I want to offer a perspective from outside the Django community.

> I also saw the relative lack of candidates for Board elections and 
essentially thought "better burnt-out me than literally nobody".

I appreciate Andrew's honesty here. I have been a volunteer on our local 
mountain rescue team for about 20 years. That has involved ongoing work 
with our local fire department, which includes EMS and dive rescue 
divisions as well. It also involves work with rescue teams from around 
Alaska, the US, and the rest of the world.

On our local team, many of us have been feeling badly because our numbers 
are down. People have left the team in recent years, and we have had a 
really hard time finding new members. We all start to think we're not doing 
enough, and not doing our work well enough. But when we start to talk to 
each other, we find that this is a widespread issue. Volunteerism is down 
all over the place: in all of the divisions of our department, in various 
regions of our state, and across the country. I'm less clear on how things 
are playing out outside the US. We are having ongoing discussions on how to 
maintain an effective rescue team with all of this in mind. It's not as 
simple as "offer better training", "have more social events", or "implement 
a recruiting drive". We are working towards reframing our team not based on 
the capacities that volunteers had 25 years ago when the team was forming, 
but based on the capacities that people have in our community today.

I don't claim to know if this relates to what we're seeing with the two 
Django boards. But I and others have wanted to step back from our mountain 
rescue leadership positions, and we find ourselves staying in these roles 
for exactly the reason Andrew mentioned here: there's no one ready to 
replace us.

I think the discussions here are moving in the right direction. We are 
looking at the community we have, and figuring out how to build and 
maintain an active leadership group based on the current capacities of our 
community members.

Eric Matthes




On Tuesday, October 25, 2022 at 7:31:14 AM UTC-8 Andrew Godwin wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2022, at 12:12 AM, James Bennett wrote:
>
>
> My first reaction to this is: if having a DEP that says the Technical 
> Board is supposed to take the lead in gathering feature proposals didn't 
> get them to do it, it doesn't feel like another DEP saying they're 
> responsible for that is going to fix it.
>
>
> I agree. Me proposing the DEP changes is mostly merely formalising some 
> other changes I want to catalyse here - the DEP is an outcome, not the 
> start, here.
>
> Getting burned out or overcommitted is a thing that happens, and a thing 
> that was anticipated in drafting the governance -- DEP 10 has a procedure 
> for it!
>
> Why did no member of the Technical Board do that?
>
>
> Again, speaking for myself - because we were doing almost all the 
> functions of the Board except for the feature canvassing. I also saw the 
> relative lack of candidates for Board elections and essentially thought 
> "better burnt-out me than literally nobody".
>
> And from the sound of what you're saying in this thread, the Technical 
> Board is mostly communicating with itself about this, in private, when the 
> direction of Django is supposed to be worked out publicly and 
> transparently. That's why we shut down the old private communication spaces 
> for the former "core team" after DEP 10 was adopted.
>
>
> That is not the case - this thread is the majority of the discussion. I 
> opened a thread on the TB mailing list in case people there wanted to give 
> specific, blunt feedback about how they would feel about being affected by 
> this as current Board members, but it has only a couple of replies, and 
> nothing that hasn't been discussed here.
>
> So forgive me for being blunt, but: if the Technical Board is not 
> following the governance we have, I think replacing the Technical Board's 
> current membership should be higher on the list of remedies than replacing 
> the governance.
>
>
> Forgive me for being blunt but... that seems like a really bad idea? The 
> current board ran uncontested, so if all five of us step down I suspect 
> there may not *be* a Board at the end of the day. The DSF Board's current 
> difficulties finding candidates I think reinforces that fact - one of the 
> changes I was considering bringing in here was "what if we have to reduce 
> the TB to 4 or 3 people in the near future".
>
> Again, I'm not saying "we should write a new DEP and *that'll* fix it", 
> I'm trying to come from a position of working out what we can and should be 
> *doing*, and then ensuring our rules match that.
>
> Andrew
>
>

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