Django approves DEP 19 and rewrites its technical governance
Victoria Shinder1 min readDjango's Steering Council and the DSF Board have both approved DEP 19, the proposal that implements the project's new technical governance. The announcement, posted on 22 September 2026 by Tim Schilling and the Steering Council, records that the work spanned two different DSF boards and dozens of community members.
The stated direction is subtraction. The project describes the change as a revisitation of its technical governance in which a simplification and a reduction were made, with the explicit goal of making the structure approachable to more people.
The piece the announcement singles out is the new Steering Council eligibility criteria: a deliberately wide range of qualities that a member could hold, written so that community members recognise themselves as qualified and stand for election.
What follows is documentation work. The Django and djangoproject.com repositories are to be updated, after which the DEP moves to its final state and folder.
What it means
Governance changes in mature projects usually add process. This one is presented as removing it, and the justification is recruitment rather than tidiness — a council that nobody feels entitled to join has a succession problem long before it has a process problem.
Whether the eligibility text does that work is not a question the approval settles. Broad criteria lower the barrier to standing but also make it harder for a prospective candidate to judge whether they clear it, and the effect will only be visible in who actually appears on the next ballot. That is the measurement to come back for.