Hi all!

I live in Moscow, Russia and by education is a particle physicist
(HEP). These days my activities shifted more to the HPC field, which
is mandatory for most scientific research. I run several Gentoo
powered HPC clusters in our university and use Gentoo on a number
of servers and workstations.

I'm Gentoo developer since 2014, Gentoo user since 2007 and Linux
user since 2002. My activity in Gentoo is in sci, HPC fields and
fixing stuff here and there through all tree. This year I'm one of
Google Summer of Code mentors for the Gentoo MPI project [1,2].

Outside of Gentoo I participate in a number of free software
projects, mostly with bug fixes and improvements. Some notable
contributions were in OrangeFS, clsync, MPlayer, Midnight Commander.

Engagement with wider community is important to promote and expand
free software, so I participated in a number of conferences,
including FOSDEM-2017 [3], Linux Days 2016 (Gentoo miniconf) [4]
and LVEE (Linux Vacation Eastern Europe) [5-9] with talks on a wide
range of subjects from distributed file systems [9] to quantum
computing and post-quantum cryptography [3,7], from file level live
data replication [4] to big data mining [8], from efficient usage
of terminal [6] to the second generation of anonymous overlay
networks [5].

I see the diversity and the freedom of choice as the main powers of
Gentoo, so the Council should support them when necessary. We should
have no "follow mainstream" approach when alternatives are
available and we have manpower to support them including external
contributors.

Therefore we should bring more developers to our team, this
gives several vectors for improvements:
- create friendly and cozy environment, be gentle but strict if
  necessary to protect it if administrative action is required;
- improve PR and Gentoo presence at Linux events worldwide;
- encourage long-term contributors to become developers.
- encourage individuals with new ideas, do not block them by action
  or inaction unless there is a serious reason (e.g. the tree is
  broken).

All Council decisions should be clear and transparent to the
community, this includes swiftly available Council logs and all
discussions being done in public except for cases where personal
privacy or 0-day security vulnerabilities dictates otherwise.

The Council should keep an eye over conformity to the Gentoo Social
Contract and make sure that we are not depending on proprietary or
non-free (in terms of OSI and FSF approved) components or services.
This implies that Gentoo should be fully available for both
development and usage without any mandatory dependency on
third-party service providers.

References:
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2017/Ideas/Support_for_multiple_MPI_implementations
[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo-mpi-overlay
[3] https://fosdem.org/2017/schedule/event/quantum/
[4] https://www.linuxdays.cz/2016/video/Andrew_Savchenko-A_live_data_synchronization_using_clsync.pdf
[5] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/258
[6] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/226
[7] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/184
[8] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/128
[9] https://lvee.org/en/abstracts/33