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  • Disability Pride

    I saw Sophie’s #DisabilityPrideMonth post two days ago. I don’t normally make a point of re-reading tweets, but I’ve revisited it a dozen times, due to its clarity.

    I have been staring at an empty Emacs buffer for an hour now. I have been trying to think of some sincere and supportive words I could add to Sophie’s. The best I can do is this: I will try to follow her example.

    Sophie's floss.social Mastodon post, containing the following text: July is #DisabilityPrideMonth Wait, disability ... pride? Why would someone be proud to be disabled? One of the most important aspects of disability pride for me is to counter the shame. The shame of “being different,” the shame of “needing help,” the shame of “being a burden,” the shame from the humiliation and abuse I have experienced. Disability pride gives me the chance to counter the shame by saying, “I am disabled, and I am proud to exist and be who I am.”

    Thank you, Sophie. Thank you to the GNOME community for providing a welcoming space that allows us all to be who we are. And thank you to the GNOME contributors who work on the #a11y features which enable users like me to access a computer at all: Hari Rana, Jeff Fortin Tam, Bilal Elmoussaoui, Matthias Clasen, Claire, Emmanuele Bassi, Lukáš Tyrychtr, Sam Hewitt (and all our Design team, who take very seriously), Eitan Isaacson, Mike Gorse, Samuel Thibault, Georges Stavracas, and many more.

     

  • 2025-06-27 Foundation Report

    ## Flathub / Flatpak

    I’ve been chatting with various folks about Flathub and Flatpak for a while now, but this week was my first chance to catch up with Sebastian Wick. It was really helpful to hear the history of Flatpak tech, understand where we sit today, and discuss how we might grow Flatpak in the near future, if we can find some funding for it.

    Flathub continues to be the Linux App Store and I’ve never once experienced a Flathub failure, as a user… but I would love to see the Foundation support it more directly with acute financing. It’s such a valuable service and we need to ensure that it has the resources it requires.

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing Grant

    Allan and I spent a big chunk of this week reviewing applications and interviewing candidates for the Digital Wellbeing role. We will have an announcement of the new contractor next week.

    Thank you to everyone who applied! It was great to meet you all (a nice excuse to chat with some of our seemingly-infinite contributors), learn what projects you’re working on, and understand what you hope to see in the future of GNOME. There will always be more grants and the wider the base of applicants for each one, the more we can ensure we’re finding the best paid work for each contributor. So please never hesitate to apply for a role if you think your skills and experience are a good match.

     

    ## GIMP

    I had a couple long and lovely conversations with Jehan, the lead of the GIMP project. The GNOME Foundation is a fiscal host for GIMP, and we’re quite happy to be. The two projects have a long and valuable history together.

    We spoke about how we can improve some of our processes with respect to supporting GIMP and how GNOME and GIMP can share a little more love — in social media, in presentations (“Made with GIMP!”), and so on.

     

    ## KDE

    Speaking of sharing love! I keep bumping into KDE folks here and there. They also want to spend a little more time online developing the KDE/GNOME friendship… and I’m all about it. Two great desktops, each with their own vision, providing beautiful freedom of choice to our users.

    Watch this space.

     

    ## libxml2

    I had a quick chat with Nick about libxml2 and the possibility of onboarding a new maintainer. If you are keen to pick up some work on serious, universally-consumed f/oss infrastructure, please do reach out.

     

    ## Framework

    I got a chance to speak with Matt Hartley again (we missed our regular call when I was in New York). Maaaan, what an awesome dude. I asked him a bunch of annoying questions. He said maybe we could get some Framework laptops into the hands of GNOME devs. I told him to install GNOME OS. He had some pretty good fundraising ideas. Uh… some other stuff. Matt’s great.

     

    ## Python Foundation

    I had a chance to speak to Deb Nicholson of the Python Foundation. If you ever bump into her or Loren Crary (ED and Deputy ED, respectively) please know that they have the backs of the entire f/oss community. They are both so rad, I have no words. They’ve already helped me with so many things and I’m massively grateful.

