SC Vote: Remove 18-month eligibility requirement

Django Internals
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Requesting a vote of the @steering_council for a change to DEP 12’s language.

Currently it states:

A history of substantive contributions to Django or the Django ecosystem. This history must begin at least 18 months prior to the individual’s candidacy for the Steering Council, and include substantive contributions in at least two of these bullet points:

I would like to change this to:

A history of substantive contributions to Django or the Django ecosystem. This history must include substantive contributions in at least two of these bullet points:

In other words, removing the requirement of beginning contributions 18 months in the past. This has been brought up as a blocker to people nominating themselves, and I think we’re more likely to get a better slate of candidates if we remove it.

So the question put to vote is: Shall the above wording change be adopted immediately into DEP 12?

I vote +1.

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There’s a PR with the suggested change here to help review/resolution:

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Has the Steering Council spoke with the DSF secretary? It should be possible to get a count of the number of qualified SC pre-nominations that have been received and determine if that number too low for folks’ comfort.

@thibaudcolas is that number something you can share publicly to help expedite this conversation?

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+1 from me. Thanks for formulating and creating the PR @ubernostrum and @carltongibson

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:melting_face: yes we need governance reform, but this isn’t the right way to go about it. @ubernostrum, it strikes me as inappropriate for a Steering Council member to put forward a proposal and call for a vote at the same time. This falls short of many aspects of the Steering Council’s role per the DEP 12 Specification:

While the Council SHOULD NOT define this direction entirely by itself, it should be the catalyst within the community for doing so - as such, it is expected for Council members to actively participate in engaging with the community canvassing for ideas about big new features or directions to take the framework, and reporting back to the community and the DSF Board on these ideas and if the Council believes they should be followed.

We’re way short on engaging with the community here, as we’re going straight from proposal to voting. We’re also way short on “reporting back to the community and the DSF Board”. As a DSF Board member, I reached out to the Steering Council six weeks ago based on pre-existing DSF Members discussions. I asked for any changes you’d want to see ahead of elections. James, you’ve never even just acknowledged the emails. I know you’ve been in the (DSF Members only) Preparing for the 6.x series Steering Council Election thread, loosely proposing what you’re carrying out now. It’d have been a sound proposal – if you’d taken the time to publish it and get others’ review over those 6 weeks that have elapsed.

And during that time – other SC members did engage with the community and the DSF Board, and we arrived at Andrew’s Steering Council - Early Election Vote. This new proposal is inappropriate on its own, but even moreso due to you presenting it in that early elections thread as a preamble to getting on with voting. I don’t think any of this should need explaining.

Where this leaves us

All in all - this leaves me with little to no confidence in the current Steering Council’s ability to function as a catalyst within the community. I’m sure I’m not alone here. If anything this just feels like yet another example of a bigger pattern. Please reconsider.

Do people want to go further with those governance changes? Please do, we need it. Personally I think it’s counter-productive at this point in time, but certainly in the long term we need to be more inclusive. The correct way to go about it – per DEP 10, is to follow what’s in Changing this governance process. This means following the process outlined in DEP 1, and a few things on top. It’s a hassle, lots of specifics in here that I dislike, but certainly those changes are worth spending proper time on.

@CodenameTim, re your question – as DSF Secretary, it was me doing the reaching out to the Steering Council, as part of preparing for upcoming elections. 8 days ago, I’ve shared the number of expressions of interest we’d received. There were 6 at the time which I thought would all be eligible. I was very clear that in my personal opinion we were ready for elections. Latest number is 8 eligible.

I’m not a fan of sharing this publicly as we currently have the 2025 DSF Board elections going on, and Django’s governance is confusing enough for everyone in the best of times. For official “Django” public comms my focus currently is the DSF Board elections, but am very happy to answer questions like this in private, “DSF members” spaces, or yes in public if need be. Same for other board members I’m sure.

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We’re way short on engaging with the community here, as we’re going straight from proposal to voting

I believe the consensus in the prior threads was that we should aim for a minimal governance change to loosen eligibility and encourage new people to run for the SC, and then run an election with that change in place. The 18-month requirement in particular has been brought up as a significant hurdle to recruiting new members, so I’m proposing we get rid of it.

