Form and Function

It’s been about 4 months since my last GNOME Foundation update. Time flies. I’m sorry that it’s been so long. I will try to do more regular posts again in the future, but perhaps not at the same tempo as before. While I would love to post every other week, it’s hard to sustain.

With that said, let’s jump in. Given the time since my last post, I’m going to focus on the bigger and more recent news items that have happened at the GNOME Foundation.

New board, new officers

The Foundation’s board elections happen every year, and this year’s election completed in July. The election resulted in a number of changes to the board:

• Sri Ramkrishna, Jonathan Blandford and Adrian Vovk joined the board as new/returning directors
• Deepa Venkatraman, our treasurer, secured a new two year term
• Robert McQueen, Federico Mena Quintero and myself all ceased to be directors (Rob failed to be re-elected, Federico didn’t run, I withdrew part-way through the process)

The election was a difficult one for me personally, and left me reconsidering my involvement in the Foundation. This was not because I lacked motivation or commitment, but because the situation around the election had become untenable for me personally. However, I’ve spent a good deal of time since I withdrew my candidacy thinking about my role at the Foundation, and I’ve concluded that I care about this organisation and the progress we’ve made, and I want to see that work through. Conversations I’ve recently had with members of the community have also given me confidence that we can move forward together. In short: I’m happy to be sticking around.

The new board held its annual meeting in August, which is when officers and committees are appointed for the next 12 months. The Board decided to put me into position as Interim Executive Director, with Sri Ramkrishna taking my place as President. This is a good move from my perspective: it recognises that I’ve been doing a lot of the day to day management work (which I will continue to do), and gives the Board more ability to hold me accountable. Sri stepping into the role of President means that he will be my backup.

Other officer changes include Jonathan coming in as Second Vice-President, Cassidy moving from Vice-Secretary to Secretary, and Adrian stepping up as Vice-Secretary. Our other officers remain in post, with Maria as chair, Deepa as Treasurer, and Arun as Vice-President.

Huge thanks to everyone who volunteered for these positions!

In terms of committees, the Executive Committee had a minor reshuffle, with Jonathan, Adrian, and Sri joining, and Julian and Rob departing. The new members of the exec are already taking on work, which is great, and I’m hopeful for the newly reconstructed committee. The Finance Committee had some slight membership changes, with Rob leaving and Sri joining.

Finance and Operations Director

Last April we opened the search for a new paid team member, to join us as our Finance and Operations Director. There are a number of goals for this new position: to enhance the finance and accounting expertise that we have internally, to lead the development of our internal systems and budgets, to ensure the sustainability of finance and compliance tasks, to manage our fiscally sponsored projects, and more generally take ownership of the business side of the organisation.

We had a huge number of applicants apply for the position, and had some extremely high quality candidates to choose from. After going through several rounds of interviews we selected Dawn Matlak for the role, who we are extremely excited about joining us. Those of you who have read my previous posts might remember Dawn’s name: she initially started working with us as a consultant last year, in order to help us prepare for our first formal audit, which happened in March this year. As part of this work she helped us to transform many of our internal systems and processes. We’re thrilled that she is joining the Foundation on an ongoing basis, and are confident that our internal operations will continue to improve under her stewardship.

Dawn is already doing a small number of hours for us each week, which she will continue to do until she properly starts in the role in November.

Many thanks to Arun and Deepa who helped enormously with the hiring process.

FY27 Budget

The Foundation’s financial year runs from 1 October to 30 September, and each financial year requires a new budget, both for planning and as the basis of reporting and spending authorisation. We have all therefore been working hard on the new budget that will come into effect on 1 October. The new budget has been in the works for a while, and has been a major focus for the board over the past few months. Thankfully we got the initial budget approval done last week at the board’s regular September meeting. We’ll follow-up with a more detailed post about the budget as soon as we’re able, so the community can have some insight into how we’re managing our finances.

Events

With GUADEC 2026 wrapped up, Kristi has turned her attention to the next event in our schedule: GNOME.Asia 2026. This is being held in Terengganu, Malaysia, from 31 October to 2 November. There’s a great venue lined up, and Kristi is busy working on the details with a fantastic local team.

