Form and Function

It’s Friday, so it’s time to provide an update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past week. Here’s my summary of the main activities and events, covering what both Board and staff members have been up to.

GNOME.Asia

I mentioned GNOME.Asia 2025 in my last post, but I’ll mention it again since it’s only a month until the event in Tokyo, which is being co-hosted with LibreOffice Asia.

As you’d expect, there is a lot of activity happening as GNOME.Asia 2025 approaches. Kristi has been busy with a plethora of organisational tasks, including scheduling, printing, planning for the day trip, and more.

Travel has also been a focus this week. The Travel Committee has approved sponsorship for a number of attendees, and we have moved on to providing assistance to those who need documentation for visas.

Finally, registration is now open! There are two registration sites: one for in-person attendees, and one for remote attendees. If you plan on attending, please do take the time to register!

Transitions

This week was a big week for us, with the announcement of Rosanna’s departure from the organisation. Internally transition arrangements have been in progress for a little while, with responsibilities being redistributed, accounts being handed over, and infrastucture that was physically managed by Rosanna being replaced (such as our mailing address and phone number). This work continued this week.

I’d like to thank Rosanna for her extremely helpful assistance during this transition. I’d also like to thank everyone who was pitched in this week, particularly around travel (thank you Kristi, Julian, Maria, Asmit!), as well as Cassidy and Arun for picking up tasks as they have arisen.

The Foundation is running smoothly despite our recent staffing change. Payments are being processed quickly and reliably, events and sysadmin work are happening as normal, and accounting tasks are being taken care of. I’m also confident that we’ll continue to work reliably and effectively as we move forward. There are improvements that we have planned which help with this, such as the streamlining of our financial systems and processes.

Ongoing tasks

It has become a common refrain in my updates that there is lots going on behind the scenes that doesn’t make it into these posts. This week I thought that I’d call some of those more routine activities out, so readers can get a sense of what those background tasks are.

It turns out that there is indeed quite a lot of them, so I’ve broken them down into sections.

Finances and accounting

It’s the beginning of the month, which is when most invoices tend to get submitted to us, so this week has involved a fair amount of payments processing. We use a mix of platforms for payments, and have a shared tracker for payments tasks. At the time of writing all invoices received since the beginning of the month have been paid, except for a couple of items where we needed additional information.

As mentioned in previous posts, we are in the process of deploying a set of improvements to our banking arrangements, and this continued this week. The changes are coming in bit by bit, and there are tasks for us to do at each step. It will be a number of weeks before the changes are completed.

Dawn who joined us last week has been doing research as part of her work to improve our finance systems. This has involved doing calls with team members and stakeholders, and is nearly complete.

Meetings!

Kristi booked the room for our regular pre-FOSDEM Advisory Board meeting, and I’ve invited representatives. Thanks to everyone who has sent an RSVP so far!

Next week we have another regular Board meeting scheduled, so there has been the routine work of preparing the agenda and sending out invitations.

Sysadmin work

Bart has been busy as usual, and it’s hard to capture everything he does. Recent activity includes improvements to donate.gnome.org, improvements to Flathub build pipelines, and working through a troublesome issue with the geolocation data used by GNOME apps.

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

For over 20 years, Rosanna Yuen – aka zana – has been a key member of the GNOME Foundation team. I am writing this post to share the news that, as of last week, she is no longer working for us. We cannot emphasise enough how grateful we are for everything that Rosanna has done for the GNOME Foundation over the years, both as a volunteer and an employee, and we want to take this opportunity to thank and congratulate her for her accomplishments at the GNOME Foundation.

In the rest of this post I want to share some details about Rosanna’s career at the GNOME Foundation, as a way of celebrating her contributions and reiterating our gratitude for everything she has done for us.

Rosanna was a GNOME contributor before she started with the GNOME Foundation, as a hacker on the card games in Aisleriot. Way back in 2005, the organization was in a perilous situation after the departure of its first Executive Director, and had no employees. Rosanna stepped in as a volunteer to help keep the organization afloat. Following her intervention as a volunteer, she was taken on as a temporary contractor, and then became a part-time employee. Around four years later, in 2010, she went full time.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rosanna saved the organization from a state of collapse during those early years. Since then, her roles and duties have been diverse. Aside from a broad range of accounting, finance, and administrative tasks, Rosanna has helped with travel and visas, running programs, and handling grant paperwork. There have also been many small but meaningful tasks that she has taken care of, such as mailing out thank you postcards to our donors, and going to the store each year during GUADEC to buy the “Pants of Thanks”.

For a long time, Rosanna participated in Board meetings, to address any questions about the Foundation’s operations. And for many years, as the Foundation’s only employee, she performed those operations herself. In more recent years, the Foundation hired additional staff, and Rosanna took on a management role alongside her other duties, providing mentorship and guidance for new staff members as they joined. One of her defining qualities has been the care and support that she has shown towards these colleagues.

Rosanna had many significant achievements during her time with the GNOME Foundation, and it is impossible to list all of them in this post. However, some of those achievements deserve special mention. They include ensuring that we have maintained our charitable status over the past 20 years, presenting finance reports to both the Board and the membership at our AGMs, playing a key role in establishing GNOME’s first Code of Conduct (and serving on the Code of Conduct Committee since its inception), running the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (as it was known then) for a period, managing transitions between multiple banks and accounting platforms, and ensuring the smooth running of the organization over the past 20 years, including filing taxes, payment of bills and staff, payments for contractors, and much more.

The decision to eliminate Rosanna’s position was made by the Board as part of approving the GNOME Foundation budget for October 2025 to September 2026. The Board felt that this difficult decision was the right one for the Foundation, and we will be providing details about our plans in future communications. For now, we want to offer Rosanna our deepest thanks and best wishes for the future.

Thank you, zana.

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.

Message ends

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.

Message ends

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