So it's election time again...

I'm from Regensburg, Germany and by profession an experimental
physicist leading a university research group. Outside physics
and Gentoo I'm interested in a wide range of topics all the way
from art and cultural history to scifi and cocktail mixing. 
(Doesn't necessarily mean that I have time for all that though...)

I'm a Gentoo developer since 2010 when my back-then-gf got me
interested in the distribution... and since I decided at some point
that if I'm tinkering with the computer in my free time anyway
I might as well do it productively. I started in the KDE team and
am still a bit involved there, but today mostly work on Perl
and LibreOffice, and solve odd problems here and there. Council 
business, if present, and occasionally Comrel start eating up 
my free time. 

Gentoo runs on our university PCs and is controlling our 
measurements. So, same as Kristian, I see a solid stable set 
and clean upgrade paths as very important. Conversely, ~arch 
gives us the unique opportunity to provide our users with
the bleeding edge of code, and that's something we should use, 
value and advertise too! While I'm less partial to any side
of the unix philosophy versus systemd debate, Gentoo should be
about providing choice, not locking anyone into a single solution.

Which brings me to the two words that describe Gentoo: Code and 
community. Our objective should be to provide the best possible 
experience and the best possible packaging to our Gentoo users. 
That needs both technical expertise and an active developer 
community. The best technical expertise can be worthless if 
people keep shouting at each other, ignore others, block work or 
tear up a project. A cozy community alone is also worthless in 
our context if it produces crappy code. So this is the balance 
that we have to find.

We need to
- strengthen recruiters so anyone competent who has finished
  quizzes can come onboard really quickly
- strengthen user contact points such as proxy-maintainers
- improve the visibility of Gentoo, see FOSDEM stall, or PR, or
  social media, to bring more people onboard

Finally, I see absolutely no place in Gentoo for things such as 
harassment, backstabbing, or power plays and empire building.
If that's what you're after, please pick a different project.