Steering Committee Nomination: Sean McGinnis (@stmcginnis)

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Wendy Ha

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Jul 13, 2026, 3:11:17 AM (9 days ago) Jul 13

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Hi everyone 👋
I'd like to nominate Sean McGinnis (@stmcginnis) for the 2026 Steering Committee election.

I don't work at the same company as Sean, and we're living on different sides of the globe 🌍, so this nomination comes purely from my experience working with him in the Kubernetes community.

If you start to contributing in Kubernetes in the last 5 years, it's not hard to spend time in the Kubernetes Slack without seeing him answering questions across Slack channels, helping contributors and quietly supporting others behind the scenes. I had the opportunity to work closely with him in the Kubernetes v1.33 Release Signal team, where he proved to be a dependable, thoughtful, and collaborative teammate. Sean is someone I describe as an example of open source person, he love helping others, easy to talk with and love the work he do.

Since then, I've come to appreciate the breadth of his contributions. He's helped organize multiple Maintainer Summits and now serves as Co-chair of Maintainer Summit North America 2026. But what stands out to me is that Sean doesn't seek visibility, he simply steps in wherever the community needs help. That's why it wasn't surprising to see him become involved in kind after long-term contributing in Cluster API.

Sean has earned the trust of contributors across many Kubernetes SIGs and Committee (Code of Conduct Committee, SIG Cluster Lifecycle, SIG Testing, SIG Release and SIG Contribex) and CNCF Ecosystem (with TAG DevEx and CNCF Ambassador) , and I'm confident he'll bring that same collaborative mindset to Steering. He has the experience and perspective to help shape project policy, support contributors and maintainers, and guide Kubernetes with a long-term vision.

I also believe Sean brings a unique value through his role as Tech Lead of CNCF TAG Developer Experience. As AI becomes an increasingly important part of community, he can help contributors and maintainers adopt AI thoughtfully and sustainably while bringing lessons and best practices from the broader CNCF ecosystem back into our community.

If you are an eligible voter interested in endorsing Sean, you can do so by replying to the nomination issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/issues/9071 saying: "I endorse this nominee, and I work for " or "+1". Please state that you are an eligible voter and include your employer's name so that Election Officers can recognize qualified endorsements.