Django Fellowship Program
The biggest expense of the DSF is the Django Fellowship program. It's a project where paid contractors are engaged to manage some of the administrative and community management tasks of the Django project to support rapid development of Django itself.
The Django Fellowship program has a major positive impact on how Django is developed and maintained. The Django Fellows triage 10-15 new tickets each week and review and merge around fifteen non-trivial patches a week from the community. Release blocking and severe bugs aren't postponed indefinitely. Major releases happen according to an 8 month schedule and bug fix releases occur monthly.
For more details, you can read retrospectives for the first three months of the program, 2015, and 2016.
The Django Fellows are a resource to help review patches and contributions from the community, and the community loves that:
As a long time contributor to Django, I’m extremely happy to see how the fellowship empowered all contributors and leveraged their work. The development of Django was stunningly smooth, fast and efficient during the last three months. 1.8 alpha was released on schedule, which was unheard of until then. 1.8 is shaping up to be a great release.
Fellows guided the first steps of novice contributors — who may have seen their initiatives ignored otherwise. They took patches through as many review rounds as needed, relentlessly teaching Django’s guidelines and principles — where a hurried core developer may have simply made whatever changes they wanted, committed and moved on. They provided feedback on patches written by experienced contributors or core developers — allowing quick merges without shunting the review process.
I’m especially grateful to Tim Graham who reviewed within a day every pull request I submitted for my multiple template engines project. Without his constant help, I couldn’t have made the deadline for 1.8 without jeopardizing quality.
Thanks to the faster turnaround on reviews, not only did the fellowship program solve most pain points of Django’s contribution process, but it also increased quality. I hope we can resume it shortly and make it sustainable!
Aymeric Augustin, Django Core Developer
If you use Django on a daily basis and care about the development of Django itself, you should donate today (may be tax deductible). Only with your support can we make sure that the web framework you base your work on can grow to be even better in the coming years.
Django Girls Outreach
Supporting Django Girls workshops is a significant priority for the Django Software Foundation. Django Girls workshops are organized by volunteers and are provided as free events for women who want to learn to code. The workshop serves as an introduction to Python and Django, where attendees learn usable skills to build their first web app.
Django Girls workshop attendees go on to organize their own workshops, lead in their community, and secure full-time jobs as developers. Read their stories in the “Your Django Story” series on the Django Girls blog.
What is the Django Software Foundation?
Development of Django is supported by an independent foundation established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Like most open-source foundations, the goal of the Django Software Foundation is to promote, support, and advance the Django web framework. If you're interested in how the Django Software Foundation supports the Django web framework, we published a Summary of 2014.
Who are the Django Fellows?
There are currently three Django Fellows:
Jacob Walls (2025-present) - a member of Django's triage and review team since 2021 and a core committer to Python projects such as music21, pylint, and Arches. Jacob began as a full-time Fellow in August 2025.
Sarah Boyce (2024-present) - an active community member, co-creator of Djangonaut Space and a member of Django's review and triage team since 2023. Sarah began as a full-time Fellow in April 2024.
Natalia Bidart (2023-present) - a seasoned Django user with extensive experience in architecting, building, and maintaining scalable web services, as well as leading new feature design and development. Natalia began as a part-time Fellow in April 2023.
Former Django Fellows:
Mariusz Felisiak (2019-2024) - a member of the Django team since 2017, focusing on the ORM and Oracle back-end, along with triaging tickets, reviewing pull requests, and backporting changes. He has contributed to more than a dozen open-source projects. Mariusz began as a full-time Fellow in April 2019. In 2024 Mariusz retired after five years of service.
Carlton Gibson (2018-2023) - a longtime Django user, core contributor to Django REST Framework, maintainer of Django Filter and Django Crispy Forms, and a contributor to many other packages in the Django ecosystem. Carlton began as a part-time Fellow in January 2018. In 2023 Carlton retired after five years of service.
Tim Graham (2014- 2019) - the inaugural Django Fellow, a member of the Django team since 2010, and a longtime major contributor and reviewer. In 2018 Tim transitioned to part-time and in 2019 retired after four years of service.
Berker Peksağ (2014) - a core developer on CPython and Gunicorn, Berker worked as Fellow during the 3 month pilot, supporting Tim part-time.