     

    ## New Treasurers

    Our new Treasurer and Vice-Treasurer met our bookkeepers! It was a great meeting! I was totally useless because I’m not an accountant but I had fun listening in, in awe! haha 😉 I’m not sure if we’ll make a formal announcement for the Treasury roles, which is why I’m not naming anyone here yet.

    Huge thanks to Rosanna for organizing this and getting everyone on-board. I’m really excited to see the new Finance Committee knock this out of the park.

     

    ## OSU-OSL

    Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab recently had a scary financial moment, not unlike the moment the GNOME Foundation currently finds itself in. They also have a messaging challenge that’s not unlike GNOME’s: “How do you explain what the OSL is to someone who doesn’t already know?”

    I had a lovely conversation with Lance from their team about how they can structure their communication such that they will find repeat revenue, year after year. They met their fundraising target for this year, but they provide services to a colossal number of free software projects and it’s essential that they don’t find themselves in the same financial position next year.

     

    ## Fundraising

    It’s very important that I’m not the only one pounding the pavement and doing fundraising. You, GNOME, have a new Board on the way in. Legally, it’s part of their job (all nine of them) to help fundraise for the benefit of GNOME. I encourage you to encourage them: help them get on a podcast, a YouTube channel, in the news with your local OSPO, giving a talk at a local meetup, anything. We need more people out there in the world, talking about the maintenance and development of GNOME — and to let users know that we need their help.

    We’re in this togeher. But thankfully we have a team of 10 people to get cracking, now that we have a beautiful new donation page. 🙂 Thanks again to Bart, Jakub, Sam and Allan for all your help over the past few weeks.

    Until next week!

  • Donate Less

    We have a new donation page. But before you go there, I would like to impress upon you this idea:

    We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

    First of all, cash flow matters just as much to a non-profit as it does to a corporation. If a business only saw revenue once or twice a year — say, in the form of $300,000 cheques — it would need to be very careful with expenses, for fear of one of those cheques disappearing.

    And so it is with non-profits. A non-profit built on chasing grants and begging for large cheques is inherently fragile. Financial planning that is based on big, irregular revenue sources is bound to fail sooner or later. Conversely, financial planning based on monthly recurring revenue trends close to reality. The organization is more stable as a result.

    Second, if your monthly donation is negligible, you probably won’t worry too much about whether you keep your donation going or not. Maybe you decide $10/mo is such a small number (the price of two coffees in any country where I’ve lived over the past 15 years) that you’re happy to keep on donating at the end of one year? Great! If not? No hard feelings. The consistency still made the $120 figure extremely valuable to us.

    We want your donation to represent a number that is very comfortable for you. Personally, I make two larger (for me) donations every month. Out of my bank account in India, I donate $50/mo to a charity in Sikkim. Out of my Canadian bank account, I donate $100/mo to a charity in Nova Scotia. I have enough money available in both countries that these donations will not run out before I die. These are the two most important charities I donate to… but I’m not putting myself at risk by donating to them.

    If you value GNOME, we would appreciate your support. But your comfort is essential. $50/mo is too much? Don’t stretch yourself! $25/mo or $15/mo still makes a massive difference. We’re asking all GNOME users, developers, and fans to consider supporting us in this way. (If you’re not sure if you run GNOME, it’s the default desktop on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Red Hat.)

    GNOME brings incredible value to the world. This is how you ensure that it continues to exist.

     

    Donate less.

  • 2025-06-20 Foundation Report

    Welcome to the mid-June Foundation Report! I’m in an airport! My back hurts! This one might be short! haha

     

    ## AWS OSS

    Before the UN Open Source Week, Andrea Veri and I had a chance to meet Mila Zhou, Tom (Spot) Callaway, and Hannah Aubry from AWS OSS. We thanked them for their huge contribution to GNOME’s infrastructure but, more importantly, discussed other ways we can partner with them to make GNOME more sustainable and secure.

    I’ll be perfectly honest: I didn’t know what to expect from a meeting with AWS. And, as it turns out, it was such a lovely conversation that we chatted nonstop for nearly 5 hours and then continued the conversation over supper. At a… vegan chinese food place, of all things? (Very considerate of them to find some vegetarian food for me!) Lovely folks and I can’t wait for our next conversation.

