# Alex Pollitt

I am excited to have been nominated for the steering committee. I recognize that doing
the role justice will be a demanding and time consuming commitment, but I would like 
to do my part to help maintain and foster the growth of this amazing community of 
contributors and users.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am one of the founders of Tigera, the company behind 
Calico, and active contributors to flannel, CNI, Kubernetes, and Istio. I’ve been working 
with the Kubernetes community since 2014 and have great respect for everyone I’ve had the 
chance to get to know along the way.

Since the early days of the project, when friends used to ask, “which container orchestrator 
would you bet on?”, my answer was always Kubernetes – not because of the great design 
principles, but because of how the founding team and those already contributing welcomed 
others to take part and collaborate with an equal voice to move the project forward.  For me,
“Kubernetes” means the people and how they work together, as much as technology.

One example I experienced was the k8s-sig-net efforts to agree a network policy API.  In 
other communities, this might have descended into vendors trying to get one up on each 
other.  Instead there was true collaboration, focusing on technical merit and meeting the needs 
of future users.  It was awesome to play a part in that process and even though it was just one 
small corner of Kubernetes it’s a great illustration of why I love working in this community.

If elected, I promise to do my utmost to foster and facilitate this kind of diverse, vendor 
neutral, merit based collaboration, empower and support contributors to shape the project, 
and maintain the spirit of this awesome community as it grows.
