Steering Council nomination: Guido van Rossum (2020 term)

Since he hasn’t done it himself yet, I’m nominating Guido van Rossum for the 2020 term Steering Council. (Yes, I asked him, and he agreed :). I can’t imagine he needs much of an introduction or endorsement at this point. His self-nomination from last year is here: Steering Council nomination: Guido van Rossum. (He has since retired from Dropbox.)

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Still, I’d like to know which directions @guido aims to take Python into, and what his priorities are for the next term.

Please don’t vote for me. My nomination was meant to draw out other nominations.

Sorry, my English is lacking a bit here, so by “draw out” I assume you mean “encourage other nominations”?

Yep. “Draw out” is a phrase that essentially means “entice to come out”.

So… should this nomination be withdrawn?

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If so, the other question would be, can one withdraw after the nomination period has closed?

It’s up to Guido, but I don’t see why one couldn’t withdraw, else you run the risk of them simply resigning if they are elected.

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FWIW, I did not nominate Guido just to draw out more nominations (in fact, had I thought about it, I would’ve expected it to have the opposite effect). I think it would be good to have Guido on the steering council, at least for a couple more years.

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I also feel that having Guido on the council for a while longer would be a good thing. But I don’t want to vote for him if he would prefer not. So I’m getting mixed messages here. Can we clarify the status of this nomination, please?

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I have thought about this some more. I appreciate the thought (@thomas, @pf_moore) that you’d like me to be on the SC for a while longer. But it seems to me we have many excellent candidates, and after a brief discussion with the current incumbents I have decided to withdraw.

Part of my reason is that in the end, SC duty feels more like a chore to me than fun, and one of the things I’m trying to accomplish in my life post Dropbox retirement is to have more fun. To me, fun includes programming in and contributing to Python, for example the PEG parser project. But I don’t see participating in the SC as fun. (This is true for all SC members, I imagine, and an important duty it is! It’s just that I’ve done enough duty for Python in the past 30 years, and I want to focus more on having fun.)

I will still be around though! I will be reading and answering mail, sometimes reviewing PRs and participating in issues and discussions on python-ideas, python-dev, or discuss.python.org (and even Zulip and Twitter). If the new SC asks me to act as BDFL-Delegate for a PEP I’ll consider it, and if they have other questions for me I’ll try to answer them. I’ll just not be acting as an official member of the Steering Council.

I am sure that an SC without me will do just fine, especially if you all vote for Barry, Brett and Carol – they will provide continuity. I’m not endorsing other candidates, they’re all great!

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