Author: Allan

Steven’s weekly Foundation updates were fantastic and, since I’m filling in the ED role as President, I want to keep them going. I’m still mulling over the frequency and scheduling of the posts, but for now I’ll stick to weekly on Fridays.

I’m trying to make this an update for the entire organisation, rather than for me personally, so a lot of this update is about others’ activities, rather than my own. Inevitably I can’t report on everything and will miss some items, so apologies to anyone if I don’t manage to cover your contributions. We can always squeeze omissions into a future update, so let me know if I missed anything.

As many of you know, Steven departed his role as ED last week. Everyone on the board knows that this was a shock to many people, and that it has had an impact on the GNOME community. I think that, for now, there’s not a huge amount that I can say about that topic. However, what I will say is that its significance has not been lost on those of us who are working on the Foundation, and that we are committed to making good on our ambitions for the Foundation and for the GNOME Project more generally. With that said, here’s what we’ve been up to this week.

Transition

Transitioning the Foundation leadership has been a major focus for this week, due to Steven’s departure and new officers being appointed. Handing over all the accounts is quite a big task which has involved paperwork and calls, and this work will carry on for a while longer yet.

I’d like to thank Steven for being exceptionally helpful during this process. Everyone on the Exec Committee is very appreciative.

I’ve been handing the chair role over to Maria, which involved me dumping a lot of procedural information on her in a fairly uncontrolled manner. Sorry Maria!

I’ve also started to participate in the management of our paid team members. Thanks to everyone for being accommodating during this process.

There have also been a lot of messages and conversations with partners. I am trying to get around to everyone, but am still midway through the process. If there’s anyone out there who would like to say hi, please don’t be shy! My door is always open and I’d love to hear from anyone who has a relationship with the GNOME Foundation and would like to connect.

Budget season

The GNOME Foundation annual budget runs from October to September, so we are currently busy working on the budget that will come into effect in October this year. Deepa, our new treasurer, did an amazing job and provided the board with a draft budget ahead of time, and we had our first meeting to discuss it this week. There will be more meetings over September and we’ll provide a report on the new budget once it has been finalised.

Sponsorships

We got our first corporate sponsor through the new donations platform this week, which feels like a great milestone. Many thanks to Symless for your support! Our corporate supporter packages are a great way for businesses of all sizes to help sustain GNOME and the wider ecosystem, and these sponsorships a huge difference. If anyone reading this post thinks that their employer might be interested in a corporate sponsorship package, please do encourage them to sign up. And we’re always happy to talk to potential donors.

Framework

One particular highlight from this week was a call between GNOME developers and members of the Framework team. This was something that Steven had set in motion (again, thanks Steven!) and was incredibly exciting from my perspective. Partnerships between hardware vendors and upstream open source projects have so much potential, both in terms of delivering better products, but also improving the efficiency of development and testing. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Outreachy

The Exec Committee approved funding for a single Outreachy intern for the December 2025 cohort. This funding is coming from an Endless grant, so thanks to Endless for your support. Outreachy is a fantastic program so we’re happy we can continue to fund GNOME’s participation.

Audit

The GNOME Foundation is due to be audited next calendar year. This is a standard process, but we’ve never been audited before, so it’s going to be a new experience for us. This week I signed the paperwork to secure an auditor, who came highly recommended to us. This was an important step in making sure that the audit happens according to schedule.

All the usual

Other Foundation programs continue to run this week. Flathub is being worked on, events are being planned, and we continue to have development activities happening that we’re supporting. There’s already a lot to mention in this post, so I won’t go into specifics right now, but all this work is important and valued. Thanks to everyone who is doing this work. Keep it up!

Message ends

That’s it from me. See you next week. o/

Steven Deobald has been in the post of GNOME Foundation Executive Director for the past four months, during which time he has made major contributions to both the Foundation and the wider GNOME project. Sadly, Steven will be leaving the Foundation this week. The Foundation Board is extremely grateful to Steven and wish him the very best for his future endeavors.

