On the importance of DjangoCons

I mentioned this on Django Chat this week, but I wasn’t pleased with how I remember it¹. I don’t know if I communicated my opinions and ideas as well as I’d like. So I’m going to use this post to express my opinions more fully. There are several motivating factors for this.

1. I’m on the board of directors for Django Events Foundation North America (DEFNA)
2. I’ve been an organizer for DjangoCon US the past two years
3. DjangoCon Europe had some difficulties finding organizers
4. DjangoCon Africa is coming back for 2025
5. DjangoCon US had fewer sponsors
6. DjangoCon US attendance hasn’t risen to pre-pandemic levels
7. The Django Software Foundation (DSF) board elections are in about one month
8. The Django Steering Council (SC) elections are in five months

The benefits to an individual

• Networking

  Being at a conference allows you to meet new folks. These folks can become close friends, trusted sounding boards, and provide you with opportunities in the future. Those opportunities can cascade and result in a dramatically different life than you would have thought possible.

• Self-improvement

  A conference is a great place for self-improvement. Through interacting with new people, you begin to see differences and similarities to yourself. Performing some self-reflection will identify things you may want to change or double-down on. Additionally, there are ample opportunities to be introduced to a new way of thinking. These may resonate with you, leading you down a path towards a better you.

• A sense of community and belonging

  DjangoCons provide a safe space for collaboration and interaction about software and the world. There’s a general feeling of wanting to improve things that permeates the conference. This feeling is infectious. The general welcoming and inviting nature of a DjangoCon makes you feel like you belong. Like you’re where you should be. It’s truly impressive when you consider the Django community is a global one.

The benefits for contributors

• Feedback

  DjangoCons provide ample opportunity for you to solicit feedback on your ideas and work. Being able to talk to someone face-to-face allows for deeper conversations and more nuance. This improves your communication and will help you understand where your understanding could be improved. This also provides you perspective. There are times when your experiences and understanding can limit you to seeing a problem from a limited number of angles. By talking to others who want to see you and your project succeed, you can see the problem from a multitude of perspectives. This allows you to produce something more well-rounded and accessible to more people.

• Opportunities

  DjangoCons provide you with a platform. You may be selected as a presenter for a talk or workshop. In these cases, you’re given a lot of time and attention to speak about your idea. Alternatively, you could be selected for a lightning talk. The highly focused nature of this is great. It reduces your talking points down into a concise five minutes. Or maybe you host an open space where people informally gather to discuss your topic. Open spaces are fantastic for brainstorming and discovering new perspectives. Lastly, don’t discount the hallway track opportunities. Speaking with random people and getting to know them may help you understand something new. Or perhaps there’s a sponsor who has an offering that may be ripe for collaboration. Being in the same physical space and repeatedly running into people as they are all feeling the collaborative energy is the best way to find serendipity. From there you can find collaborators and future leaders for your project.

• Rejuvenation

  DjangoCons are a place to receive positive affirmations and gratitude. There are several people out there who have heard of you and your work, but haven’t found the platform to thank you properly. It’s weird to send an email or a DM out of the blue thanking you for something². This acknowledgement of your efforts will refill your cup. It provides you with the emotional sustenance to continue to volunteer time and effort³. Or maybe someone gives you the space to step back from your work. What else can happen is that when you express gratitude or amazement of someone else, they then respond in kind. Having a person who you look up to in the community reflect appreciation back towards you is like feeling the warm sun on your face⁴. If burnout is the lack of emotional return on volunteer community investment, then DjangoCon is a strong preventive medicine.

The benefits for the community

• Energy

  The Django community will continue to thrive as long as there’s an energy to sustain it. The distributed and fractured nature of a democratic, volunteer-based organization means we have many people thinking and doing similar, but different things. These efforts either need a constant source of energy or a large battery. The DjangoCons are well suited to recharging that battery (see rejuvenation). This energy is critically important from the DSF Board to package maintainers to people who just want to put a site up on the web. This creates the forward momentum that keeps Django relevant, modern and successful.

• Productivity

  A DjangoCon typically involves the ability to temporarily disconnect from other concerns of life. This allows the community to focus more intensely on their various endeavors. This amount of acute focus can produce fantastic results for the community. This can result in new initiatives, new features, better cross-team collaboration or even cleaning up some gnarly technical debt that’s been around for years. It’s difficult to predict how the community will utilize its focus during a DjangoCon, but it’s always moving the ship forward.

