Devs, listen up–voting closes for the Gentoo council at 23:59 UTC today (Friday). Here I’m going to tell you my surprise underdog picks. By underdog, I mean people who I didn’t realize I was going to rank fairly highly for before doing research. I dig through all my mailing-list archives of -dev, -project and -core, looking at all the recent posts by each candidate. Then I decided whether they expressed enough opinion on global directions, whether they were active enough on-list, and whether I agreed with their ideas about where Gentoo should go. Based on that, here’s my underdogs:

• jer (HPPA arch team)
• leio (wxWidgets, GNOME maintainer)
• ulm (emacs maintainer)
• dev-zero (cpp, postgresql, samba, python maintainer)

Other than them, I strongly endorse our QA lead, Halcy0n (also on GCC porting, toolchain, and C++ teams). I’m not listing anyone who’s been on the council before, because that isn’t as interesting. There are other candidates who I think have the technical qualifications–I’m not voting for some of them because I think having a strong community that follows and enforces its own Code of Conduct is not just important but vital for Gentoo to move down the path of greatness.