The Executive Director role is extremely diverse and it is hard to list all of Steven’s contributions since he has been in post. However, particular highlights include:

• energetic engagement with the GNOME community, including weekly updates focused on the Foundation’s support of GNOME development, and attention to topics of importance to our contributors, such as Pride Month and Disability
  Pride
• the creation of a new donations platform, which included both a new website, detailed evaluation of payment processors, and a strategy for distributing donations to GNOME development
• a focus on partner outreach, including attending UN Open Source Week, adding postmarketOS to our Advisory board, and the creation of a new Advisory Board Matrix channel, alongside many conversations with partner organisations
• internal policy and documentation work, particularly around spending and finances
• the addition of new tooling to augment policies and documentation, such as an internal Foundation Handbook and vault.gnome.org
• assistance with the board, including recruiting a new treasurer and vice-treasurer

We are extremely grateful to Steven for all this and more. Despite these many positive achievements, Steven and the board have come to the conclusion that Steven is not the right fit for the Executive Director role at this time. We are therefore bidding Steven a fond farewell.

I know that some members of the GNOME community will be disappointed by this decision. I can assure everyone that it wasn’t one that we took lightly, and had to consider from different perspectives.

The good news is that Steven has left the Foundation with a strong platform on which to build, and we have an energetic and engaged board which is already working to fill in the gaps left by his departure. I’m confident that the Foundation can continue on the positive trajectory started by Steven, with a strong community-based executive taking the reins.

To this end, the board held its regular annual meeting this week, and appointed new directors to key positions. I’ve taken over the president’s role from Rob McQueen, who has now joined Arun Raghavan as one of two Vice-Presidents. The Executive Committee has been expanded with the inclusion of Arun and Maria Majadas (who is our new Chair). We have also bolstered the Finance Committee, and are looking to create new groups for fundraising and communications.

Steven has been very helpful in working on a smooth transition, and our staff are continuing to work as normal, so Foundation operations won’t be affected by these management changes. In the near future we’ll be pushing forward with the fundraising plans that Steven has set out, and are hopeful about being able to provide more financial support for the GNOME project as a result. If you want to help us with that, please get in touch.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to president@gnome.org.

On behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors,

– Allan

This post is a response to what Tobias posted yesterday on his blog. I would really prefer not be writing it. There are many other things that I would prefer to be doing, and I do not enjoy engaging in public disagreements. I honestly find all of this very stressful and unpleasant, but here we are.

For context, I joined the board in July last year, having previously been on the board from 2015 to 2021. This means that I wasn’t on the board during some of the events and decisions described in Tobias’s post. I am assuming that I am not one of the unnamed individuals he is calling on to resign, though I would be significantly impacted if that were to happen.

The post here is a personal view, based on my close involvement with the issues described in Tobias’s post. As such, it is not an official board position, and other directors may disagree with me on some points. It’s possible that the board may produce its own official statement in the future, but boards are inherently slow-moving beasts, and I wanted to get something posted sooner rather than later.

I want to start by saying that it is difficult to respond to Tobias’s post. The Foundation has a policy that we don’t comment on specific code of conduct cases, in order to protect the privacy of those involved. And, when you get down to it, this is mostly about the particulars of one specific case. Without being able to discuss those particulars, it is hard to say very much at all. That, in my opinion, is the elephant in the room.

The other reason that it is difficult to respond is there are just so many broad brush accusations in the blog post. It presents power conflicts and financial mismanagement and reckless behaviour and so on and so forth. It’s impossible to address every point. Instead, what I will do is provide a fairly high-level view of each of the two main themes in the post, while calling out what I consider to be the main inaccuracies. The first of those themes is the code of conduct decision, and the second relates to the performance of the Foundation.

