So it's election time again... 

I'm from Regensburg, Germany and by profession an experimental physicist 
leading a university research group. Currently staying at Aalto University,
Espoo, Finland for a year as visiting professor. 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; 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. Today I mostly work on keeping toolchain stuff like glibc and 
binutils going, and solving odd problems here and there. Council business and 
QA are other topics I'm working on. At some point I got interested in 
Gentoo history, and started assembling the council decisions index [1] and 
updating the Gentoo ecosystem poster [2]. Both badly need an update again.
Related to university work, I'm also tinkering with Julia recently.

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.

There's one thing that Gentoo is really bad at, and that is making strategic
decisions and actually implementing them. We discuss controversial topics on 
the mailing lists, but activity there is not necessarily a good indicator of 
how opinions are actually distributed across the developer community. If you 
ask 10 persons, you'll get 11 different opinions on how things should be done, 
and at least 4 people with completely different opinions will be fully 
convinced that they speak for the majority!

As consequence, what Gentoo needs is clear and undisputed areas of 
responsibility, and *one* democratically elected steering body, the Gentoo 
Council, that listens to the developer community, is familiar with daily 
affairs, and makes decisions based on that. Electing people means you trust them 
to represent your interests for a year; an election is the most reliable way 
that we have so far to find out what the developer community actually wants. 
From this background I stand for a proactive council that takes responsibility 
for all aspects of Gentoo.

We need to build on the strengths of Gentoo and make it cool again. Infinite 
adaptibility, combination of cutting edge testing and solid stable, wide arch 
support, ideal for software developers. This means generic public relations 
work (see e.g. FOSDEM), but also initiatives of developers to "do something 
cool", supporting and publicising that. 

We need to at least try to go with the times. Yes I see the ideological and 
practical disadvantages of Github, but if we want to attract a large base of 
contributors, we need to seriously think about having modern, comparable ways 
to contribute! And not get stuck in eternal yesterday... just because things 
were done successfully in one way when you joined Gentoo 10 years ago, that 
doesnt mean they have to be done that way for all eternity; this attitude does 
not help!

That's it for now. Cheers!

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