     

    ## United Nations Open Source Week

    The big news for me this week is that I attended the United Nations Open Source Week in Manhattan. The Foundation isn’t in a great financial position, so I crashed with friends-of-friends (now also friends!) on an air mattress in Queens. Free (as in ginger beer) is a very reasonable price but my spine will also appreciate sleeping in my own bed tonight. 😉

    I met too many people to mention, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of organizations and different folks in attendance. Indie hackers, humanitarian workers, education specialists, Digital Public Infrastructure Aficionados, policy wonks, OSPO leaders, and a bit of Big Tech. I came to New York to beg for money (and I did do a bit of that) but it was the conversations about the f/oss community that I really enjoyed.

    We did do a “five Executive Directors” photo, because 4 previous GNOME Foundation EDs happened to be there. One of them was Richard! I got to hang out with him in person and he gave me a hug. So did Karen. It was nice. The history matters (recent history and ancient history) … and GNOME has a lot of history.

    Special shout-out to Sumana Harihareswara (it’s hard for me to spell that without an “sh”) who organized an extremely cool, low-key gathering in an outdoor public space near the UN. She couldn’t make the conf herself but she managed to create the best hallway track I attended. (By dragging a very heavy bag of snacks and drinks all the way from Queens.) More of that, please. The unconf part, not the dragging snacks across the city part.

    All in all, a really exciting and exhausting week.

     

    ## Donation Page

    As I mentioned above, the GNOME Foundation’s financial situation could use help. We’ll be starting a donation drive soon to encourage GNOME users to donate, using the new donation page:

    https://donate.gnome.org

    This blog post is as good a time as any to say this isn’t just a cash grab. The flip side of finding money for the Foundation is finding ways to grow the project with it. I’m of the opinion that this needs to include more than running infrastructure and conferences. Those things are extremely important — nothing in recent memory has reminded me of the value of in-person interactions like meeting a bunch of new friends here in New York — the real key to the GNOME project is the project itself. And the core of the project is development.

    As usual: No Promises. But if you want to hear a version of what I was saying all week, you can bug Adrian Vovk for his opinion about my opinions. 😉

    The donation page would not have been possible without the help of Bart Piotrowski, Sam Hewitt, Jakub Steiner, Shivam Singhal, and Yogiraj Hendre. Thanks everyone for putting in the hard work to get this over the line, to test it with your own credit cards, and to fix bugs as they cropped up.

    We will keep iterating on this as we learn more about what corporate sponsors want in exchange for their sponsorship and as we figure out how best to support Causes (campaigns), such as development.

     

    ## Elections

    Voting has closed! Thank you to all the candidates who ran this year. I know that running for election on the Board is intimidating but I’m glad folks overcame that fear and made the effort to run campaigns. It was very important to have you all in the race and I look forward to working with my new bosses once they take their seats. That’s when you get to learn about governance and demonstrate that you’re willing to put in the work. You might be my bosses… but I’m going to push you. 😉

    Until next week!

  • 2025-06-14 Foundation Report

    These weeks are going by fast and I’m still releasing these reports after the TWIG goes out. Weaker humans than I might be tempted to automate — but don’t worry! These will always be artisanal, hand-crafted, single-origin, uncut, and whole bean. Felix encouraged me to add these to following week’s TWIG, at least, so I’ll start doing that.

     

    ## Opaque Stuff

    • a few policy decisions are in-flight with the Board — productive conversations happening on all fronts, and it feels really good to see them moving forward

     

    ## Elections

    Voting closes in 5 days (June 19th). If you haven’t voted yet, get your votes in!

     

    ## GUADEC

    Planning for GUADEC is chugging along. Sponsored visas, flights, and hotels are getting sorted out.

    If you have a BoF or workshop proposal, get it in before tomorrow!

     

    ## Operations

    Our yearly CPA review is finalized. Tax filings and 990 prep are in flight.

