Form and Function

Welcome to another GNOME Foundation update; an overview of everything that’s been happening at the Foundation. There was no update last week, due to me being away from my computer last Friday, so this post covers a two week period rather than the usual single week.

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my request for feedback in my previous post! It was great to hear your views on these posts, and it was extremely motivating to get positive feedback on the blog series.

Budget report

In case you didn’t see it, last week Rob posted a detailed breakdown of the Foundation’s current operating budget. This is the second year in a row that we have provided a budget report for the community, and I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to keep up the momentum around financial transparency. I’d encourage you to give it a read if you haven’t already.

Community travel

One positive aspect of the current budget is that we have a healthy community travel budget, and I really want to encourage members to make use of the fund. The travel budget is there to be spent, and we absolutely want to see community members applying for travel. If you have been interested in organising a hackfest, or attending a GNOME conference, and finances have been a barrier, please do make use of the funding that is available. Information about how to apply can be found in the handbook.

Also on travel: we are currently looking to recruit additional volunteers to help administer the travel budget, as part of the Travel Committee. So, if you are interested in helping with GNOME and would like to get involved, please do get in touch using the comments below, or by messaging the Travel Committee.

Outreachy

The Foundation has a proud history of funding outreach efforts, and has regularly supported interns through Outreachy. The December to March round is almost upon us, and the Internship Committee has coordinated the selection of an intern who we will be sponsoring. We were pleased to release the funding for this internship this week. More details about the internship itself will follow.

Banking and finance systems

As mentioned in recent updates, we have been working through a round of improvements to our banking setup, which will give us enhanced fraud protection, as well as automatic finance management features. This week we had a training session with our bank, the fraud protection features were turned on, and I signed the last of the paperwork. As a result, this round of work is now complete.

I have also been going through the process of signing up for the new financial system that Dawn our new finance advisor will be setting up for us.

Bookkeeping meetings

Our regular monthly bookkeeping meeting happened last week, and we had another follow-up call more recently. We are still working through the 2024-25 financial year end accounts, which primarily involves resolving a list of small questions, to make sure that the accounts are 100% complete and accurate. Our bookkeeper has also been very patiently answering questions from Deepa, our treasurer, and myself as we continue to familiarise ourselves with the finance and accounting setup (thank you!)

Board meeting

The Board had a regular meeting this week. The topics under discussion included:

• Setting goals for the upcoming fundraising campaign, in particular what the fundraising target should be, and what programs we want to fund with the proceeds.
• Improving our minutes to meet the needs of different audiences (directors, auditors, the IRS, members, and so on). We also worked on a plan to clear the backlog of unapproved minutes.
• Planning for a Board hackfest prior to next FOSDEM.

We came away with a healthy list of action items, and I’m looking forward to making progress in each of these areas.

GNOME.Asia

Our upcoming conference is Tokyo continues to be a focus, and Kristi is busy putting the final arrangements together. The event is just 15 days away! A reminder: if you want to participate, please do head over to the site and register.

Flathub

There has been some good progress around Flathub over the past two weeks. Bart has done quite a bit of work to improve the performance of the Flathub website, which I’m sure users will appreciate. We also received some key pieces of legal work, which are required as part of the roadmap to establish Flathub as its own financial/legal entity. With those legal documents in place we have turned our attention to planning Flathub’s financial systems; discussions about this are ongoing.

Digital Wellbeing

There was another review call this week to check on progress as the current phase of the program reaches its final stages. The main focus right now is making sure that the new screen time limits feature is in good shape before we use up the remaining funding.

Progress is looking good in general: the main changes for GNOME Shell and Settings have all been merged. There are two more pieces of work to land before we can say that we are in a feature complete state. After that we will circle back to UX review and papercut fixing. If you want more information about these features, I would recommend Ignacy’s recent post on the topic.

Philip has also published a fantastic post on the web filtering functionality that has been implemented as part of this program.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

It’s Friday, so it’s time to provide an update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past week. Here’s my summary of the main activities and events, covering what both Board and staff members have been up to.

GNOME.Asia

I mentioned GNOME.Asia 2025 in my last post, but I’ll mention it again since it’s only a month until the event in Tokyo, which is being co-hosted with LibreOffice Asia.

As you’d expect, there is a lot of activity happening as GNOME.Asia 2025 approaches. Kristi has been busy with a plethora of organisational tasks, including scheduling, printing, planning for the day trip, and more.

Travel has also been a focus this week. The Travel Committee has approved sponsorship for a number of attendees, and we have moved on to providing assistance to those who need documentation for visas.

Finally, registration is now open! There are two registration sites: one for in-person attendees, and one for remote attendees. If you plan on attending, please do take the time to register!

Transitions

This week was a big week for us, with the announcement of Rosanna’s departure from the organisation. Internally transition arrangements have been in progress for a little while, with responsibilities being redistributed, accounts being handed over, and infrastucture that was physically managed by Rosanna being replaced (such as our mailing address and phone number). This work continued this week.

I’d like to thank Rosanna for her extremely helpful assistance during this transition. I’d also like to thank everyone who was pitched in this week, particularly around travel (thank you Kristi, Julian, Maria, Asmit!), as well as Cassidy and Arun for picking up tasks as they have arisen.

The Foundation is running smoothly despite our recent staffing change. Payments are being processed quickly and reliably, events and sysadmin work are happening as normal, and accounting tasks are being taken care of. I’m also confident that we’ll continue to work reliably and effectively as we move forward. There are improvements that we have planned which help with this, such as the streamlining of our financial systems and processes.