You seem to be aware of that context, so I’m unsure why you’re coming in so aggressively against it here and now.

I asked for any changes you’d want to see ahead of elections. James, you’ve never even just acknowledged the emails.

For a while, every time someone tried to start a private forum or email thread with the SC I would point out that the SC’s business is to be conducted in public. These days I’ve largely given up on trying to remind folks about that and so I just participate in public.

This new proposal is inappropriate on its own, but even moreso due to you presenting it in that early elections thread as a preamble to getting on with voting. I don’t think any of this should need explaining.

Again: it seemed clear that the consensus in earlier threads was as summarized in this post: enact the minimal DEP change to loosen up requirements, and run an election focused on getting new people involved who can then tackle the larger problem of how to properly reform the technical governance.

For convenience’s sake, and to avoid further fractured discussion, I’m also going to respond to your other post here.

Seriously? That’s not per the DEP 10 voting process

As we’ve covered in prior threads, the current state of the SC means that until all of us have voted no vote closes. It’s unfortunate, but it’s where we are due to the fact that we didn’t recruit enough people last election.

you yourself shot that down and made plain the obvious risk that “currently each of us effectively has a veto”

I pointed out the risk, and also have consistently said that I don’t think adding a fifth member to the current group is going to be the solution we need. I have been extremely consistent in saying we need to enact a minimal eligibility change and run a full election, and at this point I don’t think it should be surprising that I’m trying to actually get that done.

I also think your approach and tone have been unnecessarily aggressive and have shown a tendency to needlessly escalate, and I’d ask you to reflect on that.

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Unfortunately, based on our current rules, such a proposal would require a DEP with the usual process followed first, as outlined in deps/final/0010-new-governance.rst at main · django/deps · GitHub.

As such, I believe this vote is invalid, and vote -1 as a result.

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I will write a DEP, then. Please keep an eye out for it — with any luck I’ll have it ready in a few hours so that we can all vote on it and then call the election.

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What seems inappropriate here is the timing.

Having sat on hands for the entire term, indeed having called for early elections since almost day one, to propose a process change after the vote for the elections is in place, and to use the unintended veto power arising to from the board being short handed to block that vote, having ignored an explicit suggestion to resolve that issue… well… it’s inappropriate. The time for such has gone. The issue at hand is electing the next SC.

There is massive appetite in the community to refresh the steering council, and elect a new one. There are already more than enough people showing willingness to stand. I would ask that you complete the vote on the early election, allow that to proceed and let the next SC propose whatever changes they think due.

The sooner this term draws to a close, the better for everyone.

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Once again: it seemed to me in prior threads there was a consensus around making a change to the eligibility requirements.

And if we’re going to be hard-line absolute sticklers for procedural correctness, DEP 10 does not allow us to both call for an early election and also set its date in the future – it just allows us to trigger an immediate election. So by the reasoning @andrewgodwin has given in this thread, the request in the other thread to trigger an election is invalid and must be rejected.

The 18-month requirement is something I’ve seen cited multiple times, publicly and privately, as an obstacle to recruiting new people. As I see it, we have one good opportunity to try to recruit a new and more diverse group of candidates and elect a group who will provide the next generation of Django’s technical leadership, and we should do what we can to make it go as well as we possibly can. And, for like the fifth time in these threads, it seems everybody previously agreed the eligibility criteria were too strict and need to be fixed!

So the insistence that we must rush to trigger an urgent emergency ASAP election that won’t even start accepting nominations until a month from now while also not fixing the eligibility criteria – which literally just takes tweaking a sentence or two in the DEP that could be merged immediately-- makes very little sense to me.

As I see it, if we’re going to bend the procedures to allow triggering an election but also putting it off for a significant period of time, we can also bend them to tweak the eligibility requirements without requiring a full DEP process. And if we’re not going to bend procedures for one, we should not bend procedures for the other.

So, @andrewgodwin could you maybe explain what would need to happen to get you to a +1 on the eligibility changes?

