- Current support team agrees that there is a need to add a new support team member. Reasons for this include:
- Workload is heavy, and more team members would help reduce workload for everyone (this is the most common reason someone is added to the support team)
- New perspective on a specific issue that affects Django Girls
- New perspective on the general direction of Django Girls
- Terms of past members expired, or they've decided to leave the Support Team
- Support Team announces a nomination period for new members, and allow all community members to nominate someone who they think would be a good addition to the team. Nominations are opened for two weeks, and are submitted privately to Google Form. Self-nominations are more than welcome! A person is usually nominated on the following basis:
- they’ve organized an event that went particularly well;
- they have remained active in Django Girls before and after their event;
- they have been helpful in Slack and other channels to other organizers and community members;
- they contributed to Django Girls things that the current support team feels were missing, and the addition of this person will make the team more complete;
- they have worked in such a way that they made a greater impact on the whole community or have put an extra mile while working for the community.
- The current Support Team members decide to invite new members to the team. They all must agree for each particular person to join.
- The new potential member receives an email, offering them a spot on the support team, which they are free to accept or reject.
Many of the questions you have, with the exception of the above process, can probably be answered in the Wiki! So feel free to have a look around the wiki and email us if you have any other questions. We’ve listed possible questions we think you might have below.
You can find that out on the Who is who page! This page includes all current Support Team members, as well as volunteers who run the Django Story blog series, handle social media accounts, and manage translations.
Read the Start Sparkling Guide for an overview, but some tasks we take on include:
- Respond to [email protected] emails
- Set up new events and support those events -- check in when needed, answer questions, help in whatever way we can
- Work on resources (the website, tutorial, coaches’ manual, organizer’s manual, and tutorial extensions)
- Review pull requests
- Recruit more volunteers to help with these things
- Work on new projects
- Website maintenance (take care of servers, DNS, etc.)
- Think about the future. Examples of prior things that the Support Team implemented are:
- T-shirt sales
- Registering the Foundation
- Django Girls Newsletter
- Tutorial translations
- Big moves in the tutorial, like moving deployment to PythonAnywhere
- Monthly meeting on Hangouts (Agendas are public! This is a link to the Google Drive folder containing all past agendas.)
- Document processes, like this wiki!
That’s a tough question. Django Girls is only two years old, and it’s growing really fast. Awesomeness Ambassador is currently taking a big chunk of work listed above (email, setting up new events, etc.), so the Support Team can focus on improving the website and resources, and planning for the future.
However, we're currently aiming for 6-8 people to be on the Support Team. This is not a hard requirement or limit yet. As Django Girls grows and the role of the Support Team changes, we will continue to think about how to define the role of the Support Team more clearly.
Up until June 2016, the appointment of a Support Team member had no set length of time. However, as we struggled with more and more work-life balance issues and burnout of the members, we've decided to introduce a set period of time each member is asked to join: 6 months.
After 6 months expires, each member is asked if they want to serve on the team for another period of 6 months. Everybody is welcomed to stay, but they need to make that clear with another opt-in. This way we give everyone a chance to re-evaluate their commitments without feeling guilty about it.
Work-life balance is important to us, so if someone wants to leave the Support Team early, we would support that, and evaluate whether there is enough workload to justify replacing that person (if we haven’t yet decided on the number of people the Support Team should have).
After leaving the Support Team, past members are still welcome to come back if at any point they feel like helping out again.
Most of the decisions that need to be made by Support Team require one +1 (two people agreeing it's a good thing). We encourage and practice asking everyone for opinion, but only one +1 is required for an idea. This allows us to move quickly and act on ideas even when availability of the team members is low.
Any major decisions (hiring or firing, spending significant amount of money, change having a significant impact on the community) are made by majority vote. We're continue working on having an explicit list of decisions that need to be made by majority vote as we go. Currently we implement majority vote whenever any member of Support Team thinks that decision is significant enough.
Email [email protected]! We would love to hear from you about who you think would be a great addition to the Support Team. Like we said, we’re adding members as we feel we need to, based on workload, so while we value your opinion, your person might not be added immediately. But, as you can see, there are many ways to contribute to Django Girls! If you know someone (or you yourself) would like to volunteer in another way, we’d love to hear from you.
The DSF and PSF are very large organizations that serve a lot of people. They also have the benefit of having been around a long time. We feel that adopting a governance structure similar to theirs is premature, but that doesn’t mean that won’t change.
At this point, we are trying to balance being transparent with making sure Django Girls is a supportive, sustainable organization. Our main mission is to help people put on free programming workshops for women. We’re still growing and figuring out the best way to do that.
We are more hands-on with our chapters than other meetup groups. It’s a lot of work to put on a workshop, as all of you who have been organizers know. We’re not saying a meetup isn’t difficult to start or that meetups don't require extra support, but we provide a lot of materials, infrastructure, and support because of the nature of our mission.
What this means is that our Support Team spends a lot of hours during the week answering email, checking on events, making sure applications are working, and just helping keep the lights on. That’s a big job, and it takes several people across multiple time zones to make sure it gets done. The Support Team exists to support the organizers in putting their workshops together, and to support Django Girls in general in putting on even better workshops.
It takes a lot of person hours to make sure Django Girls workshops happen, and the Support Team exists for just that: to help. Django Girls is still a baby in some respects, and it’s helpful to have a small group of people to bounce ideas off of, even if it’s just making sure an email is phrased right.
And we do! We have an open Trello board dedicated to what’s coming down the pipeline, and anyone is able to add ideas to it.
Design and decision-making by committee is a rough thing, though. It’s possible to have too many cooks in the kitchen, so for the time being, it’s helpful for us to have a place where we can check in with a few people and get those perspectives. It also helps us do things faster!
As we refine the purpose of the Support Team, the number of members who should be on the Support Team, and the length of time they should serve, it’s possible that we will make changes to the way we add new Support Team members. Before that, though, we would have to decide how best to collect input from the community, and we’d definitely want your input on that. We don’t have any group of people akin to PSF-members or DSF-members. We have people who contribute in all sorts of ways: organizers, coaches, sponsors, committers, submitters of pull requests, translation managers, translation participants, etc. It takes time to build the bylaws necessary to implement a voting system, and at the moment, we don’t have the time and we don’t think it’s appropriate for Django Girls.
But Django Girls is growing really fast, and the community gets bigger every day. This is a topic we’re going to keep revisiting. We don’t want you to feel shut down or unheard. We do hear you. Right now, we are trying to keep a laser focus on helping people put on the best workshops they can, and all our resources are going to support that goal.
Adding someone to the Support Team is not an award or a way to distinguish someone in front of others. There are hundreds of people who are not on the team, but their impact and work on Django Girls is invaluable and they shape the future of Django Girls.