     

    ## Infrastructure

    You may have seen our infrastructure announcement on social media earlier this week. This closes a long chapter of transitioning to AWS for GNOME’s essential services. A number of people have asked me if our setup is now highly AWS-specific. It isn’t. The vast majority of GNOME’s infrastructure runs on vanilla Linux and OpenShift. AWS helps our infrastructure engineers scale our services. They’re also generously donating the cloud infrastructure to the Foundation to support the GNOME project.

     

    ## Fundraising

    Over the weekend, I booted up a couple of volunteer developers to help with a sneaky little project we kicked off last week. As Julian, Pablo, Adrian, and Tobias have told me: No Promises… so I’m not making any. You’ll see it when you see it. 🙂 Hopefully in a few days. This has been the biggest focus of the Foundation over the past week-and-a-half.

    Many thanks to the other folks who’ve been helping with this little initiative. The Foundation could really use some financial help soon, and this project will be the base we build everything on top of.

     

    ## Meeting People

    Speaking of fundraising, I met Loren Crary of the Python Foundation! She is extremely cool and we found out that we both somehow descended on the term “gentle nerds”, each thinking we coined it ourselves. I first used this term in my 2015 Rootconf keynote. She’s been using it for ages, too. But I didn’t originally ask for her help with terminology. I went to her to sanity-check my approach to fundraising and — hooray! — she tells me I’m not crazy. Semi-related: she asked me if there are many books on GNOME and I had to admit I’ve never read one myself. A quick search shows me Mastering GNOME: A Beginner’s Guide and The Linux GNOME Desktop For Dummies. Have you ever read a book on GNOME? Or written one?

    I met Jorge Castro (of CNCF and Bazzite fame), a friend of Matt Hartley. We talked October GNOME, Wayland, dconf, KDE, Kubernetes, Fedora, and the fact that the Linux desktop is the true UI to cloud-native …everything. He also wants to be co-conspirators and I’m all about it. It had never really occurred to me that the ubiquity of dconf means GNOME is actually highly configurable, since I tend to eat the default GNOME experience (mostly), but it’s a good point. I told him a little story that the first Linux desktop experience that outstripped both Windows and MacOS for me was on a company-built RHEL machine back in 2010. Linux has been better than commercial operating systems for 15 years and the gap keeps widening. The Year of The Linux Desktop was a decade ago… just take the W.

    I had a long chat with Tobias and, among other things, we discussed the possibility of internal conversation spaces for Foundation Members and the possibility of a project General Assembly. Both nice ideas.

    I met Alejandro and Ousama from Slimbook. It was really cool to hear what their approach to the market is, how they ensure Linux and GNOME run perfectly on their hardware, and where their devices go. (They sell to NASA!) We talked about improving upstream communications and ways for the Foundation to facilitate that. We’re both hoping to get more Slimbooks in the hands of more developers.

    We had our normal Board meeting. Karen gave me some sage advice on fundraising campaigns and grants programs.

     

    ## One-Month Feedback Session

    I had my one-month feedback session with Rob and Allan, who are President and Vice-President at the moment, respectively. (And thus, my bosses.)

    Some key take-aways are that they’d like me to increase my focus on the finances and try to make my community outreach a little more sustainable by being less verbose. Probably two sides of the same coin, there. 🙂 I’ve already shifted my focus toward finances as of two weeks ago… which may mean you’ve seen less of me in Matrix and other community spaces. I’m still around! I just have my nose in a spreadsheet or something.

    They said some nice stuff, too, but nobody gets better by focusing on the stuff they’re already doing right.

     

  • 2025-06-06 Foundation Report

    Imagine a punchy, news-broadcast-sounding intro tune and probably some 3D text swinging around a shiny, silver globe. Dun da da dun: The June 6th, 2025 GNOME Foundation Report!

    Sorry. These reports need a little colour or I’m going to get bored of writing them. Also sorry this one is late again! Busy week.

     

    ## Fundraising

    This week’s big activity (for me) was preparing a fundraising proposal for the Board of Directors at a special meeting on Tuesday. The day before, everyone on staff patiently listened to me shout and spit and sweat and then patiently gave me feedback. Thanks y’all.

