Re: [gentoo-project] Gentoo Council 2012/2013 election

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

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On 22:05 Thu 07 Jun     , Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Mon, 04 Jun 2012, Jorge Manuel B S Vicetto wrote:
> > Nominations for the Gentoo Council 2012/2013 are now open for the 
> > next two weeks (until 23:59 UTC, 17/06/2012).
> 
> Seems that somebody has to start. ;-) I nominate:
> 
>    betelgeuse
>    chainsaw
>    dberkholz
>    grobian
>    hwoarang

Thanks, Ulrich — I accept. As a brief manifesto, I have 3 reasons to run 
for council:

1. Representing the Gentoo philosophy as a long-term dev (9+ years) with 
   a cool head and reasonable point of view
2. Making the council less of a bureaucratic blocker on progress and 
   improving its productivity
3. Overseeing the health of our dev and user communities

I believe that individual developers drive all the innovation with 
Gentoo, and the council's role should be to get out of their way instead 
of setting up roadblocks.

The importance of having people who have Gentoo's philosophy in their 
blood can't be overstated, and this only comes from long and extensive 
experience working within our community. Being able to apply this 
philosophy to every council decision ensures that we stay consistent 
with the spirit of Gentoo.

I've seen the council transform greatly since I took some time away from 
the council prior to this term. There are many parts of that 
transformation that I think need to be reversed to make Gentoo more 
productive as a whole. Bureaucracy and general confusion are getting in 
the way of progress on both large and small scales.

For example, having some kind of solution for the GLEP 55 problem has 
*literally* dragged on for *years*. And we ended up choosing an option 
that was out there for nearly as long as the GLEP itself. This is one 
case where making almost any decision is better than making no decision.

On the smaller scale, I'm talking about problems caused by, for example, 
the frequent rotation of chairs. This means every meeting is run by 
someone different so there's no good continuation of issues from the 
last meeting, and a lack of experience in moderation so we get off-topic 
and talk too long without decisions. We should have at most a few chairs 
who are running 3-4 months of meetings in a row.

Finally, something I've cared deeply about for years is the health of 
Gentoo's developer community. We occasionally need to take action to 
ensure it stays healthy, and fortunately we seem to be closer to the 
peak of a cycle at the moment. But it's inevitable that we'll have 
problems again, and we need to be prepared and ready to deal with them 
quickly, at a council level if necessary.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Council Member / Sr. Developer, Gentoo Linux <http://dberkholz.com>
Analyst, RedMonk <http://redmonk.com/dberkholz/>

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