Kubernetes Steering Committee Election Cycle Starting
Sreeram Venkitesh
## Election Announcement
It's Steering Committee[1] election season again!
This year we will be electing four (4) seats on the Steering Committee. Each of these seats will serve for a two (2) year term.
Maciej Szulik, Paco Xu 徐俊杰, Patrick Ohly, and Stephen Augustus are finishing their 2 year terms this year. Antonio Ojea, Benjamin Elder, and Sascha Grunert are halfway through their terms and will continue to serve on the Steering Committee for another year.
The first phase of the election has two parts:
1. Candidate nominations
2. Voter exceptions
## Nominations
If you would like to nominate yourself or someone else for one of the four available seats, follow the process in the election guide[2]. This involves writing a *candidate issue*, emailing it to d...@kubernetes.io, and submitting a bio and information about your candidacy as a Pull Request.
You can find all the details about the nomination process in the election
repository: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/elections/steering/2025#candidacy-process [2]
## Voting System
We will be using Elekto[3] for the Kubernetes Steering election. It uses GitHub authentication, so all we need to know is your GitHub username. If you log in to Elekto at https://elections.k8s.io/app/elections/steering---2025 [4], you can check your voter eligibility now.
## Voter Status
The requirements for voting are Kubernetes GitHub org membership, and to have had at least 50 project contributions (according to devstats [5]) in the last year. We do our best to source contribution data from many areas, however we know that many types of contributions to the project are not necessarily code contributions and hence difficult to measure. We apologize for any contributions not counted. If we've missed you for any reason, please file an exception request[6] and we'll take a look as soon as possible and approve it when appropriate.
You can check your voter eligibility by checking elections.k8s.io [6].
You can also check the full list of current voters by GitHub username in the election repository:
https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/elections/steering/2025/voters.yaml
[7]
## Schedule
The following are the critical dates for this election:
- Monday, September 8 - Candidate nominations due at the end of the day in AoE time
- Tuesday, September 9 - All candidate bios due at the end of the day in AoE time
- Wednesday, September 10 - Election Begins
- Wednesday, October 22 - Deadline to submit voter exception requests
- Friday, October 24 - Election Closes at the end of the day in AoE time
- Wednesday, November 5 - Public announcement of Results at Public Steering Committee Meeting
We will be posting regular updates to dev@kubernetes during the election.
## Resources
[1] Steering Committee: https://github.com/kubernetes/steering - who sits on the committee and terms, their projects and meeting info
[2] Candidacy Process:
https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/elections/steering/2025#candidacy-process - how running for a seat works
[3] Elekto: https://elekto.dev - Our elections platform
[4] 2025 Steering Election on Elekto:
https://elections.k8s.io/app/elections/steering---2025 - You may check your voting eligibility by logging in to the election on Elekto.
[5] Devstats developer activity counts: https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/13/developer-activity-counts-by-repository-group?orgId=1&var-period_name=Last%20year&var-metric=contributions&var-repogroup_name=All&var-repo_name=&var-country_name=All
[6] Exception Request:
https://elections.k8s.io/app/elections/steering---2025/exception - form to fill out to get added as a voter if we've missed you
[7] Voters List:
https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/elections/steering/2025/voters.yaml - GitHub usernames for everyone qualified to vote in this election
Thank you from all your election officers. If you have any questions, you can reach us via elec...@k8s.io, or message us on Slack any time.
Christoph Blecker
Nina Polshakova
Sreeram Venkitesh