Django’s technical governance challenges, and opportunities | Weblog | Django

As of October 29th, two of four members of the Django Software Foundation Steering Council have resigned from their role, with their intentions being to trigger an election of the Steering Council earlier than otherwise scheduled, per our established governance processes.

To our departing members, Simon and Adam, thank you for your contributions to Django and its governance ❤️. The framework and our community owes a lot to your dedication, and we’re confident our community will join us in celebrating your past contributions – and look forward to learning about your future endeavors in the Django ecosystem. And thanks to the remaining members, James and Andrew, for their service over the years.

Governance in open source is hard, and community-driven open source even more so. We’re proud that Django’s original two Benevolent Dictators For Life (BDFLs) both retired from the role and turned things over to community governance ten years ago now. The BDFL model can provide  excellent technical governance, but also has its flaws. So the  mantle of technical governance then went on to the Core Developers and the Technical Board (renamed to Steering Council) was introduced.

However, time has revealed flaws in the Steering Council’s governance model and operations. The Steering Council was able to provide decision-making – tiebreaking when the developer community couldn’t lead to consensus – but didn’t provide more forward-looking leadership or vision. Disagreements over how – or if – the Steering Council should approach this part of leadership led us to the current situation, with no functioning technical governance as of a few weeks ago. Even before those recent events, those flaws were also a common source of frustration for our contributors, and a source of concern for Django users who (rightly or not) might have expectations of Django’s direction – such as the publication of a “roadmap” for Django development.

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