DSF initiatives I'd like to see

Nominations are open for the 2025 Django Software Foundation Board of Directors.

Following Sarah Boyce’s lead, here’s my list of DSF initiatives I’d like to see for 2024.

One big sponsor

Something I’ve heard in the past is that we don’t ask for enough money from companies to be worth their time. So let’s find a way to ask for it. One way is to define a global Django sponsor for. They would have top sponsorship at every DjangoCon across the world. We could even put some branding on the release notes of a major version. We would need to identify what exactly the company wants before making the pitch. In exchange, we should be able to fund a Fellow and provide a baseline level of sponsorship to each DjangoCon.

More community recognition

An easy way to provide community recognition is to provide more awards. This will take people effort, but allows the community to shine the light on people who represent our ideals.

Some ideas of new awards are:

• People who are making efforts to make Django more diverse
• The person(s) with the most impactful change of a major version
• Fresh face award, who has made a large community impact while being relatively new

Continue focusing on working groups

The working groups are a fantastic directive. I think some more celebrating (easy mode marketing) and calls to action would help though. Keeping them front of mind, recognizing their work and delegating tasks feels like it could help the Django community tremendously.