Aside from GNOME.Asia, the other recent focus has been GUADEC 2027. We have a couple of options for locations right now, and are in the process of confirming details before we commit to one of them for next year. We’ll share updates as soon as we have more details confirmed.

Fundraising

The end of the calendar year is an important time for non-profit fundraising, and we are currently busy planning our campaign for the end of 2026. I’ll be posting more about this soon, in particular in relation to the budget, but for now I will say that this campaign is going to be critical for our ability to grow and support the GNOME project.

Other

As ever, many other things have been happening at the Foundation, and there’s too much to go into detail about here. Work on GNOME’s infrastructure and Flathub continues, our back office operation continues with finances and other routine paperwork, and the board continues to discuss our long-term plans.

That’s it for now. Many thanks for reading, and feel free to leave questions in the comments.

Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. As has become my custom, this post covers a two week period, this time from 18 May until today, 29 May. As usual the Foundation continues to be busy, with events, infra, governance, and accounting activities all happening simultaneously. Read on for more information!

Events

Linux App Summit (LAS) 2026 was held in Berlin over the 16-17 May weekend. I’ve heard quite a few reports now, and everyone seemed extremely positive about the event. Kristi wrote a nice summary if you want more details.

The GNOME Foundation had two team members on the ground helping with running the event, which we co-organize with KDE. I’d like to take this opportunity to give a big thank you to the event’s sponsors: openSUSE, Tuxedo, Nextcould and Codethink. This event wouldn’t be possible without your support.

In addition to LAS, work is continuing on arrangements for GUADEC 2026. The deadline for travel sponsorship applications has now passed, and the Travel Committee has met to decide who will be funded. Notifications will be going out soon.

Board Elections

The process is officially underway for this year’s Board elections. Terms on our Board of Directors are two years in length, and each year half the board seats are open for election. This year we have five seats being contested.

The 2026 election has a slightly different schedule to previous years. In the past, there was no gap between the candidacy period, in which people can announce their intention to run, and the voting period. This meant that there was little opportunity for last-minute candidates to participate in discussion prior to voting taking place.

To address this, we’ve added a one week discussion period to the schedule, which will run between 8 and 15 June, between the candidacy and voting periods. This will hopefully give us opportunity to have more structured and inclusive debate amongst the candidates. We are still figuring out what that might look like, so if people have ideas or want to help, let me know in the comments.

GNOME Fellowship

We are currently in the very final stages of confirming and announcing the successful candidates for the inaugural round of the Foundation’s Fellowship program. Expect an announcement very soon.

Got a Concern?

Last week we introduced a new policy for handling of concerns about the Foundation, which is now part of the project handbook.

The new policy covers how to report concerns about people who are working for the Foundation, either in a paid or voluntary capacity. It also covers more general concerns about the Foundation.

The main goals of the policy are to:

• have a documented reporting procedure for those who have concerns relating to the Foundation
• clarify how concerns will be responded to
• provide reassurance for those reporting concerns, including that concern reports are welcome, are taken seriously, and will never result in retaliation

We hope that this policy will make it clear how you can inform us of a concern if you have one. We also want to emphasise that we want to hear concerns, so we can address them. Please do use the new reporting procedure.

Finance/Accounting

Work has continued on the finance and accounting operation over the past two weeks. Highlights include:

• Our transition to a monthly rather than quarterly close reached a significant milestone this week, with the completion of our April finance reports within three weeks of the previous month end. This is probably the fastest ever turnaround for our finance operation, and is a huge win for us in being able to effectively manage our finances.
• Following input from the board, corrections have now been sent to the accountants for our audit and annual tax filing.
• Applications are still open for our Director of Finance and Operations part-time contract. Candidates have until 4 June to submit.
• Finally, as I mentioned in my last update, we are in the process of retiring a number of finance platforms as we consolidate and streamline our operation. This week saw another platform retired, which brings the total number of eliminated platforms to four.

Infrastructure

Our infrastructure experienced a DDoS attack last weekend, which Bart and Andrea have been dealing with. Thankfully it seems that services weren’t too badly affected, and we’ve already improved our protection against similar attacks in the future.

Also on the infra side, Bart wasn’t at LAS this year, but he did spend some time writing two great posts about Flathub’s internals: How does Flathub even work? and Why are Flathub downloads so slow sometimes?. They’re a fascinating read if you’re interested in Flathub.