    Sidenote: I love the notion of a “special meeting.” I know it’s not meant to feel cute and silly, but it feels very cute and silly. That said, we got a lot done!

    The Board is on-board. Yay. We had a project kickoff the next day. We have a repo, we have some early work done already. I’m not allowed to make any promises. 😉 So you’ll just have to watch this space, I guess.

     

    ## Treasurer

    During the special meeting, it was voted that we would make an offer to a new Treasurer. I’m really looking forward to this announcement if they accept!

     

    ## Project Wall!

    The Staff project wall is really taking off, and it feels like we have some momentum with it now. Too many things in flight and too many cards in the “blocked” column, but we’re steadily improving.

     

    ## Vaultwarden

    Bart’s hooked us up with Vaultwarden for the Foundation’s shared passwords, as our tooling was a little broken and/or scattered previously. Yay! Thanks Bart.

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing Frontend

    We held a Digital Wellbeing meeting on Tuesday and we now have a Call for Proposals up:

    https://discourse.gnome.org/t/request-for-proposals-digital-wellbeing-frontend/29289

    If you still know C and you want to help take this project over the line, it’s a neat piece of integration work.

     

    ## 501(c)3s

    I met my friend Brihas, who is also an Executive Director of another 501(c)3. It was good to pick his brain about:

    • Limits to capital retention: Despite a widely-held misconception, there aren’t any.
    • 990 Schedule B redactions: When and why. The GNOME Foundation fully redacts our Schedule Bs… that seemed weird to me at first but he says it’s fairly common, which agrees with what others have told me.
    • How to keep the Board engaged: Whether one has a Working Board or not (we do), “engagement” in this question refers to the level of governance, not execution. He said his organization has found real benefit in a stricter adherence to Policy Governance. I’m inclined toward a stricter form of this model myself, and would encourage potential Board members (this year and in future years) to glance through that Wikipedia page.
    • How to take vacation: He prepares a year in advance. Seems about right.

     

    ## Meeting The Matts

    I had a chance to sit down with an old friend (Matt Godbolt, of Compiler Explorer fame) and a new friend (Matt Hartley, of Framework Computer fame). We talked variously about how to raise money, the future of the Linux desktop, the “sandwich problem” (that GNOME neither has the name recognition of Linux nor the product recognition of distros), and the fact that every cool kid at Strange Loop 2024 was running a Framework, not a Mac.

    I left both calls super excited to talk to them both again. Great folks. (I also just noticed their respective website have very similar gear favicons.)

     

    ## Grants

    I got to talk to Richard! He’s still very busy. He had some grant suggestions. It was nice to see him.

     

    ## End of 10

    I’ve still got an eye toward the https://endof10.org/ project. Increasingly, I have a fantasy of a simple, brightly-coloured A4 that explains how to get started with GNOME, in ~6 steps, if you’re coming from Windows:

    • what’s the equivalent of the “start” button? (do they still… call it that?)
    • how do I run a program?
    • how do I install a program?
    • how do I start the web browser? which one should I use? how do I get chrome[ium]?
    • where are my files?
    • where are my settings?

    Extras for the back side of the paper:

    • “modern” apps: Discord, Slack, Spotify, Telegram, Signal, etc.
    • how to install games
    • GNOME-specific features (virtual desktops and such)
    • core platform apps
    • “everyday” settings: wifi, bluetooth, light/dark mode, etc.
    • GNOME Online Accounts and Office files

     

    What do you think? Would you want to help with this? Is this a silly idea? Does this already exist somewhere?

     

    ## Meeting People

    I had a nice conversation with Lorenz, as he’s the only Board candidate I hadn’t spoken to yet. I met Sumana Harihareswara, who is extremely cool and I ran out of time while picking her brain about the various ways the GNOME Foundation can start its own grants program. I got some advice from Federico about how to improve our docs-creation process… among other things, he had the pretty sensible idea of just letting people barf streams of consciousness at me (or other folks comfortable with reStructuredText) and letting the documentation gnomes clean it up before publishing it. Seems legit! I had my first formal feedback session with Rosanna — she had prepared a 5-point structured document and I had to admit to her it was the most rigorous feedback I’ve ever received. 🙂

     

    ## UN Open Source Week

    I found a couch to crash on in NYC and a cheap flight, so I’ll be there! If you’re in NYC the week of the 16th to the 20th, reach out!

