Simon Willison’s Weblog

If we had $1,000,000…. Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave my favorite talk at DjangoCon this year, imagining what the Django Software Foundation could do if it quadrupled its annual income to $1 million and laying out a realistic path for getting there. Jacob suggests leaning more into large donors than increasing our small donor base:

It’s far easier for me to picture convincing eight or ten or fifteen large companies to make large donations than it is to picture increasing our small donor base tenfold. So I think a major donor strategy is probably the most realistic one for us.

So when I talk about major donors, who am I talking about? I’m talking about four major categories: large corporations, high net worth individuals (very wealthy people), grants from governments (e.g. the Sovereign Tech Fund run out of Germany), and private foundations (e.g. the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who’s given grants to the PSF in the past).

Also included: a TIL on Turning a conference talk into an annotated presentation. Jacob used my annotated presentation tool to OCR text from images of keynote slides, extracted a Whisper transcript from the YouTube livestream audio and then cleaned that up a little with LLM and Claude 3.5 Sonnet ("Split the content of this transcript up into paragraphs with logical breaks. Add newlines between each paragraph.") before editing and re-writing it all into the final post.

# 8th October 2024, 7:59 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, whisper, llm, claude-3-5-sonnet, dsf

Thoughts on the Treasurer Role at Tech NonProfits. Will Vincent, Django Software Foundation treasurer from 2020-2022, explains what’s involved in the non-profit role with the highest level of responsibility and trust.

# 7th October 2024, 10:41 pm / django, dsf

Talking about Django’s history and future on Django Chat (via) Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss sat down with the Django Chat podcast team to talk about Django’s history, his recent return to the Django Software Foundation board and what he hopes to achieve there.

Here’s his post about it, where he used Whisper and Claude to extract some of his own highlights from the conversation.

# 21st March 2024, 12:42 am / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, podcasts, python, dsf

DSF calls for applicants for a Django Fellow. The Django Software Foundation employs contractors to manage code reviews and releases, responsibly handle security issues, coach new contributors, triage tickets and more.

This is the Django Fellows program, which is now ten years old and has proven enormously impactful.

Mariusz Felisiak is moving on after five years and the DSF are calling for new applicants, open to anywhere in the world.

# 20th January 2024, 8:35 am / django, open-source, dsf

PEP 8016 -- The Steering Council Model (via) The votes are in and Python has a new governance model, partly inspired by the model used by the Django Software Foundation. A core elected council of five people (with a maximum of two employees from any individual company) will oversee the project.

# 17th December 2018, 4:02 pm / django, open-source, python, dsf

DSF calls for applicants for a Django Fellow. This is a fantastic opportunity: the Django Software Foundation’s fellowship program is providing the opportunity for a new developer to get paid to work on Django 20-40 hours a week. Tim Graham has held this position full-time for the past three years and is looking to scale back to part-time, hence this new opportunity. Applications are due by December 18, 2017.

# 16th November 2017, 10:31 pm / django, dsf

New foundation for Django. Django now has its own nonprofit software foundation (courtesy of a bunch of tough paperwork by Jacob Kaplan-Moss), and fittingly the Lawrence-Journal World get the exclusive.

# 17th June 2008, 5:16 pm / django, jacob-kaplan-moss, ljworld, python, dsf