Maintainers

Django doesn't ship a CODEOWNERS file — the governance model is the Django Software Foundation and its Technical Board. Day-to-day maintenance is split across DSF Fellows (paid by the foundation) and a community of long-standing committers.

This page approximates "who knows what" by combining the documented governance with git log / git blame over the last year on each subsystem's source tree.

Governance

• Django Software Foundation — the legal home of the project.
• Technical Board — the elected body that makes structural decisions (currently 5 members; rotates).
• DSF Fellows — full-time maintainers. As of 2026: Mariusz Felisiak and Sarah Boyce. Fellows handle Trac triage, security responses, release management, and review.
• Mergers — a small group with merge rights on django/django. Includes the Fellows plus a rotating set of long-standing contributors.

Top contributors over the last year

From git log --since="1 year ago" --pretty=format:'%aN' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn:

Commits	Contributor	Roles
169	Jacob Walls	Frequent contributor; admin, ORM, docs
85	Natalia	Documentation, i18n
67	Mariusz Felisiak	DSF Fellow; release manager; broad coverage
43	Tim Graham	Long-standing core dev (former Fellow)
42	Clifford Gama	Recent contributor
38	Adam Johnson	Core dev; ORM, async, performance
35	Mike Edmunds	Core dev; mail backend, contrib
31	Simon Charette	Core dev; ORM internals
31	David Smith	Core dev; templates, forms
25	Sarah Boyce	DSF Fellow; broad coverage

There are roughly 90 unique committers in any 90-day window.

Subsystem ownership (heuristic)

Derived from git log -- <path> for the trailing year. These are the people most likely to review or answer questions on each subsystem; they are not formal owners.

Subsystem	Recent contributors (last year)
ORM (django/db/models/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Simon Charette, Adam Johnson, Jacob Walls
Migrations (django/db/migrations/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Simon Charette, Sarah Boyce
Backends (django/db/backends/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Adam Johnson
Admin (django/contrib/admin/)	Jacob Walls, Mariusz Felisiak, David Smith
Auth (django/contrib/auth/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Sarah Boyce
GIS (django/contrib/gis/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Claude Paroz
Postgres contrib (django/contrib/postgres/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Adam Johnson
Templates (django/template/)	David Smith, Mariusz Felisiak, Mike Edmunds
Forms (django/forms/)	David Smith, Jacob Walls
Views (django/views/)	Jacob Walls, Mariusz Felisiak
URLs (django/urls/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Adam Johnson
Middleware (django/middleware/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Adam Johnson, Sarah Boyce
Management (django/core/management/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Mike Edmunds
Mail (django/core/mail/)	Mike Edmunds
Cache (django/core/cache/)	Mariusz Felisiak, Adam Johnson
Sessions (django/contrib/sessions/)	Mariusz Felisiak
Test framework (django/test/)	Adam Johnson, Mariusz Felisiak
i18n (django/utils/translation/, locales)	Claude Paroz, Natalia, Mariusz Felisiak
Docs (docs/)	Natalia, Mariusz Felisiak, Sarah Boyce, many others

Bot accounts and one-off committers are excluded.

How to reach a maintainer

• Trac (code.djangoproject.com) — file a ticket. Triage will route to the right person.
• Forum (forum.djangoproject.com) — open discussion, design questions.
• Discord (chat.djangoproject.com) — informal, real-time.
• Security (security@djangoproject.com) — for vulnerabilities. Don't open Trac tickets or PRs for security issues.

Release management

The DSF Fellows run releases. The cadence:

• Feature release: every 8 months (e.g., 6.0 in Dec 2025, 6.1 expected ~Aug 2026).
• LTS release: every 2 years, with 3 years of support.
• Patch releases: monthly during active life; quarterly after EOL of feature support.

The stable/<version>.x branches receive backports for security and data-loss bugs.

Notes

The list above is a snapshot — Django's contributor base rotates. The git log is the source of truth for "who has touched what recently". For the official list of organisations and current Fellows, see djangoproject.com/foundation/.