     

    That’s all for this week. See you in the next one and I’m sorry I didn’t make it in time for TWIG again.

     

  • Pride At GNOME

    After some discussion about where to announce our Pride Month celebrations, I’ve decided it might be easiest to do it on my own blog. It’s a little more personal that way. And if I say something silly or out of turn, it’s on me.

    Let me begin by trying to explain why Pride feels particularly important in the world of Free Software.

     

    Free Software Is Inclusive

    GNOME is a weird project. It’s not a household name, like Linux. Nor is it a shrinkwrapped brand, like Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. But it is a massive, collective software project that includes many different components under its umbrella.

    What binds all these interconnected projects together if not a brand and not a singular BDFL technical vision? It is the founding principle and vision for the project: everyone should be allowed in. To use GNOME, to modify GNOME, and to collaborate on GNOME.

    GNOME has more active threads of contribution than any one person could possibly follow and more active users than we could possibly count. So this simple mission of making a desktop that includes everyone is actually a lot harder than it seems. Will it run on a 14-year-old Chromebook? Perhaps that’s the only computer someone has access to. Is it translated into Farsi? Perhaps that’s the only language the user reads. “Everyone” is a lot of people — and the world is a big place.

     

    Pride Is Inclusive

    Far be it from me to equate the mission of an open source project with that of a worldwide civil rights movement. But Pride carries a very similar message: everyone is allowed in. Everyone should be allowed into a country or city or business. Everyone is allowed to be themselves.

    I’m very fortunate. I live in Halifax. It is, as far as I can tell, the Gayest City in Canada. Year-round, the Pride flag hangs from our bridges, is painted on crosswalks, and fills storefront windows. The rainbow adorns backpacks, laptops, skateboards, cars, and checkout counters. On an individual level, the Pride flag is a symbol of safety: “I promise you’re safe with me.” On a societal level, it’s an invitation: “You are welcome here.”

    I know that not everyone is this lucky.

     

    Pride Is Not The Same Everywhere

    Pride is a celebration of how far the community has come. The 1970s and 1980s feel far away and the decades-long fight for liberation (in countries where liberation has begun) provides us with the history and war stories we all benefit from today.

    But GNOME is global. And for many in the global 2SLGBTQIA+ (queer) community, the war is ongoing. Or it’s barely even begun. In some countries, members of the community are shunned, silenced, ostracized, harmed, or killed. Most of us know someone who didn’t survive.

    We also need to demonstrate support for everyone because no one is safe simply because they live in a city filled with rainbow flags. Many of us still struggle with our identity and our place in society, no matter where we live.

    And so Pride is bittersweet: a celebration of the freedom Pride represents but also an awareness of the dangers that continue to exist.

     

    A Request To The Foundation

    While discussing Pride preparations, there was a simple request, addressing these dangers, from one queer Foundation Member: “We just want to know you have our back.”

    To all GNOME’s queer users and contributors: absolutely, the Foundation has your back. Not just this June, but always. ❤️

    May everyone enjoy a peaceful and joyful Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

     

    (Special thanks to Laura Kramolis for her thoughtful feedback and guidance while writing this post.)

  • 2025-05-30 Foundation Report

    ## Opaque Stuff

    • the usual policy drafting work; thank you Allan for ensuring we’re on top of this
    • moving some operational deadlines forward (“preponing”) was discussed but this hasn’t been confirmed yet
    • a bunch of tactical paperwork minutiae I’ll be very happy to see completed

     

    ## Safety

    I published a post this week entitled On Safety. I won’t revisit it here in the Foundation Report but it is an important topic and I encourage you to go read it. Thank you to Allan Day for his thoughtful and patient editing.

