Author: Allan

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.

Another week, another GNOME Foundation update! This week was slightly quieter than the last two, but there’s still plenty going on. Here are some of the highlights.

GNOME 49

GNOME 49 was released this week! Huge congratulations to the GNOME community. It’s a really strong release and the release notes are a testament to everyone’s hard work.

It’s notable that some of the new features in this release have been in the works for much longer than 6 months – in some cases, probably years. This speaks to an amazing level of dedication by the contributors involved.

Given that this is a GNOME Foundation update, I am obliged to mention the role our organisation played in the release. By providing the project’s development infrastructure, organising events where planning discussions happen, and providing other general support to the project, we played a significant role in the making of GNOME 49.

Our goal is to increase the amount of support we provide for GNOME development, but we can only do that with the support of donors. So, if you want to help GNOME, donate today.

Fundraising committee

Maria Majadas, who is our current board chair, has organised the first meeting of the new fundraising committee this week. I’m hugely grateful to Maria for taking on this important task, and it’s exciting to see our community fundraising effort starting to take shape. Hopefully there will be more details to share once the committee has had its first meeting.

Lawyering

We have a few legal questions that we’re looking to get answers to right now, around requirements for our governance arrangements. That led me to have conversations with a few lawyers this week.

The GNOME Foundation has the good fortune of being able to tap into a network of legal advisors who are also open source experts, and who are very supportive of our organisation. I find it very humbling that we have this support, and I think we can be very grateful to have friends in the legal space.

Matrix hosting

Historically, Element Matrix Services (EMS) has generously hosted GNOME’s Matrix homeserver. However, this week Bart has started the process of moving our Matrix service to our own infrastructure. This will offer a few advantages in the future, such as integration with our SSO. Stay tuned for updates as the migration rolls out.

Bookkeeper meeting

We had our monthly meeting with our bookkeeper this week, which was great as usual. We love our bookkeeper! She helps us to keep our accounts in order, address issues as they come up, and makes sure that we are ready for our annual tax filings. Accounting is a big part of what the GNOME Foundation does, and our books are in great shape thanks to this work.

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Thanks for reading! See you next week.

It’s been another busy week for the GNOME Foundation. Here’s my attempt to summarise what’s been happening. As with my previous update, this update is for the whole organisation rather than just me personally. It’s also likely that I’ll have missed some things. Hopefully I’ve captured the highlights though!

GNOME.Asia 2025

GNOME.Asia 2025 is happening in Toyko, Japan, in December. I’m sure that this is going to be a fantastic event, and the call for papers has recently been extended to 1st October. If you have an idea for a talk and would like to participate, go submit a proposal!

Digital wellbeing

The Foundation has been funding development work on digital wellbeing features in GNOME for almost two years now. This work is funded by a grant that we received from Endless, which is now in its final stages. I spent some of this week reviewing the budget and discussing the timeline with Philip and Ignacy, who are currently working on the project.

There are a number of features which are currently in development which will hopefully be landed for GNOME 50, including session time limits for accounts that are managed with parental controls. We also have a modernized parental controls app which is also in the works.

For Future Summit

Kristi attended the For Future Summit in the United Arab Emirates last weekend, where she gave a talk about GNOME and had some exciting hallway conversations. There were some very interesting organisations at the event, who we are hoping to have follow-up conversations with soon.

Thank you to For Future Summit for funding Kristi’s attendance.

Flathub

We have a long-standing ambition to establish Flathub as an independent entity, so that it can do its own fundraising and spending. These plans have unfortunately suffered from delays. However, Rob has been working with Aleix from KDE on this recently, and they’ve made some positive progress this week, with lawyers being commissioned to provide some of the initial pieces that we need. I’m hopeful that this work can continue and we can finally get Flathub standing on its own feet.

Alongside this, Flathub infrastructure support continues to tick along. All of this Flathub support is being funded from our Endless grant, so many thanks to them for enabling it to happen.

Board regular meeting

The board had its first regular meeting of September this week (regular meetings are on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month). The Finance Committee have been working on the upcoming budget since the Board meeting, so this was a good opportunity for the Board to discuss the latest proposal.

This is the best budgeting process I’ve seen in my years on the board. Kudos to everyone who’s been involved.

GIMP support

The GIMP project’s grants program has been inching towards the finish line this week. It’s taken a while, but we’re almost there! It’ll be so exciting to see two developers being funded from their donation stream.

Routine paperwork

A fair chunk of the work done by the Foundation is not very exciting, but is important nonetheless. This week featured a few items of that type, relating to our trademarks and insurance. These got done.

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See you again next week. o/