Thank you Lacey
Django Commons has some very lofty goals for open source. One of our goals is Sustainability. While this can mean many things for the Django Commons organization, it means:
The community seeks to make contributing to open source and the community itself a sustainable activity. This involves clear expectations on roles, being supportive of taking breaks and creating space for others. Our processes and code should be documented, be maintainable and easily searchable.
The idea of "being supportive of taking breaks" is a key part of sustainability. While this can seem to apply only to the projects that are part of Django Commons, it applies to our admin team as well.
Which brings me to Lacey.
Lacey Henschel has been a key contributor to the Django Commons admin team since day one. She was "in the room" for our very first meeting, and for the better part of two years she had a hand in just about every part of how the organization works. A short list of what that looked like:
- She drove our effort to bring Django REST Framework into Django Commons ... easily the most ambitious onboarding we've taken on. She kept the transfer playbook that Storm created up to date, coordinated the logistics with the DRF and Encode maintainers, and laid the groundwork for moving their sponsorship over to Open Collective (with Tim standing up the Open Collective project alongside her). The transfer hasn't crossed the finish line yet, but wherever it lands, it'll build on the groundwork she helped lay.
- She built our admin recruitment pipeline ... the interest form, the recruitment posts, and the criteria discussion she led ... and she pushed us to bake diversity and inclusion into how we bring new people in.
- She created our project check-in system, including the tracking spreadsheet and the regular check-in discussions that keep our member projects healthy instead of quietly going stale.
- She opened the door to the DSF, drafting and sending the outreach that started our conversation about becoming a recognized working group, and partnering on our governance documentation.
- She represented Django Commons out in the world, including a Lightning Talk at DjangoCon US 2024 that put the project in front of a much wider audience.
But that list undersells her.
More than any single deliverable, Lacey was often the conscience of the group. When we hit the hard calls ... like whether to step in on a project without its maintainer's blessing ... she was the one reminding us to respect maintainers, to weigh the trust of the community, and to not cross a line just because we could. That kind of judgment is a lot harder to put on a list than a playbook or a spreadsheet. It mattered just as much.
Lacey has decided to step down from being an admin. She will be missed greatly, but her stepping back also shows that what we're doing is working. Lacey let the other admins know that she needed to step away, and we all agree that an admin being able to do that ... cleanly, and without guilt ... is a big win. It shows that the ideas Django Commons is trying to accomplish are working.
So, thank you, Lacey. For the playbooks, the spreadsheets, the hard conversations, and for showing the rest of us that taking a break isn't a failure of the plan ... it's part of it.