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I would want a community discussion around it - specifically, we enacted the 18 month rule for a reason, and I would want people to weigh in as to what it should be reduced to, or if it should actually be eliminated entirely.

I’d personally just like to shorten it - say to six months or so - rather than eliminate it entirely, as I do think there should be some minimum bar to prevent very simple populism, but if the rest of the community gets a chance to weigh in and it’s near-unanimously “remove it”, I’d happily follow that.

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Are you willing to delay the election however long it takes to get that consensus?

Would your view that careful community deliberation and near-unanimous consensus are required change at all if I told you that the 18-month thing is in there solely because I wanted some kind of specified time period to prevent trolls from showing up and demanding to be taken seriously as candidates? Because that’s literally the only reason for it. No deliberative community process produced that clause, as with most of DEP 10 (because in general I was the only person who was willing to put in the effort to write a new governance document, so just whatever I was thinking was good was what ended up in there).

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Again: if we want to take care to follow procedures precisely and to the exact letter, we can, but that’s going to basically end any hope of running an early election. If running an early election is seen as an important goal, we need to fix the eligibility criteria and we need to do that first to ensure we don’t trigger an election that ends up running under the current too-tight criteria.

Or if running an election isn’t seen as important, we can just go on as-is until the 5.2 release triggers an election automatically. I don’t think that sends a great message – it says we’re talking a lot about wanting to recruit more and newer people, but also unwilling to actually make any changes to help the SC become more accessible and welcoming.

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@ubernostrum Thanks for your reply.

That seems to be (symptomatic of) the problems DEP 10 has faced, wouldn’t you agree?
Having the election when proposed is clearly (it seems to me) sensible, and if our governing doc doesn’t allow that, that’s a problem with the doc. (It’s not flexible enough for our actual conversations as a community.)

Given there’s a month or so, the dynamics of this conversation look a lot different if it’s “Yes, the election is agreed, let’s do it then” — but then, quickly, Do we as a community want to make small changes to eligibility requirements before we hold the vote?

That change may only be a question of tone, but it seems we could still hold that conversation (bar a rubber stamp) outside of the SC voting mechanism, which doesn’t allow any input really, it being all +1/-1 on a specific phrasing, and not welcoming to other engagement.

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Given there’s a month or so, the dynamics of this conversation look a lot different if it’s “Yes, the election is agreed, let’s do it then” — but then, quickly, Do we as a community want to make small changes to eligibility requirements before we hold the vote?

I thought there was agreement in prior threads that we do want to tweak the eligibility. But now that it’s actually been proposed there’s opposition to it.

Anyway, I want to clarify one thing. In your earlier post you said:

Having sat on hands for the entire term, indeed having called for early elections since almost day one

I did raise concerns basically from day one, and then was explicitly told, by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on behalf of and speaking with the authority of the DSF Board, to stop.

It took a nearly-failed SC vote for others to start realizing we were in a bad place with the partial group the last election produced, and I was happy when other people finally started to make noise about trying to get it fixed, because that whole time I felt like I wasn’t allowed to bring the subject up again.

I still think we need to fix the eligibility before we hold an election. I also think it’s not hard, and if we’re willing to bend the rules on calling elections we should be willing to bend them for the eligibility change too. And then the new group can figure out how they want Django to be run.

I’ve been saying that for I don’t know how long now. I just want to get it done and move on, and I’m tired of being yelled at about it.

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Thank you for engaging here. Aside from timing, yes the problem as I see it is there’s a big gap between a consensus on loosening eligibility requirements, and any specific new wording to that effect. As @andrewgodwin says, we need a community discussion around the specifics. Not the Steering Council voting on their own.

This makes for a more appropriate proposal, but still means you’re holding up a vote with another proposal. You could just vote against / -1 what’s put forward if you don’t think it’s right.

If you think something doesn’t look right, say it as you see it. From my perspective there is no rules bending. “Shall an election of the Steering Council occur?” was the specific question put forward by @andrewgodwin, the rest is just context. The dates specifically, are the ones we’ve been working on for weeks now [private DSF Members]. Please follow up in that thread or over the “SC + DSF Board” email if you think the dates need changing.

