I nominate myself for re-election to the Python Steering Council for the 2026 term. I have served for the past four years. If elected, I intend for this to be my last consecutive SC term (following the lead of Brett Cannon) to make sure others have an opportunity to shine.
I’m @gpshead on github, etc. Over twenty years on the python core team, wrangler of internals of a posixy flavor, subprocess, multiprocessing, & hashlib. I’m also on the PSRT and a champion for getting our security story straight. I am employed by Anthropic, the maker of Claude.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
Considering the past four years on the SC, I was first elected wanting to support the ongoing performance work while maintaining language behavior and API stability. Fast forward and I wound up being amazed that we had the opportunities to both: Hire full time PSF managed developers in residences to work on python and ecosystem security. See free-threading go from a neat demo on an old interpreter into something we actually managed to support shepherding to where it is headed today. The SC doesn’t do that work, all of you do. We’re just here to approve the direction to unblock it.
That said, I think the 2026 forward looking focus for the SC should be to guide us towards making free-threading stick its landing in a way that it becomes the only Python and the world collectively forgets what a GIL even is when using Python five+ years hence. The unique opportunity that goes along with this that I’d like to see taken advantage of are improvements on the C API and ABI front given we are facing a community-desired reworked internals transition.
Remember, per PEP-13 the SC is really here to represent all of you. Our role is primarily to digest conversations and align decisions with a hopefully coherent strategy based on the broader community consensus in as much as one can hopefully already exist before issues land on our plate.
State of the SC 2025 edition
I think I speak for all of us on the SC when I say that this was a much better year for us.
We had lots of lovely PEPs and discussions sent our way to review regardless of our ultimate decision. I’m honored to have been the one to “notify” Pablo of the first rejected PEP with his name on it.
Despite good feelings, the one thing that has always been on the SCs radar to do better on, and remains so, is our communication. That is still circling the radar. We had a hired communications liaison for a while but found ourselves having to reset and figure out a new workflow after they departed. At this point I expect doing better at SC to core team comms will be a continually evolving thing no matter what we do. 
To the next SC: find your cadence and stick to it.
In a poll we ran in 2024, y’all voted to have SC-to-public comms in this Core Development forum be a thing. Doing that in public takes a lot more time and energy (in short supply for all of us) due to the lower-context potentially infinite audience, so I think what I’d suggest is that we aim for more consistent communications with the core team first before expanding. We have had some success here in limited forums as Barry noted in his own nomination. We need to actually move that to cover everyone.
The success I really want to highlight is that many of y’all have used our office hours slots. Thank you! Direct conversations are great to have. More of that please!