• Consensus building

  Django has been around for a very long time. It is difficult to make large changes. There are several perspectives to be considered, and there are likely several sites depending on every intended and unintended feature of Django. Trying to address these entirely asynchronously requires time and significant energy. DjangoCons provide the opportunity for folks to meet face-to-face, communicate more fully, and resolve any disputes. The energy and feel of a DjangoCon puts everyone in a mood to focus on what’s best and to find a way to compromise. This is because people are typically fully engaged in the conference atmosphere. They typically aren’t dealing with the pressures of life and work. Instead, they can put their full mental strength towards the problem at hand to find a solution to a difficult problem.

The benefits for a company sending its people

• Recruitment

  A DjangoCon is a fantastic opportunity for recruitment, though perhaps we can do a better job of it⁵. Even without a formal structure, a person who is looking to hire folks can make it known and find potential candidates.

• Employee satisfaction

  If your company doesn’t have a large technical presence, it can be difficult to give your engineers the sense of camaraderie or self-improvement of a larger company. By supporting and encouraging your engineers to attend and fully immerse themselves at a DjangoCon, you can provide that to a limited degree (see rejuvenation). This is an intrinsic benefit for your employee and can help retain them, reducing turnover, lowering costs and improving your throughput.

• Infrastructure

  If your product is using Django, it’s going to be fairly difficult to replace it with another framework. It’s certainly possible and well known that large products and organizations end up forking Django to produce their own library, but for the majority of companies, Django is used as is. This means that you’re constantly benefiting from now only the Django Fellows, but also the broader volunteer community. Django is built to make your engineers more productive in less time. By using the Django ecosystem, you’re augmenting your workforce with dozens, if not hundreds of people’s efforts. DjangoCons (see all points above) help ensure that their efforts are sustainable and continued.

What to do understanding the importance of DjangoCon

Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that DjangoCons are a critical component to the Django community. I feel that those of us who are in community organizer roles should revisit our approaches to DjangoCon.

Warning, personal opinions inbound

In my ideal world, all the following would be true:

1. The DSF and all DjangoCons have a large, multi-year sponsorship opportunity

   Sponsorship is challenging. At times, we’re being told we’re not asking for enough money. And we’re also being asked to provide even more benefits. I think the DSF having an arrangement with at least one company for a multi-year sponsorship that results in a baseline level of sponsorship for each DjangoCon would help tremendously. There are several details that would need to be resolved. This is also likely something we’d need an Executive Director for, but it’s something I’d love to see.

2. DjangoCons are well attended by community leaders and be available to folks

   Being able to meet and talk to folks you look up to is one of the major benefits to a DjangoCon. I think it’s important for our community organizers to be aware of the impact you may have on others and to pay it forward when it’s sustainable. I’d argue this is near critical for any elected members of the community. To help make this an easier choice for folks, the DSF should have a line item to cover at least a portion of an elected member’s travel to one DjangoCon.

3. DjangoCons and various community groups are better coordinated for collaboration and cross-marketing

   The DjangoCons can do a better job of helping people identify their local Django and Python meetups. We could start by reaching out to those communities to ask if they are sending anyone to the conference and if they’d like to be listed on the conference website. In return, they’d be asked (not required) to announce key dates on behalf of the conference (CFP, tickets on sale, talks announced, talks published). From here, my hope would be that the regular communication would evolve into something more robust and collaborative. Potentially making it easier to find volunteers to host a DjangoCon in the future.

4. DjangoCons are more prominently marketed on the djangoproject.com and various community groups’ pages

   When a person is looking to get involved in the community, we should be telling them when the next major and regional Django events are happening. Additionally, I think it’d be a good idea to normalize package maintainers and community organizers to be able to advertise their presence at the conference. This could be a simple list of affiliation, name and link on the particular DjangoCons page. On the community member side, it should be more common to announce that you will be at said public event. This can improve both your opportunities for collaboration and discovery. It also benefits the DjangoCon by lending it additional legitimacy by showing that looked up to community members find it important enough to announce their attendance.

I understand some of these can only be implemented by a select number of people. However, with elections coming up, it’s essential to consider what you want to see out of the Board for the future of Django. The others are more accessible. Anyone can open a PR against djangoproject.com. Anyone can be an organizer for a conference to help on the website and community teams.

Personally, I will be attempting to do a better job of #3. It’s an easy win, and I’m currently well positioned to improve that. So if you’re a community organizer that would like to improve collaboration with DjangoCon US, please let me know.

You can find me on the Fediverse, Django Discord server, or reach me via email.