Having been nominated to run for the Council this year, which nomination I consider an honour (thank you, everyone who thinks I am appropriate for this position!), here are a few words from me regarding what I think is important regarding the Gentoo Council and why I consider myself a good fit for this role.


A bit about me:

I am an experimental particle physicist (currently employed in the field again but having since my Ph.D. studies gone through several other fields of science, as well as a brief stint in industry) with strong interest in computing infrastructure, with particular emphasis on high-performance computing, advanced networking and security.

I have been using Gentoo since I got my first amd64 system in early 2006, and it has been THE workstation Linux distribution for me ever since - not in the least due to the fact that even when I used Slackware on x86, I still installed most software from sources. Even as a regular user I frequently contributed ebuild patches via Bugzilla, became a proxied maintainer shortly having found out about this possibility in early 2016, and later this year following the encouragement of several people on IRC became a developer. In addition to maintaining (and rather well I dare say, if my update or stabilisation turnover rate as well as the number of open bugs assigned to me are anything to go by) a somewhat eclectic set of packages, I have:
 - introduced to Gentoo OpenCL runtimes for Intel (first Beignet, then the whole NEO stack) and AMD (amdgpu-pro-opencl) GPUs;
 - subsequently led the effort to refactor OpenCL support in Gentoo to be more modular and easier for users to understand;
 - planned and to a large degree implemented the long-outstanding goal of supporting side by side multiple implementations of Lua, making Gentoo one of the few Linux distribution capable of this;
 - helped test Python 3.8, 3.9 and now 3.10 support across the main Gentoo tree;
 - been involved in the RISC-V Project since early 2021, in which capacity I am one of the developers representing Gentoo in the BeagleV beta programme and have been keywording packages for ~riscv using such a system.


What I think is important for the Council:

1. It has already been mentioned in several other manifestos that the Council should be OPEN; mine will be no exception. As the body responsible for global Gentoo policies as well as the final court of appeal for disciplinary decision, the Council's work should be as transparent as possible without violating privacy and data-protection regulations.


2. The Council should be DECISIVE. Seeing most if not all materials pertaining to issues requiring Council decisions are publicly available well ahead of the meetings and that it is entirely possible to discuss such issues in advance on Bugzilla, the mailing lists, IRC and so on, deferring a decision should be a last-resort option. And yes, all of the above does mean Council members should spend time on Council matters outside Council meetings.

Here I strongly feel my work experience in particle physics will prove very useful - it is a highly collaborative field, with projects comprising of members scattered across numerous countries who even before the pandemic communicated primarily through videoconferences, so I am by no means a stranger to such a mode of work.


3. I feel it would be useful for the Gentoo Council to be a bit more PROACTIVE regarding policies. Not that I think we should codify everything, far from it! Still, we have got some things in Gentoo which are de-facto standards (for instance the fact much of the main tree currently implicitly depends on changed-USE functionality to achieve seamless updates of e.g. Lua, Ruby or Python, even though as far as I can tell this feature is not part of the PMS) yet which often fall through the cracks. It is my opinion that Council members should try to keep track of such matters being brought up and follow up on them. This implies Council members should be INVOLVED in the Gentoo community, which for me is obvious but I'm mentioning it here for completeness.

As a scientist, I on the one hand largely supervise my own work (making it in my best interest to keep track of what needs to be done, what is important or urgent, etc.) and on the other operate in an environment where many ideas come from informal discussions (meaning they are easy to lose unless you capture an nurture them). I believe this makes me quite suited to this task.