Thanks for getting the ball rolling here!
I’ve been following the conversation on Mastodon, and really agree strongly with the goals expressed over there (which I’d roughly paraphrase as: “make it more obvious what Django is and what it can do for you”).
One bit of prior art you might want to look at: about a year ago, 20tab did some user research and made some recommendations; you can find their report here: djangoproject.com – 20tab deliverables – Google Drive. I think you’ll find some stuff in there that supports your line of thought.
Mostly though I wanted to speak to this:
I do not know the process to make a redesign official or deploy it – I’m mostly just trying to push the ball forward and then going to figure out the next steps later
You have a few options here, but I think your best bet here is to take the design pretty far – like “early beta” stage – and then present it to the Board for feedback and approval. I can’t speak unilaterally for the Board, but I really think if you show up with a clear vision, and something that’s a concrete improvement of the status quo, there’s a very high chance you’ll get an enthusiastic “go ahead”.
This is obviously risky: I’m asking that you put in work (possibly lots of work) with a possibility of it going to waste. But the problem is that without a clear vision, it’s going to be really hard to get a preemptive OK. The alternative would be to form a Working Group with a clear charter to execute a redesign, but the downside there is that’s probably a month or more of “paperwork” getting the group formed, writing the charter, getting a Board vote on the WG, etc. That’s some serious stop energy and I don’t want to tamp down the enthusiasm building here.
(Though: if you want to go the WG direction, now or in the future, I’m happy to support that, let me know.)
One final suggestion: I’m of the firm belief that design by committee doesn’t work. The parts of Django that have the best design were all designed by one or two, maaaybe 3 people. (I was thinking about aesthetics as I wrote this, but in retrospect the same actually applies to a lot of the best API designs in Django too!). You’re going to get lots of feedback, and while I do hope you’ll listen to it, ultimately I think you’ll be the most successful if there’s a very small core group make clear and consistent decisions.
Good luck! I’m super excited to see what comes out of this.
