The Fellowship Working Group manages the Django Fellowship Program. This includes:
- Evaluating candidates for open Fellowship slots and making hiring recommendations to the Board. This includes developing and whatever selection scripts, exercises, interviews, and rubrics the WG needs to provide a fair selection process. No particular workflow is mandated by this charter, merely that the WG has some workflow and keeps it documented.
- Along with the Fellows themselves, maintaining the job description, outline of duties, and any other similar process documentation for the Fellow role (a "job manual", if you will). By and large these don't currently exist (as of April 2024), so the first group operating under this new charter will be responsible for starting to create this documentation. The Fellows and WG can maintain and update these without explicit Board approval, but should report major changes to the Board for review.
- A designated member of the committee acts as the line manager for active fellows. See Fellow Management, below, for details of this role.
- Acting as an HR committee for Fellows. In the event of a complaint about a Fellow, if this is a failure to fulfill the responsibilities of the position or around performance, this should be reported to the Fellowship-WG to investigate. The Fellowship-WG will present findings and a recommendation to the board for action. If this is a Code of Conduct issue, this should be reported to the Code of Conduct WG who will involve the Fellow WG if appropriate.
- As with the CoC-WG, the Fellowship-WG has the power to unilaterally suspend Fellows, with pay, pending an investigation. This power should only be used in egregious circumstances, where waiting on investigation and/or board action might plausibly be harmful.
- Acting as an escalation point if a Fellow can't get in touch, or has a disagreement with their designated manager. Fellows can escalate to any other member of the WG directly, to the WG as a whole, or to the DSF Board.
- Gathering and maintaining statistics on the impact and efficacy of the Fellow program (for use in fundraising, reports to sponsors, etc). See reporting for a short discussion of this report.
One member of the committee is designated as the manager for the Fellows. It's expected that this person will have previous engineering management experience, and the Board must approve this designation.
Defining the specifics of this role is out of scope for this document -- it should be developed and maintained by consensus of the Fellows and the WG members and laid out in the documentation mentioned above.
Broadly speaking, this should be thought of as a "supportive" management role, rather than a "directive" one. The DSF intends to grant a very high degree of autonomy to Fellows. The DSF trusts their judgement on what's right to work on. So the person designated as the Fellows manager is there to provide the Fellows whatever support they need to be happy and productive. This may include help with setting priorities, coaching, and so forth -- subject to what each Fellow needs. It's suggested that the Fellows hold one-on-ones with their manager at least monthly.
The designated manager is also the official approver for expenses for Fellows, subject to the budget, see below.
This working group replaces the previous Fellowship Committee, operating under pre-WG rules. Until this WG is fully operational -- i.e. has an approved charter, has all members selected and approved, has a designed manager -- the previous committee will continue to operate.
Upon adoption of this new charter, the Board will issue an open call for members, recruit, and select membership. We'll follow the guidelines outlined below under future membership in selecting this initial group.
The board liaison will act as chair through this transition, util the full membership is approved and all roles filled out.
- Chair: Jacob Kaplan-Moss (interim)
- Co-Chair: Katie Katie McLaughlin (interim)
- Board liaison: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
- Designated manager: TBD
- Other members:
- TBD
Board-managed: the DSF Board appoints members of this WG, including specific roles (chair, Fellow manager).
The Board will select membership with some high-level goals in mind:
- Diversity: the WG membership should be diverse, as representative of the global Django community as possible within the confines of a small team.
- Management experience: WG members, particularly the designated manager, should have some engineering management experience, or other relevant experience (i.e. experience with fellowship programs at other NPOs, etc). This isn't a hard requirement and can easily be outweighed by the other things the potential member brings to the table, but it is something the board will generally look for.
- Django community experience: WG members generally speaking should have been members of the Django community for some time. Once again this isn't a hard requirement, but one of the duties of the WG is to help Fellows navigate the community, if needed, so people with experience there are nice to have on the board.
Membership is open to volunteers, subject to board approval. Contact the board to express interest. Please include a brief explanation of how your background aligns with the goals above.
The Board will consult the current Fellows and WG members when making decisions on adding new members.
Members serve a 1-year term, April 1st to March 31st, in alignment with the Fellow contracts. At the end of this term, they need to opt into staying involved to keep being a member of the group. If any member wishes to leave the group before the end of their term, they can do so without a vote.
- The Board sets the Fellowship compensation (which is adjusted yearly, automatically, to match CPI inflation).
- The Board establishes a yearly Travel & Expenses budget, which Fellows may spend against (with management approval). This is set to a level to allow Fellows to attend at least one DjangoCon.
- Expenses beyond this yearly budget may (probably will!) be approved, but would require approval by the board to increase the budget.
The Fellowship-WG has a private mailing list, and uses the DSF Slack. Fellows themselves generally work in the open, on the Django Forum and other public spaces.
The Fellowship-WG is required to submit regular reports on the impact and efficacy of the Fellow program.
Frequency: at least quarterly, with a strong preference for some sort of live "dashboard" (read: Google Sheet) that's updated more regularly for the Board to check any time.
The specifics of what needs to be in here will change over time, and should be an ongoing conversation between Fellows, the Fellowship-WG, and the Board. It can and should change and evolve over time. It probably should include things like count of tickets triaged and PRs reviewed, along with more qualitative info like highlights of major features reviewed/shepherded, mentorship of new/existing contributors, talks at conferences, etc. Fellows already record much of this in their weekly reports to the community, so the WG's responsibility is to roll this up into longer-term metrics, highlight themes, and help make sure the information in these reports is useful to the Board and other consumers (sponsors, community members, etc).
The Fellowship-WG is also expected to report any meta-issues or problems to the Board. E.g. things like themes in the kind of problems Fellows are running into, ongoing strategic questions without answers, problems with DSF infrastructure, emerging performance issues, and so forth.