Please welcome our new admins
Hello Django community!
Django Commons has some exciting news. Our team has grown to eight members. Please help us in welcoming our new admins: Brian Kohan, Daksh P. Jain, and Tilda Udufo!
Brian Kohan
Brian is a software engineer with 19 years of experience in the aerospace sector. He’s been squashing web-shaped problems with Django for the last 9 of those years and is the maintainer of 5 open source Django packages. He lives in Los Angeles with his family where he devotes the balance of his time to organizing his community’s response to homelessness.
Daksh P. Jain
Daksh P. Jain is a freelance design engineer (read: full-stack engineer and UI/UX designer) with 3 years of professional experience building products people actually enjoy using. Based out of New Delhi, India, he works across backend systems, frontend, cloud, and product design. He is also an active part of the Python community, organizing PyDelhi (Delhi's local Python community), and helping out with Django India and EuroPython.
When he's not overthinking if a design is good, or messing up Django migrations, he's probably playing guitar or going down a rabbit hole in psychology, sociology, or philosophy (and occasionally writing about it too).
Tilda Udufo
Tilda is a software engineer and Developer Advocate with a background in open-source community building and mentorship. Through her work with Outreachy as a program organizer, she helped onboard and support dozens of mentoring organisations and hundreds of contributors each year, working to make open source more accessible to people from under-represented backgrounds. She has also mentored with both Outreachy and Google Summer of Code. Her open-source contributions span OCaml, Public Lab, Mozilla, and PyLadies, among others. Outside of tech, she unwinds with Lego builds and a good thriller.
Thanks to everyone who applied!
We also want to express our gratitude to all the people who applied to be an admin. Your time and energy was greatly appreciated. We look forward to engaging with you more in the future in the Django Commons and Django communities!
Looking forward
The admin team has been working towards this since last September when we did our team check-in. We had members who expressed an interest in stepping back if there were someone to take their place. This forced us to revisit what we expect out of admins, what gaps we had and who we wanted to bring in. So while our team is eight, the team may shift in size again as the new members become acclimated and others feel comfortable to step back.
The other change we made was to create two tiers of admins in the organization. We now have super admins and admins. The super admins are the people who have permissions to control PyPI and our sensitive internal operational controls. The admins retain elevated privileges in GitHub to manage the organization. After a yet undefined period of time, maybe six months, admins will be eligible to be elevated to super admin status if they’d like the responsibility.
Breaking the responsibilities up at the top level allows us to recruit people who aren’t in our direct networks and provides a clear pathway for people to step in and build that highest level of trust in the community.