Fwiw, the rule to qualify is at least one year of "contributions" that are "sustained" and "substantial". Having a commit bit definitely helps with some kinds of contributions (merging PRs, triaging bugs), but there's no clock that starts ticking when someone gets a commit bit; contributions before that count too.
"""
To become eligible to join the Steering Council, an individual must be a Project Contributor who has produced contributions that are substantial in quality and quantity, and sustained over at least one year. Potential Council Members are nominated by existing Council members, and become members following consensus of the existing Council members, and confirmation that the potential Member is interested and willing to serve in that capacity. [...]
When considering potential Members, the Council will look at candidates with a comprehensive view of their contributions. This will include but is not limited to code, code review, infrastructure work, mailing list and chat participation, community help/building, education and outreach, design work, etc.
"""
Also FWIW, the jupyter steering council is currently 15 people, or 16 including Fernando:
By comparison, Numpy's currently has 8, so Ralf's proposal would bring it to 11:
Looking at the NumPy council, then with the exception of Alex who I haven't heard from in a while, it looks like a list of people who regularly speak up and have sensible things to say, so I don't personally see any problem with keeping everyone around. It's not like the council is an active working group; it's mainly for occasional oversight and boring logistics.
-n