Dear Daniel and Daphne,
dear community.

What is the current status of the election process? Voting should have
been possible since March 1st.

Please excuse my frank words, but with so few voters (just over 20
people that hardly represent the people doing Scheme), so few
candidates and the current silence on the election process, it looks a
bit like a crazy business*. If the registered electorate is of the
same magnitude as the number of people working on R7RS-large, it
doesn't need an extra board to oversee the work, but the registered
voters could simply express their wishes and ideas directly.

Compared to the former election, with a much larger, more
representative electorate and a larger roster of nominees (who
accepted), the current process has some de facto legitimation issues.
Scheme as a language is not dead, but the former standardisation
process is. Sure, in the name of the twenty-or-so voters, any elected
committee can declare a new standard, but it won't be any more a
standard of the Scheme community than any other language document
declared as a standard by any other group of 20 schemers would be.

While I am critical of that, let me reiterate that Scheme itself is
not dead. The SRFI process is working great, and there are still
groups of researchers that move Scheme forward, like Marc Feeley's
group in Montréal or the distributed Racket team.

Thanks for reading. I just needed to word my worries.

Marc

* I hope that's the right word.

Am Mo., 16. Feb. 2026 um 13:03 Uhr schrieb Daphne Preston-Kendal
<dpk@nonceword.org>:
>
> Dear Schemers,
>
> As I send this mail, it is just past 12:00 UTC on 16 February 2026, so registrations and nominations to the Scheme steering committee are now closed.
>
> A list of all registered voters is available here: <https://r7rs.org/sc/voters.html>.
> If you submitted a registration, but you are not in this list, please reply and let us know as soon as possible so the error can be corrected.
> Likewise, if you submitted a registration but your (public) information is displayed incorrectly, please let us know.
>
> Nominees still have until the start of voting on 1 March to accept their nominations and provide statements, or decline.
>
> The following candidates have accepted nominations so far:
> • Arthur A. Gleckler
> • Marc Feeley
> • Shiro Kawai
>
> We are still awaiting responses from the following nominees:
> • Alexis King
> • Andy Wingo
> • Bob Burger
> • Christine Lemmer-Webber
> • Laurent Bloch
> • Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen
> • Matthias Felleisen
> • Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
>
> The following people declined nominations to the Steering Committee:
> • Christian Queinnec
> • Daphne Preston-Kendal
> • Manuel Serrano
> • Matthew Flatt
> • Michael Sperber
> • Shriram Krishnamurthi
> • William Byrd
>
> The following potential candidate was unreachable at her publically-available email address:
> • Dipanwita Sarkar
>
> Likewise, if you submitted any nomination of any person who is not on these lists, please reply and let us know as soon as possible – ideally within a day, so that your nominee can be informed and not be unfairly disadvantaged by having less time to write their statement.
>
> To reiterate, *new* registrations and nominations are closed. Corrections to the existing register of voters and candidates are still open.
>
> Best wishes
>
>
> Daphne
>