14 Mar 2026
Django community aggregator: Community blog posts
10 Years of Jazzband
Jazzband is sunsetting. Before moving on, here's a look at what 10 years of cooperative coding actually looked like.
By the numbers
Five years in, we had about 1,350 members and 55 projects. Here's where things stand now:
Members
- 3,135 total members over the years
- 2,133 members currently - a 68% retention rate over 10 years
- New members every year, peaking at 424 in 2022
- Members who left stayed an average of 510 days
- Based on GitHub profiles (only ~28% of members list a location), members from at least 56 countries across every continent but Antarctica - 36% Europe, 30% Asia, 22% North America, 7% South America, 3% Africa, 1% Oceania. Real numbers are likely higher. And given how widely Python is used in research, someone on Antarctica has probably pip-installed a Jazzband project at some point
Projects
- 84 projects total, 71 still active
- 13 projects left again over the years
- ~93,000 GitHub stars across all projects
- ~16,000 forks
Activity
- ~43,800 commits across all repositories
- ~15,600 pull requests
- ~12,200 issues
Releases
- 1,429 package uploads via Jazzband's release pipeline
- 1,312 releases to PyPI across 56 projects and 390 versions
- 281 MB of release artifacts total
- First upload in November 2017, most recent in March 2026
Project teams
- 470 project team memberships
- 105 lead roles across 81 project leads
- Most prolific leads: aleksihakli, hramezani, claudep, and camilonova each maintained 4 projects
How Jazzband was actually used
The numbers above only tell part of the story. Here's what's more interesting.
Not everyone used the release pipeline
20 active projects never shipped a single release through it. Projects like Watson (2,515 stars), django-rest-knox (1,255), and django-admin2 (1,187) used Jazzband as a collaborative home - for shared access, triage, and maintenance - not for releases. The pipeline was useful for the projects that used it, but it wasn't what made Jazzband work for most people.
Old projects stayed alive
django-avatar's repo was created in 2008 and shipped its most recent Jazzband release in January 2026 - a 17-year-old repo still getting releases. django-axes (2009), sorl-thumbnail (2010), django-constance (2010), and 18 other projects created before 2015 were all still getting releases in 2025 or 2026. Jazzband kept old projects alive long after their original authors moved on. That was the whole point.
Release cadence varied wildly
django-axes had the most active release cadence: 253 release files across 127 versions, peaking at 28 versions in 2019 - roughly one every 13 days. pip-tools was second at 138 releases / 69 versions.
Meanwhile, 7 active projects have no team members at all - django-permission, django-mongonaut, and five others. Nobody was actively working on them, but they had a home and stayed installable.
pip-tools was its own community
With 69 team members it dwarfed every other project (the next largest, djangorestframework-simplejwt, had 24). It was basically a sub-organization within Jazzband. And two projects joined as recently as 2024 (django-tagging, django-summernote) with single-digit stars and zero releases - people were still finding value in the model right up to the end.
The open access model was genuinely controversial
When django-newsletter transferred in, its author @dokterbob worried that giving 800 members write access would "dissolve the responsibility so much that it might actually reduce participation." I wrote a long reply defending the open model.
An earlier project, Collectfast, actually left Jazzband after a member pushed directly to master without review - merging commits the author had been holding off on. That incident led to real discussions about code review processes, branch protection, and what "open access" should actually mean. The tension between openness and control was never fully resolved.
Moderation was another solo job
Over the years I had to block 10 accounts from the GitHub organization - first crypto spammers who joined just to be in the org, then community conflicts that needed real moderation decisions, and finally the AI-driven spam that made the open model untenable. None of that is unusual for an organization this size, but it all went through one person.
The onboarding bottleneck
Every transferred project got an onboarding checklist - a webhook automatically opened an "Implement Jazzband guidelines" issue with TODOs like fixing links, adding badges, setting up CI, adding jazzband to PyPI, deciding on a project lead. 41 projects got one of these. 28 completed it. 13 are still open.
The pattern in those 13 is telling: contributors would do every item they could, then get stuck on things that required admin access - configuring webhooks, fixing CI checks, setting up the release pipeline - and wait for me. Sometimes for months.
django-user-sessions' original author pinged me five times over two months about broken CI checks only an admin could fix. Watson's lead asked twice to remove legacy CI tools blocking PR merges. The checklist was good. The bottleneck was me.
Projects that moved on
One of the earliest and most visible Jazzband projects was django-debug-toolbar, transferred in back in 2016. It grew to over 8,000 stars under Jazzband before it moved to Django Commons in 2024.
django-simple-history, django-oauth-toolkit, PrettyTable, and tablib all moved on too, for similar reasons - they needed more autonomy than Jazzband's structure could provide.
