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, but 
today I mostly work on Perl, office, and occasionally printing
ebuilds and solve odd problems here and there. Council business and 
occasionally Comrel start eating up my free time. 

At some point I became sick of hearing "This was tried in the past 
but didnt work" (but why?!) or "This used to be done differently" 
(but how?!), so I got interested in "Gentoo history". The council 
decisions document [1] and the improvemenent of the Gentoo 
ecosystem poster [2] can be seen from that background.

Gentoo runs on our university PCs and is controlling our 
measurements. So, 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! Gentoo 
is about providing choice, not locking anyone into a single solution
- so a wide range of projects is great - but on the other hand 
projects should ideally be structured in a way that they don't 
block each others' progress.

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, or if noone dares improving
something for fear of offending mythical maintainers. So this is 
the balance that we have to find.

We need to
- improve the bus factor of central projects
- improve the visibility of Gentoo, see FOSDEM stall, or PR, or
  social media, to bring more people onboard
- strengthen user contact points such as proxy-maintainers
- put more effort into mentoring prospective developers
  (yes, you do need to learn some stuff befor we hand you the
  keys to the house)
- adapt to modern times in terms of accepting contributions
  (yes, Bugzilla can be *very* clunky for some purposes)

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.
(And if you really care about Gentoo, train your replacement 
before you disappear.)

[If this text looks familiar to you, that's no surprise- it is an 
updated version of my 2016 election manifesto. The challenges for
Gentoo haven't changed that much in the meantime...]

[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~dilfridge/decisions.html
[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo-ecosystem