User:Mattst88/Council Manifesto

= Council Manifesto =

Hi!

I'm Matt Turner. I've used Gentoo since 2004. I've been a developer since 2010. I have 11000+ commits in ::gentoo since the transition to git in 2015.

Employment
I am employed by Google, Inc., as a member of the Chrome OS Graphics team, currently working on the freedreno/turnip 3D drivers in Mesa. Previously I was employed by Intel where I worked on the Mesa/i965 3D driver 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. 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 fulfill 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 mentored a Google Summer of Code project working on catalyst in 2021.

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  and , most on. I've been the primary maintainer for Xorg packages in Gentoo since before we transitioned to git. I'm the current lead of the X11 project.

As the primary contributor for Gentoo's GNOME project, I added the last four major releases (3.38, 40, 41, 42). See my blog post. Each major version typically involved hundreds of individual version bumps, lots of bug wrangling, and managing package stabilizations.

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 was reelected and served the 2021-2022 term.

I have been a member of the Community Relations team for the last four 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 four years ago and today are night and day in an extremely improved way.