That’s it from me! As always, thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks.

Welcome to another GNOME Foundation update post! Today’s installment covers highlights from what’s happened over the past two weeks.

LAS 2026

Linux Apps Summit 2026 starts tomorrow! The organizing team, which includes members from both GNOME and KDE, has been hard at work and is on the ground in Berlin making final preparations. The schedule looks great, and it promises to be a well-attended event.

The talks are being streamed this year, so make sure to watch our social media for details, and tune in live to hear the talks.

GUADEC 2026

Preparations are continuing for July’s GUADEC. The call for Birds of a Feather sessions is currently open. If you want to hold an informal discussion or working session, please fill out the form before 5th June.

Applications are still open for travel funding for GUADEC. The deadline for submissions is 24th May – that’s just over one week.

Board meeting

This week the Board of Directors had its regular meeting for May. A summary:

• The Board authorized the closure of a bank account which we are no longer using.
• I gave an update on operations over the past month, and got feedback from the Board
• Felipe Borges from the Internship Committee joined, to give a report. The Board discussed how we can best support the committee.
• Deepa gave a finance report, which included numbers from January and February. The main news here was that our finances are running close to what was projected for this year’s budget.
• The Board discussed the draft of the report from the audit we recently underwent, as well as the draft of our latest annual tax filing. This is a routine part of the Board’s work, as it is required to perform a review before these documents are finalized.

Office transitions

Our long-running effort to enhance our internal accounting processes has continued over the past two weeks. A notable development has been the retirement of several finance platforms, which have been effectively replaced by the new payments platform that we adopted in January. This platform reduction will reduce operational complexity, as well as workloads. It is still ongoing – we have an additional two more platforms that are currently in the process of being retired.

Another highlight has been the launch of a search for a new member to join our finance and operations team. This is a part-time, contract-based role, which has been shaped in close consultation with Dawn Matlak, who is supporting our finance and accounting operations on a temporary basis, and has already been factored into our budget projections.

We are looking for someone at director level who brings substantial nonprofit finance experience — including audit preparation and compliance experience — which reflects how much the Foundation’s operational and regulatory requirements have grown, particularly in the run up to and following our audit last March, and will provide in-house expertise which will reduce our reliance on external consultants. You can read the full posting here.

Thanks for reading, and see you in two week’s time!

It’s the first day of May, and it’s time for another update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been two weeks since my last post, and this update covers highlights of what we’ve been doing since then.

Remembering Seth Nickell

This week we received the very sad news of the death of Seth Nickell. It’s been a long time since Seth was active in the GNOME project, so many of our members won’t be familiar with him or his work. However, Seth played an important part in GNOME’s history, and was a special and unique character.

Jonathan wrote a wonderful post about Seth, with some great stories. Federico migrated the memorial page from the old wiki to the handbook, and added Seth there (work is currently ongoing to develop that page). Seth’s death has also been covered by LWN, which includes dedications from GNOME contributors.

Whether you knew Seth or came to GNOME after his time, I think we can all appreciate the contributions that he made, which live on in the project and wider ecosystem to this day.

GNOME Fellowship

Applications for the first round of the new GNOME Fellowship program closed last week, on 20th April. We had a great response and received some excellent proposals, and now we have the tough job of deciding who is going to receive support through the program.

To that end, the Fellowship Committee met this week to review the proposals and begin the selection process. We have identified a shortlist of candidates, and will be meeting again next week to narrow the selection further.

Since this is the first round of the Fellowship, we are establishing the selection process as we go. Hopefully we’ll get to put this to use again in future Fellowship rounds!

Conferences

Linux App Summit (LAS) will be held in Berlin on 16-17 May – that’s in a little over two weeks! The schedule has been finalized and looks great, and this year’s LAS is shaping up to be a fantastic event. Please do consider going, and please do register!

Due to high demand, the organizing team have decided to stream the talks from this year, so look out for details about remote participation.

Aside from LAS, preparations for July’s GUADEC conference continue to be worked on. Travel sponsorship is still available if you need assistance in order to attend, so do consider applying for that.