The big elephant

In the blog post, Tobias throws around a lot of accusations and suggestions about the code of conduct decision to suspend Sonny Piers from the GNOME project. His description of the chain of events is both misleading and a misrepresentation of what happened. Then there’s an accusation of recklessness, as well as an accusation that the code of conduct decision was somehow politically motivated. All of this is clearly intended to question and undermine the code of conduct decision, and to present a picture of mismanagement at the foundation.

My view is that, despite the various twists and turns involved in the decision making process for this case, and all the questions and complexities involved, it basically boils down to one simple question: was the decision to suspend Sonny the correct one? My view, as someone who has spent a significant amount of time looking at the evidence, talking to the people involved, and considering it from different perspectives, is that it was. And this is not just my personal view. The board has looked at this issue over and over, and we have had other parties come in to look at it, and we have always come to the conclusion that some kind of suspension was appropriate. Our code of conduct committee came to this conclusion. Multiple boards came to this conclusion. At least one third party who looked at the case came to this conclusion.

I understand why people have concerns and questions about the decision. I’m sympathetic to the experiences of those individuals, and I understand why they have doubts. I understand that some of them have been badly affected. However, ultimately, the board needs to stand up for the code of conduct. The code of conduct is what provides safety for our community. We do not get to set it aside when it becomes inconvenient.

The argument that the code of conduct decision was somehow politically motivated is false. We even had an external reviewer come in and look at the case, who confirmed this. Their report was provided to Tobias already. He continues to make this accusation despite it standing in opposition to the information that we have provided him with.

Tobias seems to think that Sonny’s importance to the GNOME project should have been taken into account in our decision for the code of conduct case. To me, this would imply that project leaders would operate according to a different, less stringent, set of conduct rules from other contributors. I believe that this would be wrong. The code of conduct has to apply to everyone equally. We need to protect our community from leaders just as much as we need to protect them from anyone else.

No one is suggesting that the management of the code of conduct decision was good. Communication and management should have been better. Community members were significantly impacted. We have sincerely apologised to those involved, and are more than willing to admit our failings. We’ve also been working to ensure that these problems don’t happen again, and that’s something that I personally continue to spend time and energy on.

However, to understand those failings, you also have to look back at the situation we faced last year: we had just lost an ED, board members were burned out, and our processes were being tested in a way that they never had been before. We still had all the usual board and foundation work that needed taking care of. In the middle of it all, elections happened and the board membership changed. It was a complex, shifting, and demanding situation, which looks rather different in retrospect to how it was experienced at the time. We learned a lot of lessons, that’s for sure.

The other elephant

The other part of Tobias’s post addresses the performance of the Foundation.

He points out various problems and challenges, some of which are real. Unfortunately, while being convenient, the theory that all of these challenges are the result of the incompetence of a few individuals is, like most convenient answers, incorrect. The reality is more complex.

One of the major factors for the Foundation’s current situation is our recent history with Executive Directors. Neil left as ED in November 2022. It took us about a year to hire Holly, who was ED for seven months, during which time she had to take a non-trivial amount of time off [1]. And the Foundation is a small organisation – there aren’t lots of people around to pick up the slack when someone leaves. Given these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that the Foundation’s plans have changed, or that they didn’t happen in the way we’d hoped.

This is why the current board has been focusing on and expending considerable effort in recruiting a new executive director, who will be joining us very soon. Hurrah!

Tobias’s proposition that anyone who tries to change the Foundation gets burned out or banned is not true. I am living proof of this. I have changed the Foundation in the past, and continue to change it as part of my role as director. The Foundation today is radically different from the one I first joined in 2015, and continues to evolve and change. A lot of this is due to the interventions of previous and current directors over time.

Amid all this, it’s also important not to forget all the things that the Foundation has been successfully doing in recent years! I went into some of this in my recent blog post, which provides more details than I can here. It is worth stressing that the ongoing successes of the Foundation are mostly thanks to the dedication of its staff. We’ve run successful conferences. We’ve supported Flathub during which time it has experienced extraordinary growth. We’ve supported development programs. And the organisation has kept running, sailing through our taxes and registrations and all those other bureaucratic requirements.

