Django Steering Council 2025 Year in Review

The members of the Steering Council wanted to provide you all with a quick TL;DR of our work in 2025.

First off, we were elected at the end of 2024 and got started in earnest in early 2025 with the mission to revive and dramatically increase the role of the Steering Council.

We're meeting for a video conference at least monthly, you can deep dive into the meeting notes to see what we've been up to. We also have set up Slack channels we use to communicate in between meetings to keep action items moving along.

One of the first things we did was temporarily suspend much of the process around DEP 10. Its heart is in the right place, but it's just too complex and cumbersome day-to-day with a primarily volunteer organization. We're slowly making progress on a revamped and simplified process that addresses our concerns. It is our goal to finish this before our terms expire.

New Features Process

We've moved the process for proposing new features out of the Django Forum and mailing lists to new-features Github repository.

We made this change for a variety of reasons, but the largest being to reduce the workload for the Django Fellows in shepherding the process and answering related questions.

Community Ecosystem Page

One of our main goals is to increase the visibility of the amazing Django third-party package ecosystem. Long time Django users know which packages to use, which you can trust, and which ones may be perfect for certain use cases. However, MANY newer or more casual Django users are often unaware of these great tools and not sure where to even begin.

As a first step, we've added the Community Ecosystem page which highlights several amazing resources to keep in touch with what is going on with Django, how to find recommended packages, and a sample list of those packages the Steering Council itself recommends and uses frequently.

Administrative bits

There has been work on better formalizing and documenting our processes and building documentation to make it much easier for the next Steering Council members.

There has also been fair bit of work around helping organize Google Summer of Code participants to help ensure the projects undertaken are ones that will ultimately be accepted smoothly into Django.

Another area we have focused on is a simplified DEP process. We're still formalizing this, but the idea is to have the Steering Council do the majority of the heavy lifting on writing these and in a format that is shorter/simpler to reduce the friction of creating larger more complicated DEPs.

We have also been in discussions with various third parties about acquiring funding for some of the new features and updates on the horizon.

It's been a productive year and we're aiming to have 2026 be as productive if not more so. We're still setting all of our 2026 goals and will report on those soon.

Please reach out to the Steering Council directly if you have any questions or concerns.