[gentoo-project] council manifesto 2016/17

[William Hubbs]

Hello all,

For those of you who do not know me, I have been a Gentoo developer
since 2004 and the primary author and maintainer of OpenRC for a number
of years. I am a member of base-system, qa, the udev team, and the accessibility
team. Also, I have experience using Gentoo in a production
environment.

Below are my thoughts about how the council should operate.

* The council should be asked to make a decision on an issue only when
the issue cannot be settled by the community itself. Innovations should
come from the developers, and the council should do what it can to
support these innovations.

* When the council is asked to make a decision, it should be fully
informed about both sides of the issue before it votes. On the other
hand, the council should not block progress by taking an extremely long
time to make a decision.

* We can learn from the past and improve upon it. Continuing
to do things like we have in the past is not a bad thing in itself.
However, using what we have done in the past to block change can be. I
understand that people are used to doing things a certain way. However,
that alone is not justification for continuing to do things the same way
in the future. if we need to make a change, we should make sure that
change is backward compatible with what we have, or if this is not
possible, provide the smoothest possible transition for our users.
Since the council doesn't maintain all of the packages, the council is
not going to know the technical details of how to make either of these
happen, so I don't feel that the council should mandate specific
implementations.?

Thanks much for your time, and please participate in the election.

William