     

    ## Pride

    On a much happier note, we’ve begun celebrating Pride Month a little early! You may see some coloured flags on GNOME’s social media accounts and Jakub Steiner has produced some lovely Pride backgrounds. You can find the source in Design / wallpaper-assets / pride and you can get the high-res renders from the GNOME-48 branch of GNOME / gnome-backgrounds. Low-res previews below. Thanks to everyone who pitched in this year to help us celebrate Pride together. 🙂

            

     

    ## Designers

    Speaking of The Designers, I got to attend their regular meeting this week. It was a pleasure to see just how committed everyone is to resolving the eternal tension of form, function, and performance. What might seem like a trivial decision on the surface (the performance of window drop-shadows, in this case) hides plenty of nuance, once you start digging. The need for performance isn’t arbitrary: a freie desktop needs to support older machines if we want to be the destination for those whose hardware had been abandoned by manufacturers and those who can’t afford to buy the fanciest gadget every 5 years. I enjoyed my time as a fly on the wall until Firefox crashed and wouldn’t restart.

    Part of my meeting with the designers was selfish. The Foundation will need their help to revisit the audiences for our fundraising efforts. I’m actually looking forward to a little bit of pairing time with some of them, if they’ll let me. 🙂

     

    ## Fundraising

    Rosanna and I sat down to drill through a mountain of spreadsheets and formulate a simplified picture of the Foundation’s finances — that “round to the nearest $100” napkin non-accounting that’s useful for visualization but not much else. I’m really grateful for the time Rosanna spent with me; it gave me a much better picture of where we stand, month on month, year on year.

    We need these cartoony visuals so we can start painting a fundraising picture for ourselves. I’ve been told by many people “don’t make any promises!” And I am not promising anything in particular. At this stage, we’re just sweeping the floor and sketching out our strategy.

     

    ## End of 10

    We’ve assembled a small Promo Team to coordinate with the End of 10 core team and the KDE folks. If you would like to be a part of this, shout at me or Sri. If you want to get involved more generally, jump into #endof10-en:kde.org.

    I’ve already pitched to the local hacker community here in Halifax that we should put on a repair cafe some weekend. Step One? Find a cheap venue so none of us are paying out-of-pocket. We have a gorgeous public library here that hosts community events for free. Maybe your city does, too?

     

    ## GTD (Getting Things Done)

    We’ve made some great progress with the new Staff project wall and the Foundation-wide “Staff Ops” calendar. The new Foundation Handbook keeps plodding along, though I will admit it’s still a disorganized dumping ground for links I wish I had when I started. Baby steps.

     

    ## Nextcloud / OnlyOffice

    Speaking of tooling, we have had repeated issues with data loss in OnlyOffice and it’s been decided to shut it down for now. If you are using Nextcloud for office files, your best option is to set up a mount in Nautilus (by adding ‘you@cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/dav’ to Online Accounts) and work on them locally.

    If the lack of collaborative office tools is a big issue, we can revisit this. If you have collaboration requirements, please document them in the Multiplayer Office Files HedgeDoc. Thanks!

     

    ## Vaultwarden

    We threw around a few suggestions for better group passwords across the Foundation. Somewhat unfortunately, we can’t lean on Nextcloud for this, as their “share” password feature doesn’t actually allow sharing groups of passwords yet.

    For the time-being, it looks like Vaultwarden is our most likely candidate. Commercial Bitwarden was considered, but we can’t guarantee we wouldn’t rely on non-free features and passwords are too big a deal to find ourselves accidentally relying on proprietary software.

     

    ## Treasurer

    We are still on the hunt for a solid Treasurer. The clock is ticking now, so if you know of anyone who might be appropriate, do reach out! I’m happy to speak to them over the weekend, if it will help, though they would need to have a conversation with Board members early next week, as it’s not me who decides who the Treasurer will be.

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing

    We are looking at adding some additional development capacity to the Digital Wellbeing work to ensure it’s delivered on time. If you’re keen on a bit of Calm Computing and family-focused frontend work, please keep an eye out for the job posting and/or poke us in #foundation:gnome.org.