On resignations

From the outside the GNOME Foundation can seem a little opaque. Part of the reason for that is that, as a board, we have to deal with sensitive and confidential matters, so much of the work we do happens behind closed doors. However, when you are on the board you quickly learn that it is really much like any other community-based open source team: there’s usually more work to do than we have capacity for, and the majority of the work gets done by a small minority of contributors.

Speaking as part of that minority, I don’t think that it would be beneficial for members of the board to resign. It would just mean fewer people being available to do the work, and we are already stretched for resources. I’m also of the view that no one should be asked to resign in response to upholding the code of conduct. Conduct work is difficult and important. It requires tough decisions. As a community we need to support the people doing it.

And if people think we should have different directors, well, that’s what the elections are for.

Closing

Readers might wonder why the Foundation has not spoken publicly about this topic (reminder: I’m not speaking on behalf of the Foundation here). The main reasons are confidentiality and legal concerns. We also tried very hard to respect the wishes of those who have been involved and affected. Now with Tobias’s post it is harder to avoid saying things in public. I’m personally skeptical of how useful this is: with opaque and complex issues like these, public discussions tend to generate more questions than they do answers. Contributor relationships are unfortunately likely going to get damaged. But again, here we are.

It should be said that while the foundation hasn’t spoken publicly about these issues, we have expended significant effort engaging with community members behind the scenes. We’ve had meetings where we’ve explained as much of what has happened as we can. We even went so far as to commission an external report which we made available to those individuals. We continue to work on improving our processes in response to the, ahem, feedback we’ve received. I personally remain committed to this. I know that progress in some areas has been slow, but the work continues and is meaningful.

Finally: I am sure that there are contributors who will disagree with what I’ve written here. If you are one of those people, I’m sorry that you feel that way. I still appreciate you, and I understand how difficult it is. It is difficult for all of us.

[1] Edit: we were extremely lucky to have Richard Littauer as interim ED for the second half of 2024, and he did a huge amount. However, Richard was only working for us part-time, so was unable to deliver on strategic initiatives.

I’m currently serving as a member of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, and am also a member of the Foundation’s Executive Committee. The last major GNOME Foundation update was back in October 2024, when we announced our budget for the current financial year, along with associated staffing changes. There have been some communications since then, particularly around events strategy and board membership changes, but it’s been a while since we provided a more complete general update.

This update is intended to fill that gap, with a summary of the GNOME Foundation’s activities over the past six months or so. You will hopefully see that, while the Foundation is currently operating under some challenging circumstances, we have been active in some significant areas, as well as keeping on top of essential tasks.

Board of Directors

The Board of Directors has been busy with its regular duties over the past six months. We continue to have regular monthly meetings, and have been dealing with high-level topics including ED hiring, finances, committee memberships, and more.

There have been a few membership changes on the board. We had an empty seat at the beginning of the board year, which we appointed Philip Chimento to fill. Philip is a previous board member with a lot of experience, and so was able to easily pick up the reins. We are very grateful to him for helping out.

In January, Michael Downey resigned from the board, and recently we filled his empty seat by appointing Cassidy Blaede. Members of the community will already be familiar with Cassidy’s contributions, and I think we can all agree that he will be a fantastic director.

Both of these seats are due for re-election in the summer, so the appointments are relatively short-term.

Michael was previously serving as treasurer, a position which we have been unable to fill from the existing pool of directors. We are currently in the process of speaking to a couple of candidates who have expressed an interest in taking on the position.

Executive Director Hiring

Most readers will know that we lost our previous Executive Director, Holly Million, back in July 2024. We were extremely fortunate to be able to appoint Richard Littauer as interim ED shortly afterwards, who has did an incredible amount for the Foundation on a part time basis last year. Richard continues to serve as our official ED and has been extremely generous in continuing to provide assistance on a voluntary basis. However, since his availability is limited, finding a new permanent ED has been a major focus for us since Holly’s resignation. We advertised for candidates back in September 2024, and since then the ED search committee has been busy reviewing and interviewing candidates. Thanks to this work, we hope to be able to announce a new Executive Director very shortly.