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To provide some candid clarity on my +1, it was given in complete unawareness that this was proposed as a way to hold the early election voting process hostage.

I wrongly assumed that the early PR proposal was a demonstration of alignment and since the issue of the 18-month eligibility was previously discussed and gathered some consensus it seemed like a change that was done, in good will, to encourage even further applications to the council and not as a way to stall efforts even more.

In light of the apparent motives behind these changes I retract my +1 for a -1.

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Even though I haven’t followed this discussion much in the last few months, I’ve tried to recover all the threads, and I’d like to add a reflection of mine too.

Since there were only 4 candidates in the last SC election, a method is rightly being sought to ensure that more people run for the next elections, with the aspiration of having a renewed and more diverse SC.

I am completely in favor of this intent, but I don’t think that the 18-month requirement for eligibility was at all the reason for the few candidacies in the last election.

I’ll try to explain why I think this:

In the wake of the invitation to run for the elections for the new board in October 2022, in particular during DjangoCon US, I decided to make myself available to the community and I ran for one of the available positions, and 30 other candidates did the same for me.

Unfortunately, after the elections, but also a little during the voting, some people complained on various channels that there were too many candidates, and that people were over-invited to run.

Personally, I took this disrespectful attitude towards those who ran, and in the subsequent elections for the SC, I avoided running to avoid a repetition of the situation of the board voting.

Obviously, I was not the only one to have felt this, if we then only had 4 candidates in the voting.

For this reason, I do not think that the underlying problem of the lack of candidates is the 18-month limit, but more simply the communication, of the DSF, or of individuals, who proceeded with the voting. If there had not been so many complaints about the large number of candidates in the board voting, I am sure that we would have had more candidates for the SC voting.

Also, the climate that is felt before these SC elections this year, I do not think will encourage people to run.

Sorry for the long reflections, I leave you with two considerations:

  1. if we really care about having a renewal of people in the various bodies of the DSF, with more diversity, we should be happy to have many candidates for an election and not complain, because this discourages those who, overcoming the feeling of inadequacy or the impostor syndrome, have taken the big step of making themselves available to the community, reading a few more proposals during an election seems to me a small effort to make to have a more diverse representation

  2. if we want to encourage more people to run, let’s try to create a serene and community situation close to such an important election as that of the SC. In 2023, it was not like that, at least for me, and I think we are still feeling the consequences today.

Ciao,
Paolo

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The DEP 10 process doesn’t give us the authority to set the dates of the election. It just gives us the authority to trigger an election. As the author of it, I can tell you the intent was that an election would occur immediately according to the timeline given in the DEP (and this is consistent across all the election-triggering mechanisms). So triggering an election and then putting it off for over a month is not really something the DEP would allow under strict interpretation.

I’m personally willing to accept bending the rules a bit to get the election done because I think it’s important and I’ve been a proponent of triggering an early election, but I also thought we had consensus in earlier threads that we wanted to loosen the eligibility requirements as part of calling an election, and I want to make sure that happens. If that’s going to be voted down by the SC due to a need for strict compliance to DEP procedures, I don’t see how we can proceed with the election call, both because I’d understood the eligibility change and the election to be part of an overall consensus plan to be implemented together, and because I think it’d be inconsistent of the SC to allow bending rules for one but not for the other.

As I’ve said multiple times, I thought we did have alignment on making this change, which was why I proposed it. I think we should do this, and I think it’s important that we do both things – fixing the eligibility requirement, and calling the early election (and, again, I thought the consensus was we would do both, which is why I opened this vote in the first place, to make sure we got both of them done – I thought we’d just all +1 it quickly, merge the wording change, and then we could call the election, but that has been thoroughly derailed).

The assumption of malicious intent here and in other posts is inappropriate and should cease immediately.

I don’t think it was the only reason. But I have heard it mentioned as a reason why people might have felt they weren’t eligible or shouldn’t run. And in the previous threads we had what I thought was consensus around making a change to the eligibility requirements to help encourage more people to run.

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Understood. I’ll do that in the future.