Downloads
For context on how widely these projects are used, here are some numbers from PyPI. All projects that were ever part of Jazzband account for over 150 million downloads a month. Current projects alone are around 95 million.
Top 15 by monthly downloads:
| Project | Downloads/month | Note |
|---|---|---|
| prettytable | 42.4M | left Jazzband |
| pip-tools | 23.3M | |
| contextlib2 | 10.7M | |
| django-redis | 9.6M | |
| django-debug-toolbar | 7.3M | left, now Django Commons |
| djangorestframework-simplejwt | 6.1M | |
| dj-database-url | 5.5M | |
| pathlib2 | 4.9M | |
| django-model-utils | 4.8M | |
| geojson | 4.6M | |
| tablib | 4.1M | |
| django-oauth-toolkit | 3.7M | left |
| django-simple-history | 3.1M | left, now Django Commons |
| django-silk | 2.7M | |
| django-formtools | 2.1M |
One thing that surprised me: prettytable alone accounts for 42 million downloads a month, and it isn't even a Django package. contextlib2, pathlib2, and geojson aren't either. Jazzband ended up being broader than the Django ecosystem it started in.
django-debug-toolbar ranked in the top three most used third-party packages in the Django Developers Survey and is featured in the official Django tutorial. It spent 8 years under Jazzband before moving to Django Commons.
If you've come across Jazzband projects before, it was probably through the Django News newsletter, Python Weekly, or Opensource.com's 2020 piece on how Jazzband worked.
Top 10 projects by stars
| Project | Stars |
|---|---|
| pip-tools | 7,997 |
| django-silk | 4,939 |
| tablib | 4,752 |
| djangorestframework-simplejwt | 4,310 |
| django-taggit | 3,429 |
| django-redis | 3,059 |
| django-model-utils | 2,759 |
| Watson | 2,515 |
| django-push-notifications | 2,384 |
| django-widget-tweaks | 2,165 |
14 Mar 2026 4:02pm GMT
Wind-Down Plan
This post outlines the plan for winding down Jazzband. If you haven't read them yet, see the sunsetting announcement for context on why this is happening, and the 10-year retrospective for the full story.
Timeline
The wind-down will happen in phases over the course of 2026.
Phase 1: Announcement (March 2026)
- New member signups are disabled immediately
- This announcement and wind-down plan are published
- Existing members retain access to the GitHub organization and all repositories
Phase 2: Outreach (March - May 2026)
- All 80 project leads will be contacted via email to discuss transferring their projects
- The goal is to have initial conversations with every lead before PyCon US 2026 (May 13-19 in Long Beach, CA)
- Leads who don't respond will be followed up with at PyCon US and through other channels
Phase 3: Project Transfers (June - December 2026)
- Projects will be transferred out of the Jazzband GitHub organization to their new homes - whether that's a lead's personal account, a new organization, or another collaborative group
- For each project, the transfer includes:
- GitHub repository: transferred to the new owner
- PyPI package ownership: existing maintainers added, Jazzband credentials removed
- CI/CD configuration: updated to work outside Jazzband
- Projects without an active lead or willing recipient will be archived in the Jazzband GitHub organization
Phase 4: Wind Down (Early 2027)
- Remaining repositories archived
- The Jazzband GitHub organization set to read-only
- The jazzband.co website archived (with a redirect or static notice)
- PSF Fiscal Sponsorship status concluded, remaining funds donated to the PSF general fund
What happens to…
…existing members?
You remain a member of the GitHub organization until it is archived. No action is needed on your part. If you'd like to leave earlier, you can do so from your account dashboard.
…projects I contribute to?
The projects aren't going away - they're moving. Your contributions, issues, and pull requests will transfer with the repository to its new home. Git history is preserved.
…PyPI packages?
Package ownership on PyPI will be transferred to the project leads before the Jazzband release credentials are deactivated. If you're a project lead, we'll coordinate this with you directly.
…the Jazzband release pipeline?
The Jazzband-specific release pipeline (uploading via Twine to jazzband.co, then releasing to PyPI) will remain functional during the transition period. After transfer, projects will publish to PyPI directly using standard tooling.
…the website?
The jazzband.co website will remain online through the transition. After wind-down, it will be replaced with a static page linking to this announcement and an archive of the project list.
…the PSF Fiscal Sponsorship?
Jazzband's PSF Fiscal Sponsorship status will be formally concluded. Any remaining funds will be donated to the Python Software Foundation's general fund.
For project leads
If you're a project lead, here's what to expect:
- You'll receive an email with details specific to your project(s)
- Decide on a new home for your project - your personal GitHub account, a new organization, or another collaborative group like Django Commons
- Coordinate the transfer - we'll handle the GitHub repo transfer and help with PyPI ownership changes
- Update your project - CI/CD, documentation links, and any Jazzband-specific references
Several projects have already successfully transferred to Django Commons, including django-debug-toolbar and django-simple-history. If you're looking for a place with shared maintenance and multiple admins, it's a good option.