We are immensely grateful to the members of the ED search committee for their contributions: Deb Nicholson, Jonathan Blandford, Julian Sparber, Julian Hofer, Rob McQueen, and Rosanna Yuen. We also owe a huge debt of thanks to Richard.

Programs

“Programs” is the term that gets used for the impactful activities undertaking by non-profits (contrasted with activities like fundraising which are intended to support those programs). The GNOME Foundation has a number of these programs, some of which are established responsibilities, while others are fixed-term projects.

Sovereign Tech Fund

The Foundation has been hosting the ongoing Sovereign Tech Fund-ed development project which has been ongoing since 2023. The management of this work has been handled by the GNOME STF team, which has in recent times been managed by Tobias Bernard and Adrian Vovk. You can read their incredible report on this work, which was published only last week.

The Foundation’s role for this project is primarily as a fiscal host, which means that we are responsible for processing invoices and associated administration. Thibault Martin was working for us as a contractor to do much of this work. However, with STF ramping down, Thibault has passed his responsibilities on to other staff members. Many thanks for your efforts, Thibault!

While most of the STF funded work has now concluded, there is a small amount of remaining funding that is being used to keep one or two developers working.

Alongside the existing STF-funded program, we have also been working on a hosting agreement for a new STF proposal, which is being worked on by Adrian Vovk. This agreement is almost complete and we hope to be able to provide more details soon.

GIMP

The GNOME Foundation is the fiscal host for the GIMP project and this entails regular work for us, mostly around finances and payments. Recently we have been helping out with a grant program that the GIMP project has set up, allowing the GIMP project to make better use of the funds that the Foundation holds for them.

Digital Wellbeing

We are currently about three-quarters of the way through a two year development project focused on digital wellbeing and parental controls. This program has been funded by Endless and is being led by Philip Withnall. We have also been lucky to have assistance on the design side from Sam Hewitt. The new digital wellbeing features that arrived in GNOME 48 were a significant milestone for this project.

The Exec Committee has recently been doing some development planning with Philip for the final phase of this work, which we hope to include in GNOME 49.

Flathub

Flathub continues to be a significant area of interest for the GNOME Foundation. We are currently contracting Bart Piotrowski as the main Flathub sysadmin, thanks to ongoing generous support from Endless. Bart continues to enhance Flathub’s infrastructure as well as proving ongoing support for this hugely successful platform.

In December, we advertised for an additional short-term role to develop the Flathub organisation. Interviews for the role have been concluded and we have selected a candidate who will be starting work in the next few weeks, with the goal of getting the payments and fundraising systems online.

GNOME Project Support

General support for the GNOME project is a core part of the Foundation’s role, and is something which occupies a lot of the Foundation’s time. The activities in each of these areas deserve blog posts of their own, but here’s a quick summary:

• Infrastructure. We continue to support GNOME’s development infrastructure, primarily by paying for Bart’s work in this area. Plenty has been happening behind the scenes to keep our development systems working well. We are grateful for the past and ongoing support of Red Hat including Andrea Veri’s time and server hosting, as well as significant new support from AWS allowing us to move to a cloud-based infastructure.
• Travel. Unfortunately the budget for community travel has been limited this year due to the Foundation’s overall financial situation, but we continue to provide some funding, and GNOME Foundation staff have been working with the travel committee as we approach GUADEC.
• Events. Foundation staff continue to support our events. In December we had a successful GNOME.Asia in Bengaluru, India. Linux App Summit is happening next week in Tiriana, Albania, and preparations for GUADEC 2025 are ongoing. We additionally held a short community consultation around our events strategy back in October, and this is something that the board has had discussions about subsequently.
• Communications. Finally, despite reduced headcount, we continue to devote some staff time to operating GNOME’s social media accounts.