Office transitions ongoing

Work to update many of our backoffice systems and processes has continued at a steady pace over the past fortnight. Many of the big moves are done (new payments system, email accounts, mailing system, accounting procedures, credit card platform), and we are now firmly in the final stages, making sure that our new address is used everywhere, emails are going to the right places, recurring payments are transferred over to new credit cards, and vendors are setup on the new payments system.

The value of this work is already showing, with smoother accounting procedures, more up to date finance reports, and better tracking of incoming queries.

That’s it for this update. Thanks for reading, and take care.

Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been four weeks since my last post, due to a vacation and public holidays, so there’s lots to cover. This period included a major announcement, but there’s also been a lot of other notable work behind the scenes.

Fellowship & Fundraising

The really big news from the last four weeks was the launch of our new Fellowship program. This is something that the Board has been discussing for quite some time, so we were thrilled to be able to make the program a reality. We are optimistic that it will make a significant difference to the GNOME project.

If you didn’t see it already, check out the announcement for details. Also, if you want to apply to be our first Fellow, you have just three days until the application deadline on 20th April!

donate.gnome.org has been a great success for the GNOME Foundation, and it is only through the support of our existing donors that the Fellowship was possible. Despite these amazing contributions, the GNOME Foundation needs to grow our donations if we are going to be able to support future Fellowship rounds while simultaneously sustaining the organisation.

To this end, there’s an effort happening to build our marketing and fundraising effort. This is primarily taking place in the GNOME Engagement Team, and we would love help from the community to help boost our outbound comms. If you are interested, please join the Engagement space and look out for announcements.

Also, if you haven’t already, and are able to do so: please donate!

Conferences

We have two major events coming up, with Linux App Summit in May and GUADEC in July, so right now is a busy time for conferences.

The schedules for both of these upcoming events are currently being worked on, and arrangements for catering, photographers, and audio visual services are all in the process of being finalized.

The Travel Committee has also been busy handling GUADEC travel requests, and has sent out the first batch of approvals. There are some budget pressures right now due to rising flight prices, but budget has been put aside for more GUADEC travel, so please apply if you want to attend and need support.

April 2026 Board Meeting

This week was the Board’s regular monthly meeting for April. Highlights from the meeting included:

• I gave a general report on the Foundation’s activities, and we discussed progress on programs and initiatives, including the new Fellowship program and fundraising.
• Deepa gave a finance report for October to December 2025.
• Andrea Veri joined us to give an update on the Membership & Elections Committee, as well as the Infrastructure team. Andrea has been doing this work for a long time and has been instrumental in helping to keep the Foundation running, so this was a great opportunity to thank him for his work.
• One key takeaway from this month’s discussion was the very high level of support that GNOME receives from our infrastructure partners, particularly AWS and also Fastly. We are hugely appreciative of this support, which represents a major financial contribution to GNOME, and want to make sure that these partners get positive exposure from us and feel appreciated.
• We reviewed the timeline for the upcoming 2026 board elections, which we are tweaking a little this year, in order to ensure that there is opportunity to discuss every candidacy, and reduce some unnecessary delay in final result.

Infrastructure

As usual, plenty has been happening on the infrastructure side over the past month. This has included:

• Ongoing work to tune our Fastly configuration and managing the resource usage of GNOME’s infra.
• Deployment of a LiberaForms instance on GNOME infrastructure. This is hooked up to GNOME’s SSO, so is available to anyone with an account who wants to use it – just head over to forms.gnome.org to give it a try.
• Changes to the Foundation’s internal email setup, to allow easier management of the generic contact email addresses, as well as better organisation of the role-based email addresses that we have.
• New translation support for donate.gnome.org.
• Ongoing work in Flathub, around OAuth and flat-manager.

Admin & Finance

On the accounting side, the team has been busy catching up on regular work that got put to one side during last month’s audit. There were some significant delays to our account process as a result of this, but we are now almost up to date.

Reorganisation of many of our finance processes has also continued over the past four weeks. Progress has included a new structure and cadence for our internal accounting calls, continued configuration of our new payments platform, and new forms for handling reimbursement requests.

Finally, we have officially kicked off the process of migrating to our new physical mail service. Work on this is ongoing and will take some time to complete. Our new address is on the website, if anyone needs it.

That’s it for this report! Thanks for reading, and feel free to use the comments if you have questions!