I have recently made a tabular summary of (probably) all Council members and Trustees in the history of Gentoo. I think that this table provides a very succinct way of expressing the changes within management of Gentoo. While it can’t express the complete history of Gentoo, it can serve as a useful tool of reference.
What questions can it answer? For example, it provides an easy way to see how many terms individuals have served, or how long Trustee terms were. You can clearly see who served both on the Council and on the Board and when those two bodies had common members. Most notably, it collects a fair amount of hard-to-find data in a single table.
Can you trust it? I’ve put an effort to make the developer lists correct but given the bad quality of data (see below), I can’t guarantee complete correctness. The Trustee term dates are approximate at best, and oriented around elections rather than actual term (which is hard to find). Finally, I’ve merged a few short-time changes such as empty seats between resignation and appointing a replacement, as expressing them one by one made little sense and would cause the tables to grow even longer.
This article aims to be the text counterpart to the table. I would like to tell the history of the presented management bodies, explain the sources that I’ve used to get the data and the problems that I’ve found while working on it.
As you could suspect, the further back I had to go, the less good data I was able to find. The problems included the limited scope of our archives and some apparent secrecy of decision-making processes at the early time (judging by some cross-posts, the traffic on -core mailing list was significant, and it was not archived before late 2004). Both due to lack of data, and due to specific interest in developer self-government, this article starts in mid-2003.