Form and Function

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!

It’s the end of the working week, the weekend is calling, and it’s time for another weekly GNOME Foundation update. As always, there’s plenty going on at the GNOME Foundation, and this post just covers the highlights that are easy to share. Let’s get started.

Board meeting

The Board of Directors had a regular meeting on Tuesday this week (the meeting was regular in the sense that it is regularly scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month).

We were extremely pleased to approve the addition of two new members to the Circle Committee: welcome to Alireza and Ignacy, who will be helping out with the fantastic Circle initiative!

For those who don’t know, the Circle Committee is the team that is responsible for reviewing app submissions, as well as doing regular maintenance on the list of member apps. It’s valuable work.

The main item on the agenda for this week’s Board meeting was the 2025-26 budget, which we finalized and approved. Our financial year runs from October to September, so the budget approval was slightly late, but a delay this small doesn’t have any practical consequence for our operations. We’ll provide a separate post on the budget itself, to provide more details on our plans and financial position.

GIMP grants

Some news which I can share now, even though it isn’t technically from this week: last week the Foundation finished the long process of awarding the GIMP project’s first two development grants. I’m really excited for the GIMP project now that we have reached this milestone, and I’m sure that the grants will give their development efforts a major boost.

More specifics about the grants are coming in a dedicated announcement, so I won’t go into too many details now. However, I will say that a fair amount of work was required on the Foundation side to implement the grants in a compliant manner, including the creation and roll out of a new conflict of interest policy. The nice thing about this is that, with the necessary frameworks in place, it will be relatively easy to award additional grants in the future.

Fundraising Committee

The new Fundraising Committee had its first meeting this week, and I hear that its members have started working through a list of tasks, which is great news. I’m very appreciative of this effort, and especial thanks has to go to Maria Majadas who has pushed it forward.

The committee isn’t an official committee just yet – this is something that the Board will hopefully look at during its next meeting.

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

It’s Friday, which means that it’s time for another GNOME Foundation update. Here’s what’s been happening in the Foundation over the past 7 days.

Membership rule change

The GNOME Foundation’s members are a vitally important part of the organisation, and this week we changed our membership requirements to make them more inclusive. This change required legal input, and was one of the reasons that I had a call with a lawyer last week. With that done we have been able to drop the requirement that members provide a legally registered name: as long as the name you provide is used elsewhere and we have a valid email address, that should be enough.

I’d like to thank community members for their patience while we dealt with this matter. I’d also like to thank Andrea Veri for helping with the change, as well as all the work he’s done over the years on the GNOME Foundation Membership Committee. He’s a hugely important part of the Foundation and has been tireless over many years helping to keep our membership running smoothly. Thank you Andrea!

If you’ve wanted to apply for membership in the past, but have been put off by the name requirement, I hope you’ll feel encouraged to apply now.

Board meeting preparation

The Board of Directors has a regular meeting scheduled for next Tuesday, and there is quite a lot on the agenda, so this week has been taken up with preparing the various motions and policy changes that will be presented for ratification.

This is how Boards of Directors are generally supposed to work, with policies, reports, and plans being prepared ahead of time, so that the Board can then review and/or authorize them. I’m glad that we seem to be working in that model.

Digital wellbeing

There was another team call for our digital wellbeing program this week. As mentioned in a previous post, this program is in its final stages, and we are meeting regularly to review progress.

The project is currently focusing on delivering essential parental controls features, primarily screen time limits for children. This will make GNOME into a viable platform for children, young people and their carers: an important demographic that we want to serve better.

This week Ignacy did a demo of the work so far, showing off the updated Parental Controls app, screen limits and bedtime features. Sam Hewitt from the design team joined the call to provide UX review, and identified a list of papercut issues that the team will be working on as the project draws to a conclusion.

Testing these new digital wellbeing features can be challenging, due to them requiring development branches in multiple modules, so Ignacy produced a custom GNOME OS image with the changes. If you’re curious, you can try it. (Sidenote: this is a great demonstration of GNOME OS and its associated tooling.)

Staff vacations

Several staff members have been taking a well-earned break this week. The past few months have been a busy period for our staff, so now is a good time for a recharge. I hope everyone comes back full of energy!

Credit card policy

The Foundation provides credit cards for certain staff members and officers, as a low-friction payment method for some types of expenses. We had some spending and reporting rules defined in the platform we use, and we haven’t had any issues around credit card usage, but we didn’t have a written policy, so this week I introduced one. This will make it clearer when credit cards should and shouldn’t be used, and make sure that our corporate credit card usage follows best practice.

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

It’s a wet and windy October afternoon here in the UK, and it’s time for another GNOME Foundation update. As ever, there is plenty going on behind the scenes which hasn’t made it into this post, such as planning discussions and routine operations. However, there are some notable things from this week that are easier to sum up.

Sovereign Tech Resilience

The GNOME Project was recently fortunate to receive support from the Sovereign Tech Agency through their Sovereign Tech Resilience program. This program works by contracting out assistance for open source projects, and has resulted in a firm called Neighbourhood.ie Software doing some work on the Blueprint markup language, including implementing a new linter.

Neighbourhood.ie’s Blueprint work is now almost complete, and the new capabilities they have implemented will help to make GNOME maintainers and developers more efficient, and will also help to reduce bugs.

It is obviously fantastic to receive support like this, and I’d like to offer thanks to STA for the funding, to Neighbourhood.ie for being a great partner, and to Sonny Piers for developing the original work outline for this initiative.

With the Blueprint work being wrapped up, we are now in conversation with Neighbourhood.ie about other work that they might undertake. For this we’re drawing on a list of possible work areas that Adrian Vovk and I recently worked up in conversation with GNOME community members.

Black Python Devs

I had a great conversation today with Jay Miller from Black Python Devs. The GNOME Foundation is proud to provide fiscal hosting for Black Python Devs, and it was great to hear about how their work is having a major positive impact. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend that you check out their website.

Legal adventures

My quest to find answers to some of our pending corporate governance questions finally ended in success this week, with a successful call with a lawyer who specialises in this area. We’ll be working through the advice we got very soon.

Policy development

Policies are part and parcel of running a non-profit like the GNOME Foundation, and I’ve recently been working on a number of policy updates that will hopefully come into effect in coming months. This is mostly about tightening up procedures, and will hopefully help with budgeting and smoother operations in the future.

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Thanks for reading and see you next week!

It’s Friday, which means that it’s time for another GNOME Foundation update. Here’s what’s been happening over the past week.

Work in progress

We currently have a number of work items that are in progress, but which we aren’t quite ready to talk about in detail yet. This includes progress on GIMP’s development grants, as well as updates to our policies, conversations with lawyers, and ongoing work on the budget for the next financial year. We’ll be providing updates about these items in the coming weeks once they’re closer to completion. I just wanted to mention them here to emphasise that these things are ongoing.

Banking

Some of our directors have been looking at our bank accounts this week, to see if we can improve how we manage our savings. We have a call set up with one of our banks for later today, and will likely be making some changes in the coming weeks.

Digital wellbeing

As mentioned previously, our digital wellbeing program, which is being funded by a grant from Endless, is in its final stages. Philip and Ignacy who are working on the project are making good progress, and we had a call this week to review progress and plan next steps. Many thanks to the maintainers who have been helping to review this work so we can get it merged before the end of the project.

Regular board meeting

Board meetings happen on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month, so we had another regular board meeting this week. The Board reviewed and discussed the budget again, and signed off on a funding decision that required its approval.

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That’s it! See you in a week.