Hi!  I'm  very grateful  to  have  been  notimated  for this  year's  Council
elections. I'd  like to give  a short  personal introduction in  this manifesto,
overview  of  my  Gentoo  contributions   and  what  I  think  Council  members'
responsibilities are.

I was  born (and  currently live in)  coastal part of  Croatia, a  small country
situated  around the  Adriatic  Sea. I  obtained a  degree  in Renewable  energy
technologies, although  I'm not working  in that field  currently as my  day job
revolves around embedded Linux (with main focus on networking).

I've been a Gentoo developer since  August 2021. My Gentoo contributions started
with  various updates  to packages  I've  been using  at the  time. The  initial
satisfaction of contributing  to an open source project turned  into a desire to
be  more and  more  involved  with Gentoo.  During  my  recruitment period  I've
assisted with  a fair bit  of gcc-10 porting bugs  and fixing various  QA issues
across the tree. After being officially recruited as a developer, I've continued
to work on various QA improvements,  such as supporting efforts to remove EAPI-5
ebuilds from the tree and  removing broken and outdated packages (treecleaning).
Since November 2021 I also began to do arch testing work and I've joined several
architecture projects since (RISC-V and HPPA most recently). I try to maintain a
positive  attitude  and  avoid  conflicts  whenever  possible  as  I  think  all
disagreements can be resolved with open discussion.

Council members  have the privilege to  represent Gentoo which is  why they need
to  make rational  decisions  and    should always  have  focus  on pushing  the
distribution  forward and  making  a  better Gentoo  experience  for our  users.
Naturally there are  going to be different opinions, but  Council should be able
to discern the  best course of action even in  those situations. Council members
also  have a  responsibility to  set an  example for  other developers  by being
proactive,  open for  discussion,  not  opposed to  change  and  able to  accept
constructive criticism.  Finally, their contributions  to the tree  and packages
they maintain should hold up to Gentoo's quality standards.

I hope  that I've shown during  my time as a  developer that I'm able  to devote
enough time to Gentoo  and that I care about things  working and maintaining our
high development quality standards.

Thank you for your time,
Jakov