Involvement.
============
The time I've spent with Gentoo in the past few years has shown
involvement. Starting as a user, helping others in the forums and on
mailing-lists I quickly started contributing. First with German
translations of GWN and documentation, for which I became responsible quite
fast. Afterwards I took the ebuild quiz and helped our PPC team maintaining
the stable-tree and started building the release-media for HPPA plus I'm
maintaining several packages for now.

To quote Daniel Robbins [1]:
"And if you are already a developer who wants the Gentoo ecosystem to
improve, consider getting involved with the council, as a trustee, or work
to give regular users more of a voice on the project. Gentoo the distro
begins and ends with its users."

Running for the council is another (logical?) step of involvement.


Reliability.
============

While getting more and more involved with Gentoo I always tried to not make
wrong promises I couldn't hold. Being responsible for the HPPA
release-media for about 2 years and PPC's security liaison for about one
and a half year has shown that I'm trying to be a reliable community
member. (Uber could argue that I failed at writing the Gentoo/FreeBSD SPARC
doc, yeah I failed at that - sorry :P)


Accountability.
===============

Though I think we need a strong council which is empowered by all
Gentoo Developers taking part in this election and therefore free in it's
decision making process, I think that the council's decisions should be
made upon what's best for Gentoo and our community. Also decisions should
reflect Gentoo's interests and not individual opinions.

Once a decision is taken by a majority of council members I would expect
all council members to respect and support this decision - as it's been
made on Gentoo's interests and not individual preferences. Doing otherwise would
lead into a weak council which isn't able to enforce their decisions.

Questions.
==========

1) What you will do?

Everything which needs to be done, especially focused on improving
Gentoo's "ecosystem" and community relations. I'm pretty sure social
problems can't be fixed by technical solutions - therefore we need to
improve community relations and possibilities for users to get involved.

2) Why you will do it

See "Involvement".

3) How you will do it?

See "Accountability".

4) What is the timescale for doing it?

The timescale I'm elected for.

5) What experience do you have with this or a similar role?

I was responsible for managing German translations a while ago, but no real
experience in that tbh.

6) Why do you think you are qualified?

See "Involvement".

7) How you plan to balance a council role with your current Gentoo role?

I can't see problems where council decisions can conflict with my current
Gentoo roles, but if so it'll be my duty as a council member to vote on
Gentoo's interests and not my personal preferences.

8) How much time can you dedicate to the council role

Hopefully as much time as needed, though I wasn't able to catch up w/ dev-list
discussions in the past few months (in which I wrote that little shiny book
...).


[1] http://blog.funtoo.org/2007/07/your-choices-with-gentoo.html