We’d love to help more people attend more conferences. The human connection of conferences is extremely important to bringing someone into the Django, Python and / or open-source community. This also means we need our membership to continue to use the financial aid that’s available! We are working on a public set of guidelines so it’s easier for everyone to understand how we evaluate whether a person is qualified for financial aid. Stay tuned for those!
Another avenue we’d like to pursue is hardware reimbursement for session organizers and mentors, specifically around microphones. A quality microphone can dramatically improve a person's ability to communicate. Especially when they are a non-native English speaker. We understand that there are other factors, such as machine resources and internet speed that would also impact the audio quality on a call. However, a microphone could also be used to record a presentation, live-stream or record a podcast and it’s a one-time cost.
One area we know we’re going to be investing in the future is a newsletter through Buttondown. We have our mailing list already set up, but we’re waiting on collecting enough content for a few month’s worth of emails. The plan is to transition our session organization emails into Buttondown which should make some things more streamlined. We’ve noticed that not everyone in our community is always monitoring the Discord server which makes low-priority announcements a bit difficult to communicate. A newsletter should help in this regard.