In addition to these ongoing areas of support, there have been additional one off support tasks which the Foundation has taken care of over the past six months. For example, we recently paid for the Google API keys used by Evolution Data Server to be certified.

Administration

Outside of programs, we have been busy with the usual background tasks that are necessary to keep the Foundation operating. That includes maintaining our books, filling in legal paperwork when it’s needed, keeping the board updated about the organisation’s finances, and talking to donors.

Conclusion

So much has been happening in the GNOME Foundation over the past six months, that it has been challenging to fit it all into a single post, and there are many items which I did not have the space to cover. Nevertheless, I hope that this summary provides a useful overview, and goes some way to showing how much has been going on behind the scenes. With no full-time ED and a reduced staff, it has been a challenging period for the Foundation. Nevertheless, I think we’ve managed to keep on top of our existing responsibilities and programs, and hopefully will have more capacity with the additional a new full-time Executive Director very soon.

It should be said that, since Richard reduced his hours at the end of 2024, much of the Foundation’s “executive” work above has fallen to a combination of existing staff and the Executive Committee. It is a large burden for a small team, and I think that it’s fair to say that the current setup is not easy to sustain, nor is it 100% reliable.

We are hopeful that appointing a new ED will help ease our resource pressures. However, we are also very interested in welcoming any additional volunteers who are willing to help. So, if participating in the kinds of activities that I’ve described appeals to you, please contact me. We can easily create new positions for those who think they might be able to have a role in the organisation, and would love to talk about what skills you might be able to bring.

One of the goals of the new GNOME project handbook is to provide effective guidelines for contributors. Most of the guidelines are based on recommendations that GNOME already had, which were then improved and updated. These improvements were based on input from others in the project, as well as by drawing on recommendations from elsewhere.

The best example of this effort was around issue management. Before the handbook, GNOME’s issue management guidelines were seriously out of date, and were incomplete in a number of areas. Now we have shiny new issue management guidelines which are full of good advice and wisdom!

The state of our issue trackers matters. An issue tracker with thousands of open issues is intimidating to a new contributor. Likewise, lots of issues without a clear status or resolution makes it difficult for potential contributors to know what to do. My hope is that, with effective issue management guidelines, GNOME can improve the overall state of its issue trackers.

So what magic sauce does the handbook recommend to turn an out of control and burdensome issue tracker into a source of calm and delight, I hear you ask? The formula is fairly simple:

• Review all incoming issues, and regularly conduct reviews of old issues, in order to weed out reports which are ambiguous, obsolete, duplicates, and so on
• Close issues which haven’t seen activity in over a year
• Apply the “needs design” and “needs info” labels as needed
• Close issues that have been labelled “need info” for 6 weeks
• Issues labelled “needs design” get closed after 1 year of inactivity, like any other
• Recruit contributors to help with issue management

To some readers this is probably controversial advice, and likely conflicts with their existing practice. However, there’s nothing new about these issue management procedures. The current incarnation has been in place since 2009, and some aspects of them are even older. Also, personally speaking, I’m of the view that effective issue management requires taking a strong line (being strong doesn’t mean being impolite, I should add – quite the opposite). From a project perspective, it is more important to keep the issue tracker focused than it is to maintain a database of every single tiny flaw in its software.

The guidelines definitely need some more work. There will undoubtedly be some cases where an issue needs to be kept open despite it being untouched for a year, for example, and we should figure out how to reflect that in the guidelines. I also feel that the existing guidelines could be simplified, to make them easier to read and consume.

I’d be really interested to hear what changes people think are necessary. It is important for the guidelines to be something that maintainers feel that they can realistically implement. The guidelines are not set in stone.

That said, it would also be awesome if more maintainers were to put the current issue management guidelines into practice in their modules. I do think that they represent a good way to get control of an issue tracker, and this could be a really powerful way for us to make GNOME more approachable to new contributors.