Please register to vote by filling in this form and sending it to sc-voter-registration@scheme-reports.org. (Your posting will be held for moderation until your registration request is approved.) You must register anew for this election regardless of what Scheme-related votes you have taken part in previously.
Please nominate candidates by email to sc-election-nomination@scheme-reports.org. (Your posting will be moderated, and only an announcement of a successful nomination posted.) Anyone can nominate anyone, including themselves. All nominations should include an email address. Self-nominations should include a statement (see below).
Nominations are open until the end of 15 January 2026 (anywhere on Earth).
The outgoing Steering Committee was elected in 2009 and successfully oversaw the production and ratification of the R7RS small language report until 2013. Unfortunately, during the protracted initial development of the R7RS large language after that, it fell dormant.
The current Scheme Working Group resolved in September 2025 to ask the Steering Commitee for a new election because it felt that after such long dormancy the outgoing Steering Committee was no longer able, as a group, to make and implement decisions effectively.
The Scheme standardization process charter says, ‘The Steering Committee itself shall establish procedures for replacing its members.’ The outgoing Steering Committee unanimously decided to delegate this task to the current Working Group. The Working Group has very closely modelled the procedure to be used this time on the procedure used last time.
The Working Group has written a statement to candidates and voters explaining what it hopes for in a new steering committee.
The Scheme Working Group has appointed Daniel Gruno as independent overseer of the election. Daniel has worked with the Apache Software Foundation for fifteen years and organized their membership and board of directors elections since 2015.
Most of the functions of the outgoing Steering Committee in the previous election will be performed by Daniel, as a neutral third party, in this election.
This will be a secret ballot.
In order to make it more difficult for any particular faction to gain control of all three seats, we will be using a form of single transferable vote proportional representation. Each voter will rank the candidates, and an algorithm will compute a three-member committee that tries to fairly represent the electorate.
We encourage all voters and candidates to join the scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org discussion mailing list, where voters and candidates can discuss issues related to the election with one another. The registration and nomination addresses are also moderated mailing lists, which you can subscribe to in order to receive live updates on successful registrations and nominations.
Anybody who has a stake in the Scheme standards process – including the members of the outgoing Steering Committee – may participate in the vote. In order to register, a potential voter must supply a ‘Statement of Interest’ declaring what their stake is in the Scheme standardization process. Each voter’s statement must be original, must be at least 75 words long, and must actually address the question of what the voter's interest is in the process. At the end of the registration period (but before any voting), the list of enrolled voters will be published along with their statements of interest.
People who registered for the ratifications of R6RS, R7RS small, for the previous steering committee election, or for any R7RS large ‘ballot’ are not automatically registered for this vote. Everyone must register anew.
The instructions are included in the registration form, but you can also read them here by unfolding this details tag:
Download the registration form from <https://r7rs.org/sc/register.txt>. The registration form asks for the following information:
The e-mail address supplied in item 1 will be used for all future correspondence with you, but will not be published. The rest of the form will be made public. Items 2 through 6 are for identification purposes only. (The e-mail address in item 5 is optional as spammers will inevitably collect any address supplied here.)
The completed form should be mailed to sc-voter-registration@scheme-reports.org. The independent overseer will perform a standard address confirmation on the e-mail address you supply in item 1. (i.e., he will use it to mail you something that you have to mail back in order to prove that the person at that address really wants to vote on the future of Scheme.)
Your Statement of Interest must be original, it must be at least 75 words long, and it must actually address the question of what your interest is in the Scheme standardization process. Be aware that the independent overseer will read your statement, and if he thinks you have seriously missed the mark, he will ask you to submit another one. It is nobody’s intent to run an essay competition here: we are just looking for evidence that you’re taking this seriously.
Registration instructions
The nomination period will start and end at the same times as the registration period.
Anybody can nominate anybody. Nominators do not have to be registered voters. Nominees do not have to be registered voters. People can nominate themselves.
Nominations should be sent to sc-election-nomination@scheme-reports.org. (All postings to this email address will be held for moderation. In order to maintain the anonymity of nominators, only the independent overseer will post news of successful nominations there.)
Nominations must at least include an email address for the nominee.
Nominees will be offered a chance to decline their nomination. If they accept their nomination, they will be asked for additional identifying information, similar to that used for registration, to appear on the candidate list. Candidates will also be asked to supply a statement of no more than 250 words about why they should be elected to the Steering Committee.
When the nomination period ends, the complete list of candidates will be published on this page.
The voting period will begin on 1 February 2026. This page will be updated with instructions in time for the beginning of voting, and registered voters will receive the same instructions via email.
The poll will be open for two weeks.
We have not yet decided how we will run the vote to keep things secret. We promise in advance, though, that if anyone is able to see your vote, it will only be the independent overseer Daniel Gruno, and that he will delete any information he has associating your name to your ballot as soon as possible.
The ballot will be counted using single transferable vote proportional representation. We will use the same code, by Alan Bawden, to calculate the result in this election as in the last one: it can be found at <http://www.r6rs.org/steering-committee/election/pr.scm>. This code is written in basic Scheme, and extensively commented – any questions you may have about the precise details of the procedure can best be answered by reading the code.
Should a tie-breaker be necessary, the random selection will be performed by using some physical source of randomness (coins, dice, etc.). This event will be live streamed at a pre-announced time so that the result can be observed.
In order to allow for a tie-breaker or any irregularities to be dealt with, the result will be announced about two weeks after the close of polling.
The independent overseer may remove anyone from the list of enrolled voters, remove anyone from the list of candidates, reject any vote, or otherwise make exceptions to the process described herein, if he believes an attempt has been made to cheat, or if some other unexpected circumstance has arisen. He will not take such actions capriciously, and will endeavor to be as fair as possible.
Appeal of the overseer’s decisions is to the Working Group, who will attempt to consult with the outgoing Steering Committee, excluding any members who are candidates for re-election. We hope that it does not come to any such eventuality.