Ongoing tasks

It has become a common refrain in my updates that there is lots going on behind the scenes that doesn’t make it into these posts. This week I thought that I’d call some of those more routine activities out, so readers can get a sense of what those background tasks are.

It turns out that there is indeed quite a lot of them, so I’ve broken them down into sections.

Finances and accounting

It’s the beginning of the month, which is when most invoices tend to get submitted to us, so this week has involved a fair amount of payments processing. We use a mix of platforms for payments, and have a shared tracker for payments tasks. At the time of writing all invoices received since the beginning of the month have been paid, except for a couple of items where we needed additional information.

As mentioned in previous posts, we are in the process of deploying a set of improvements to our banking arrangements, and this continued this week. The changes are coming in bit by bit, and there are tasks for us to do at each step. It will be a number of weeks before the changes are completed.

Dawn who joined us last week has been doing research as part of her work to improve our finance systems. This has involved doing calls with team members and stakeholders, and is nearly complete.

Meetings!

Kristi booked the room for our regular pre-FOSDEM Advisory Board meeting, and I’ve invited representatives. Thanks to everyone who has sent an RSVP so far!

Next week we have another regular Board meeting scheduled, so there has been the routine work of preparing the agenda and sending out invitations.

Sysadmin work

Bart has been busy as usual, and it’s hard to capture everything he does. Recent activity includes improvements to donate.gnome.org, improvements to Flathub build pipelines, and working through a troublesome issue with the geolocation data used by GNOME apps.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

For over 20 years, Rosanna Yuen – aka zana – has been a key member of the GNOME Foundation team. I am writing this post to share the news that, as of last week, she is no longer working for us. We cannot emphasise enough how grateful we are for everything that Rosanna has done for the GNOME Foundation over the years, both as a volunteer and an employee, and we want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate her for her accomplishments at the GNOME Foundation.

In the rest of this post I want to share some details about Rosanna’s career at the GNOME Foundation, as a way of celebrating her contributions and reiterating our gratitude for everything she has done for us.

Rosanna was a GNOME contributor before she started with the GNOME Foundation, as a hacker on the card games in Aisleriot. Way back in 2005, the organization was in a perilous situation after the departure of its first Executive Director, and had no employees. Rosanna stepped in as a volunteer to help keep the organization afloat. Following her intervention as a volunteer, she was taken on as a temporary contractor, and then became a part-time employee. Around four years later, in 2010, she went full time.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rosanna saved the organization from a state of collapse during those early years. Since then, her roles and duties have been diverse. Aside from a broad range of accounting, finance, and administrative tasks, Rosanna has helped with travel and visas, running programs, and handling grant paperwork. There have also been many small but meaningful tasks that she has taken care of, such as mailing out thank you postcards to our donors, and going to the store each year during GUADEC to buy the “Pants of Thanks”.

For a long time, Rosanna participated in Board meetings, to address any questions about the Foundation’s operations. And for many years, as the Foundation’s only employee, she performed those operations herself. In more recent years, the Foundation hired additional staff, and Rosanna took on a management role alongside her other duties, providing mentorship and guidance for new staff members as they joined. One of her defining qualities has been the care and support that she has shown towards these colleagues.

Rosanna had many significant achievements during her time with the GNOME Foundation, and it is impossible to list all of them in this post. However, some of those achievements deserve special mention. They include ensuring that we have maintained our charitable status over the past 20 years, presenting finance reports to both the Board and the membership at our AGMs, playing a key role in establishing GNOME’s first Code of Conduct (and serving on the Code of Conduct Committee since its inception), running the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (as it was known then) for a period, managing transitions between multiple banks and accounting platforms, and ensuring the smooth running of the organization over the past 20 years, including filing taxes, payment of bills and staff, payments for contractors, and much more.

The decision to eliminate Rosanna’s position was made by the Board as part of approving the GNOME Foundation budget for October 2025 to September 2026. The Board felt that this difficult decision was the right one for the Foundation, and we will be providing details about our plans in future communications. For now, we want to offer Rosanna our deepest thanks and best wishes for the future.

Thank you, zana.

It’s Friday, so it’s time for a GNOME Foundation update, and there are some exciting items to share. As ever, these are just the highlights: there’s plenty more happening in the background that I’m not covering.

Fundraising progress

I’m pleased to be able to report that, in recent weeks, the number of donors in our Friends of GNOME program has been increasing. These new regular donations are already adding up to a non-trivial rise in income for the Foundation, which is already making a significant difference to us as an organization.

I’d like to take this moment to thank every person who has signed up with a regular donation. You are all making a major difference to the GNOME Foundation and the future of the GNOME project. Thank you! We appreciate every single donation.

The new contributions we are receiving are vital, but we want to go further, and we are working on our plans for both fundraising and future investments in the GNOME project.

New accountant

This week we secured the services of a new accountant, Dawn Matlak. Dawn is extremely knowledgeable, and comes with a huge amount of relevant experience, particularly around fiscal hosting. She’s also great to work with, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with her.

Dawn is going to be doing a fair amount of work for us in the coming months. In addition to helping us to prepare for our upcoming audit, she is also going to be overhauling some of our finance systems, in order to reduce workloads, increase reliability, and speed up processing.

GNOME.Asia

In other news, GNOME.Asia 2025 is happening in Tokyo on 13-15 December, and it’s approaching fast! Talk submissions have been reviewed and accepted, and the schedule is starting to come together. Information is being added to the website, and social activities are being planned. It’s shaping up to be a great event.

Registration for attendees isn’t open just yet, but it isn’t far off – look out for the announcement.

That’s it from me this week. I am on vacation next week, so I’ll be skipping next week’s post. See you in two weeks!