
Ah perfect! I think it would be sensible to highlight the short term goals (including those not attached to funding) and reading in the minutes for next year then.
Maybe the personal experience should have a counter for submitters - I see they suggest lengths, but this years personal statements range from 32 words @ 3 sentences to 427 words @ 20 sentences. While this this may have to do with English proficiency, such a gap makes it feels like some candidates put a lot more work into their personal statements than others.
ty for the suggestion! Do you think the concise ones put more work in, or the long ones? Do you wish we encouraged the short statements to be longer, or the long statements to be shorter? I don’t believe Google Forms supports word counts, but we could encourage candidates to actually use a word counter.
Personally I’d say it’s a good thing that we feel like some people put a lot more work into this than others, because that’s probably true? But happy to hear other perspectives
I felt i had no way to know, and thus no reason to vote for those that had minimal info. Maybe a absolute minimum of 200-300 word total/100 word per field for the three fields?
I am unsure about a minimum word count. If someone wants to put 10 words in, it makes my voting easier.
For me the underlying concern is, does everyone have a strong understanding of what the role entails, the expectations and where there’s room to be ambitious (for a lack of a better word)? My assumption is no considering there are short candidate statements.
Having a minimum response length likely wouldn’t communicate those expectations.
I’m in favor of not having a minimum. I understand wanting to filter candidates with 10 words that don’t really know what they are getting in, but short of some group like the board filtering them out (which is a bad idea), I don’t see how.
I’d rather have 10 words than having to read 200 words of someone who I still feel doesn’t understand what the board does and what does the role imply.
A possible consideration, although I’m not sure is the best idea, is that now that becoming a DSF member is much easier and less gatekeepy, there could be a consideration on having to be a DSF member to be a candidate.
Which makes me wonder, have we had any elected members that weren’t a DSF member already in the last few years?
Yeah, we don’t want people to pad just meet an arbitrary limit. Also you can express a lot in 100 words if you try!
Re membership, I suspect it’s never happened that a non-member has been elected, or at least not in a while. As the membership grows, it takes a lot to be compelling to a large number of people to get elected. However - I think there’s a case it’s important to make it possible for non-members to be candidates, even if their odds are slim to none?
Publish more information about what the Board / the DSF / Board members do. In particular the non-profit management side.
Does the board have a set of current goals that are published somewhere? For example I know personally that hiring an ED is a current goal and not many of the candidates mention this, but they do mention aspirations that I think would be more doable once an ED is hired.
Another alternative here would be a list of the challenges/in progress work. Or recommend/require candidates to read the Board meeting minutes for the last 6 months?
On our list of candidates on the website, it’s in a random order – could we change the randomizing so it’s stable between page reloads?
On our list of candidates on the website, could we / should we have an “export to CSV” feature?
Can we change how our elections’ vote redistribution happens, so there is no advantage however small given to late votes
Have contacted RankedVote asking if this is possible - switch to randomized redistribution, compromises replicability for the benefit of fairness.
Can we change our voting mechanism so you can avoid voting at all on candidates you don’t want to be elected
Have contacted RankedVote for advice. Problem would be if people voted for too few candidates and this created stalemates
Considering alternatives to RankedVote (see other feedback points)
Consider if we should restrict candidates to DSF members to reduce the low-quality applications, at the risk of gatekeeping
Stop
Nothing?
Continue
DSF Members contacts
Let members know about the elections ahead of time via email
Share the election results with members via email
Application form refinements
One of the nominations we received was done on behalf of someone else, could be worth clarifying further that individuals are meant to nominate themselves (getting help is fine)
Lots of statements focus more on tech skills than they should, unclear how clear it is to candidates that the Board isn’t where technical decisions are made
we’re preparing for the next Board elections of the Django Software Foundation and we could use help!
if you want to get involved, if you have questions, if you want to run and need advice - feel free to reply in this thread, or contact me in private, or email foundation (at) djangoproject.com.
Do you wish we encouraged the short statements to be longer, or the long statements to be shorter? I don’t believe Google Forms supports word counts, but we could encourage candidates to actually use a word counter.
Use elections@ email alias as the public point of contact too, with more people having access?