If you have questions or want to start the process early, please contact the roadies.
14 Mar 2026 4:01pm GMT
Sunsetting Jazzband
Over 10 years ago, Jazzband started as a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software projects. The idea was simple - everyone who joins gets access to push code, triage issues, merge pull requests. "We are all part of this."
It had a good run. More than 10 years, actually.
But it's time to wind things down.
What happened
There's a short answer and a long answer.
The slopocalypse
GitHub's slopocalypse - the flood of AI-generated spam PRs and issues - has made Jazzband's model of open membership and shared push access untenable.
Jazzband was designed for a world where the worst case was someone accidentally merging the wrong PR. In a world where only 1 in 10 AI-generated PRs meets project standards, where curl had to shut down its bug bounty because confirmation rates dropped below 5%, and where GitHub's own response was a kill switch to disable pull requests entirely - an organization that gives push access to everyone who joins simply can't operate safely anymore.
The one-roadie problem
But honestly, the cracks have been showing for much longer than that.
Jazzband was always a one-roadie operation. People asked for more roadies and offered to help over the years, and I tried a number of times to make it work - but it never stuck. I dropped the ball on organizing it properly, and when volunteers did step up they'd quietly step back after a while. That's not a criticism of them, it's just how volunteer work goes when there's no structure to support it.
The result was the same though: every release request, every project transfer, every lead assignment, every PyPI permission change - it all went through me.
The warnings
The sustainability question was raised as early as 2017. I gave a keynote at DjangoCon Europe 2021 about it - five years in. In that talk I said out loud that the "social coding" experiment had failed to create an equitable community, and that a sustainable solution didn't exist without serious financial support.
The roadmap I presented - revamp infrastructure, grow the management team, formalize guidelines, reach out for funding - none of that happened. The PSF fiscal sponsorship was the one thing that did.
In the years since, I've been on the PSF board - which faced its own crises - and now serve as PSF chair. That work matters and I don't regret prioritizing it, but it meant Jazzband got even less of my time.
GitHub went the other way
Meanwhile, GitHub moved in the opposite direction. Copilot launched in 2022, trained on open source code that maintainers were burning out maintaining for free. GitHub Sponsors participation sits at 0.0014%. 60% of maintainers are still unpaid.
The XZ Utils backdoor in 2024 showed what happens when a lone maintainer burns out and someone malicious fills the gap. And Jazzband's own infrastructure started getting in the way of the projects it was supposed to help - the release pipeline couldn't support trusted publishing, projects that needed admin access were stuck.
So projects started leaving. And that's OK - that was always supposed to be part of the deal.
Django Commons
I want to specifically thank Django Commons and Tim Schilling for picking up where Jazzband fell short. They have 5 admins, 15 active projects (including django-debug-toolbar, django-simple-history, and django-cookie-consent from Jazzband), and django-polymorphic is transferring over right now. They solved the governance problem from day one. If you're a Jazzband project lead looking for a new home for your Django project, start there.
For non-Django projects like pip-tools, contextlib2, geojson, or tablib - I'm not aware of an equivalent. If someone wants to build one for the broader Python tooling ecosystem, I'd love to see it.
By the numbers
Over 10 years, Jazzband grew to 3,135 members from every continent but Antarctica, maintained 84 projects with ~93,000 GitHub stars, and shipped 1,312 releases to PyPI.
Projects that passed through Jazzband are downloaded over 150 million times a month - pip-tools at 23 million, prettytable at 42 million. django-debug-toolbar spent 8 years under Jazzband and ended up in the official Django tutorial. django-avatar, a repo from 2008, was still getting releases in 2026. And django-axes shipped 127 versions - a release every 13 days in its peak year.
The full 10-year retrospective has all the numbers, the stories, and what actually happened.
What happens next
I'm not pulling the plug overnight. There is a detailed wind-down plan that covers the timeline, but the short version:
- New signups are disabled as of today
- Project leads will be contacted before PyCon US 2026 to coordinate transferring projects to new homes
- The GitHub organization and website will remain available during the transition period through end of 2026
If you're a project lead, expect an email soon.
Thank you
None of this would have been possible without the people who showed up - strangers on the internet who decided to maintain something together. Thanks to the 81 project leads who kept things going despite the bottlenecks I created, and to everyone who joined, contributed, filed issues, and shipped releases over the years.
I started Jazzband because maintaining Open Source alone was exhausting. The irony of then becoming a single point of failure for 71 projects is not lost on me. But the experiment worked in the ways that mattered - projects got maintained, releases got shipped, people collaborated.
Anyways, the projects will move on to new homes, and that's fine. That was always the point.
We are all part of this.
14 Mar 2026 4:00pm GMT