[gentoo-project] mattst88's Council 2021 manifesto

[gentoo-project] mattst88's Council 2021 manifesto

[Matt Turner]

Hi!

I'm Matt Turner. I've used Gentoo since 2004. I've been a developer since 2010.
I have 9100+ commits in ::gentoo since the transition to git in 2015.

Please reply to this mail with any questions you have for me.

# Employment

I am employeed by Google, Inc., as a member of the ChromeOS Graphics team,
currently working on the freedreno/turnip 3D drivers in Mesa. Previously I was
at Intel where worked on the Mesa/i965 team.

# Role of a Council member

A Council member should already be a leader in Gentoo, irrespective of the title.

A Council member should drive the distro forward and build consensus around
current issues (Note that consensus need not be unanimous).

A Council member should be willing to disagree and commit [1]. A Council member
should participate in discussions in a good faith effort to build consensus; the
purpose of a discussion is not for others to hear your point.

A Council member should be someone who works on issues larger than their
immediate responsibilities. That is to say, a Council member should recognize
places that need their help and not shy away from taking on a task because it's
not their direct responsibility. The whole Gentoo distribution is the
responsibility of a Council member.

It should be obvious to say that a Council member should be able to allocate
sufficient time and energies to prepare for meetings, participate in
discussions, and handle Council matters that are assigned to them. If I were to
fail in these most basic responsibilities I would certainly not accept another
nomination until I knew I would be able to fulfil them.

# Technical Contributions

I'm the current lead of the Release Engineering team, where I develop the
Catalyst tool, and maintain automated build systems for the various supported
architectures. I've been responsible for many hardware upgrades in recent years:
I wrote and managed a grant request for a new SPARC developer system; I
organized and managed upgrading our ARM64 developer system. Unexpectedly, I'm
mentoring a GSoC project working on catalyst this year as well.

I'm a member of most of our architecture teams. I'm currently the lead of the
Alpha and MIPS teams. Where it's made sense, I've dropped stable keywords to
lighten the load for arch testers and to remove roadblocks for others: for
example by removing all stable keywords on alpha and ia64, most on hppa.

I've been the primary maintainer for X11 in Gentoo since before we transitioned
to git. I'm the current lead of the X11 project.

More recently I joined the GNOME project, where I added GNOME 3.38 and then
GNOME 40 to the tree. See
https://mattst88.com/blog/2021/05/13/GNOME_40_available_in_Gentoo/

# Social Contributions

I served as a Council member for the 2020-2021 term. I am pleased that I was
able to bring the issue of rampant Social Contract violations in the Off The
Wall subforum to the Council's attention, leading to its necessary closure.

I have been a member of the Community Relations for the last three years. When I
was invited to join, I did so not because I wanted to be involved in more
disagreements, but because I thought that this was an area that was ripe for
improvement. I believe that the difference between ComRel three years ago and
today are night and day in an extremely improved way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit