Announcing the inaugural Django Fellows

About a month ago, the Django Software Foundation (DSF) announced that we were going to run a pilot project for a Django Fellow - a paid contractor (or contractors) engaged to manage some of the administrative and community management tasks of the Django project.

We received a almost 30 applicants for the Fellowship position. Today, we're proud to announce the two successful applicants: Tim Graham and Berker Peksağ.

Tim is already well known to the Django community. He's been a member of the core team for several years, and for the last 12 months has been a major contributor, reviewing and merging pull requests. Tim has been contracted as a full-time Fellow for the duration of the 3 month pilot.

Berker isn't as well known to the Django community, but he's got a lot of experience contributing to Open Source projects. He's a core developer on CPython, Gunicorn and Hylang. He's also contributed to some Mozilla projects. In the Django community, he has submitted a few patches, as well as organizing a Django sprint in Istanbul. Berker will be a part-time Fellow supporting Tim.

Berker won't be given a "free pass" into the core team - he'll have to earn it the same way as a volunteer contributor would. However, since he'll be dedicating a lot of time to Django contributions over the next three months, we hope he'll be nominated for core team membership in the near future.

We've got some legal paperwork to sort out before the Fellowship formally begins, but once it does, we'll have three months to see the impact that some paid community managers can have on the momentum of the Django project.

Congratulations Tim and Berker, and a huge thanks to all the members of the Django community that applied.