Form and Function

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/

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!

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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