DSF Individual Membership FAQ

More information and frequently-asked questions about becoming an Individual Member of the DSF.

To apply or nominate someone else, please fill out the DSF Membership Nomination form.

What does it mean to be a "member"?

DSF membership recognizes substantial contributions to the Django community. Think of it as a virtual “thank you” card from the DSF and the Django community.

Membership also gives you some special privileges:

• You get to vote in DSF elections. This includes elections for the DSF Board as well as the Technical Steering Council. Future working groups may also have elected members, and if we go in that way, it’ll be the Membership that votes.
• You get access to a private DSF Members forum and DSF private discord channel. This is a good place to discuss things the DSF is (or should be) doing with the board, talk about the future of the DSF, etc.
• The DSF Membership serves as a sort of distributed advisory council for the Board. When we’re considering new ideas, we’ll run them by the membership first if we need feedback or to sort of take the temperature of our most committed users.

We have plans to make this list of benefits longer over time. We’ve thought about special members-only swag (stickers, shirts, etc.), discounts on tickets to Django events, members-only online presentations or discussions, etc. etc. To be clear: this is all super-speculative right now, but we really hope we’ll be able to pull some of that off.

What qualifies someone for membership?

In a nutshell, the DSF wants to see “material” contributions to the DSF’s mission of developing or promoting Django, protecting the framework’s long-term viability, and/or advancing the state of the art in web development. This is deliberately broad and inclusive: we want to allow as broad a definition of “contribution” as possible – including, critically, contributions to the community as well as code contributions. But we do want those contributions to be “material”: we don’t believe that minimal, one-off efforts should qualify someone for membership.

We’re looking for contributions that are substantial or sustained (or both). So a single high-impact contribution (e.g. organizing a DjangoCon or contributing a major chunk of code), or many smaller contributions over a long period of time (e.g. consistently answering questions on the Django forum or Discord, or many small bug fixes over a longer time period).

If you’re not sure: please apply anyway! We generally try to err on the side of saying “yes”.

Since the precise line is hard to define, here are some examples of things that generally do and do not qualify for membership:

Examples of contributions that do qualify for membership:

• Being part of the organizing team for a Django community event (conference, meetup, tutorial, etc.). Both virtual and in-person events count! Examples include DjangoCons, DjangoGirls workshops, local Django meetups, development or contribution sprints, etc. These events should be open to the public to be applicable — company-internal events generally don’t count unless they’re open to the local public.
• Serving on a DSF working group.
• Contributing code to Django itself or to a third-party Django app. We’ll want to see that this contribution is somewhat substantial: either a single large/complex contribution, or sustained history (months) of smaller contributions.
• Maintaining a third-party Django app or package in the broader Django ecosystem. We’ll take a very broad view of this: if you maintain any sort of Python tool that is broadly useful to Django developers, it counts. We’ll probably also count related technologies that Django developers widely use – database utilities, front-end tools, WSGI/ASGI servers, etc. If you work on a thing that helps make Django developers' lives easier, it counts. This includes contributing to Python itself, core Python infrastructure like PyPI, tools that Django developers often use like Read the Docs, and so on.
• Contributing to third-party apps. This is basically a merge of the previous two points: if you contribute substantially to an app that’s useful to Django developers, you qualify as a member.
• Creating learning resources for people that use Django. This means official stuff like writing documentation (for Django or for related code), but also external things like books, blog posts, YouTube tutorials, etc. These need to be publicly-available resources. Both paid and free are fine, but company-internal material typically won’t count. As with code contributions we want to see something substantial or sustained – so e.g. a single TikTok about Django probably doesn’t apply, but if you’ve been TikToking about Django for many months, first of all very cool, and second, yes that applies.
• An extensive history of answering Django-related questions on the Django Forum, StackOverflow, Reddit, Django Discord, etc. We’ll want to see many months of sustained activity here, simply answering a few questions won’t quite qualify, but long-term peer-to-peer assistance like this totally counts.
• Serving as a moderator on Django community spaces like the Forum, official Discord, etc.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, there will be things that qualify that aren’t on this list. It’s just a set of common examples.

Examples of contributions that do not qualify for membership:

• Financial support. You can absolutely donate to become a corporate member, but individual membership isn’t for sale.
• Using Django at your job, or for side projects. We love everyone who uses Django, and thank you for your support, but membership recognizes those who give back in some way.
• Attending a Django tutorial/workshop, reading a book or taking a course on Django, and other related learning activities.
• Single, one-off contributions of code or documentation, unless they’re large. A single pull request, or a single blog post about Django doesn’t clear the bar. We’re looking for either substantial or sustained – a big contribution, or many smaller ones over a long period of time.

Can I nominate someone else for membership?

Yes, please do!

In fact, nominations are one of the key ways we’re looking to grow membership. We tend to quickly approve nominations by existing members – it’s a sort of “web of trust” thing. If you believe that someone you know qualifies to be a member, please nominate them! We’ll tend to trust your judgment.

Do I need to keep contributing to keep my membership?

I mean, we really hope you will, but no. Once you’re a member, it’s a lifetime recognition.