This post kicks off the formal election process with a call for nominations for the 2026 Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Team Reps. For 2025, Francesca Marano (@francina), Jb Audras (@audrasjb) and Benjamin Zekavica (@benjamin_zekavica) have served as the elected Core Team Reps.
The Role
In the WordPress open-source project, each team has on average one or two representatives, abbreviated as reps. For the historians out there, the role go way back to 2012.
Historically with the Core team, the team rep A Team Rep is a person who represents the Make WordPress team to the rest of the project, make sure issues are raised and addressed as needed, and coordinates cross-team efforts. duration was around a year, though some reps stuck around longer if there was a specific need.
Anyone who serves as a team rep is responsible for communicating on behalf of the Core team to the other contributor groups via weekly updates, as well as occasional cross-team chats. Reps are also consulted on Contributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/., where they help to find someone within the Core team who will be at an event who can lead a Core table. Full details on the Team Rep role can be found on the Team Update site.
It is not called team lead for a reason. It’s an administrative role. While people elected as team reps will generally come from the pool of folks that people think of as experienced leaders, the team rep role is designed to change hands regularly.
This role has a time commitment of at least one or two hours a week.
The main tasks include:
- Posting the weekly Dev Chat agenda, hosting the chats, and summarizing them (which can include writing and encouraging others to contribute to the summaries). More details on coordinating devchat are available in the Core handbook.
- Keeping up with the current releases (mainly WordPress major and minors and Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ bi-weekly releases) and communicating updates.
- Keeping a watch on the moving parts of the team to report for quarterly updates (example).
How the election works
Please nominate people in the comments of this post. Self-nominations are welcome. The deadline is January 31, 2026 at 23:59 UTC. If there are fewer than 2 nominees who have accepted their nominations, the deadline will be extended.
Once the nomination period expires, a poll will be opened for voting. It will stay open for two weeks. The new reps will start their role in February 2026.
Disclaimer: if you are nominated, please don’t feel like you have to agree to say yes. The election poll will only include the names of the people who have agreed to be nominated. So feel free to reply with a “Thank you, but no thank you”.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments or speak to the current team reps. Finally, for reference, these are the 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 nomination posts.
Thanks to @francina for reviewing this post.
#team-reps
