If we had $1,000,000… - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

A couple weeks ago I gave a talk at DjangoCon US about the finances of the Django Software Foundation. I wanted to give folks a high-level understanding of our current financial situation, and then imagine a world where we had a substantially-larger budget.

Once the video’s available (which should be any day now), I’ll post it here. Below, you can find a written version, with annotated slides and expanded notes.

You may also be interested in turning a conference talk into a blog post, the technical notes on how I turned the presentation into this post.

This talk today has three parts. I’m going to talk about the DSF’s budget, what it looks like today, where our money comes from, how we spend it. I’m going to imagine a world in which that budget magically gets quadrupled, and suddenly we have a million dollars to play with. What might we do? And I’m going to talk about what we might be able to do to get from here to there. There’s also a secret fourth part to this talk, but we’ll get to that.

This is a visualization of our finances as they stand today. This is a rough, simplified average — not exact — of what our cash flow looks like over the last five years (2024 is an estimate). It’s fairly accurate, but it’s not really intended to give you a down-to-the-dollar accounting. It’s more intended to give you a broad understanding of where the money comes from and where it goes.

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