2025 TOC election results blog (#16789)

* unlinted draft

* linted draft

* actually looked at the rendering

* link winners

* Update index.md

Author: craigbox

content/en/blog/2025/toc-election-results/index.md

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+---
+title: "Istio Project Announces 2025 Technical Oversight Committee Election Results"
+description: Announcing the results of our annual election.
+publishdate: 2025-08-19
+attribution: "Craig Box, for the Istio Steering Committee"
+keywords: [istio,toc,governance,community,election]
+---
+
+Last year we announced that Istio would transform from an indefinitely-appointed Technical Oversight Committee to a regularly elected body, with members serving two-year terms.
+
+Each year, three of the six seats are elected. To bootstrap the process, we announced the 2025 election would cover the seats held by the three longest-serving members.
+
+One of those three seats became vacant, prompting a by-election. Long-time maintainer [Costin Manolache](https://github.com/costinm) won that election. We thank Costin for his continuing contributions and completing the remainder of the term, after which he chose not to stand again.
+
+Five candidates stood for the three available seats, and the Steering Committee has now concluded the election.
+
+**[Lin Sun](https://github.com/linsun)** and **[Louis Ryan](https://github.com/louiscryan)** were re-elected to their two seats. Both have been involved with Istio since before its public launch, and continue to serve as active leaders across the project.
+
+The third seat was won by **[Rama Chavali](https://github.com/ramaraochavali)**, a long-time contributor and maintainer of Istio through his work at Salesforce.
+
+In Rama's own words:
+
+{{< quote >}}
+I have worked with service mesh technologies for more than eight years, contributing to various projects that built the Managed Mesh platform for Salesforce. Istio and Envoy are the backbone of the Salesforce service mesh platform, powering critical workloads. The majority of Salesforce traffic flows through Istio and Envoy.
+
+I have been an active and impactful contributor to the Istio project since April 2019. My contributions span both the core control plane components of Istio and Envoy, the high-performance proxy that serves as Istio's data plane. Demonstrating a deep technical understanding and commitment to the project, I was recognized as a maintainer of Istio's control plane in January 2020. Building on this expertise in service mesh networking, I became a Networking Working Group lead in July 2020.
+
+Throughout my tenure, I have been instrumental in shaping the Istio project through the development and implementation of numerous significant features and architectural designs.
+{{< /quote >}}
+
+On behalf of the Istio community, I congratulate Rama on his election to the TOC and look forward to his continued leadership and impact.