[oinopion]

For long time core devs wanted to use support the common denominator (svn) and let users choose their frontend (hg-svn, git-svn, svk).

Now they realised that github presence will raise number of contributors.

[reinhardt]

I stopped following Django more than a year ago but lack of contributors was never an issue; quite the contrary. A bigger problem was the unresponsiveness of the (tiny) core team to the occasional contributors providing patches and raising bugs, often left open for months and years. Hopefully things move faster now with more devs being entrusted with the commit bit.

[huxley]

I hope it will too. Particularly now that Adrian Holovaty is back as a more active BDFL.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss (the other BDFL) wrote a bit about the changes in the core team over the last couple of years in his "Measuring the Django Community" review:

http://jacobian.org/writing/django-community/django-communit...

The core team has grown a lot in 2012: 33 partial committers and 28 full committers.