     

    ## UN Open Source Week

    Looking to the future a bit, it’s UN Open Source Week in NYC, starting June 16th. I’m considering going if I can find a couch to crash on. If you’re planning to be in NYC that week, let me know!

    See you next week!

  • On Safety

    As you may be aware, the entire GNOME community has been on the receiving end of a coordinated harassment campaign for the past year. All GNOME users and contributors with a public profile, and those active on Matrix, are being harassed.

    I want to share my personal perspective on this, as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. There are some things that need to be said about these events, and I want to provide some reassurance for community members.

     

    People At Risk

    It is important for us to recognize that there are members of our community who are particularly at risk from the recent harassment campaign. Here, I am specifically referring to those people for whom this kind of harassment poses a genuine physical threat. The harassment frequently takes the form of anti-LGBTQIA+ (most frequently anti-trans), racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, and anti-muslim messages.

    Individual targets of the harassment have included Staff members, Board members, Foundation members, and users. Our community includes people living under oppressive, authoritarian regimes. It includes people in war zones. It includes refugees. These people are all acutely at risk.

    Please know that if you belong to one of these groups, you are always welcome in the GNOME community. We will do everything we can to ensure your safety in our community. We will not tolerate threats to your safety.

     

    Psychological Harm

    In addition to risk of physical harm, one component of this coordinated harassment campaign is the use of disturbing images, intending to cause psychological harm. The attackers’ very possession of these images is an international crime.

    These attacks have been stopped on Discourse, our forum tool. The GNOME moderation team is actively engaged with the Matrix moderation team to reduce (and ultimately eliminate) users’ exposure to these images on the Matrix protocol.

    If you have received one of these images, your best course of action is to email abuse@matrix.org. Specific, actionable advice is provided in The GNOME Handbook’s Matrix: Staying Safe section.

     

    My Personal Experience

    I was quite surprised to witness — and then find myself on the receiving end of — this harassment campaign when I began my new role with the GNOME Foundation. Because I’m a relatively new community member, I want to discuss my experience in case it is helpful to anyone else.

    The first time I was on the receiving end of one of these images, my response was to go to my partner and say, “I’m feeling sick and anxious. I really need a hug.” This was also my response to the first few harassment messages I received. I was advised by other staff members not to respond to the people sending these messages of harassment. I’m glad I took their advice. Engaging will not help.

    I have tried on many occasions to have compassion for those instigating and carrying out the harassment. They are clearly misguided — and not well. I have spent many years cultivating compassion but I still find myself struggling with this. Often thinking of the attackers leaves me feeling angry instead of compassionate.

    If I catch myself directing angry thoughts toward those people carrying out the harassment campaign, I instead try my best to direct compassion toward those who are suffering because of it: the community. It is easy to feel compassion for the victim and if I focus my attention on the people who continue to work tirelessly on GNOME in spite of these attacks, I always end up with a smile on my face.

    If you are feeling angry or frustrated, perhaps this approach will help you, too.

     

    Commitment

    Not every safety violation is created equal. Trolling and flame wars require a stern conversation — and perhaps moderation. A Code of Conduct violation necessitates the involvement of the Code of Conduct Committee — and perhaps the Board. Crimes demand the engagement of lawyers and law enforcement.

    Of the harassment campaign I have heard the following euphemisms:

    • “The spam.”
    • “They are bullies.”
    • “These people trolling us.”
    • “These people seem like jerks.”
    • “An annoying technical issue with federated protocols.”

    They are not simply “bullies”. Their actions do not constitute “trolling”. These are crimes.

    It is my commitment to you as members of this community that the Foundation will pursue the most appropriate course of action whenever your safety is violated, to the degree it is violated. This is part of why the Foundation exists: an incorporated entity can engage other organizations in more significant ways than any one person can.

    The Foundation stands with you.

     

  • 2025-05-23 Foundation Report

    Welcome to the third instalment of the Foundation Report! Instalment? Installment? English is dumb. Okay, here goes!

    ## Opaque Stuff

    • 3rd party consultation on safety issue continues
    • researching some software choices for process automation
    • asking individuals about their goals – no name-dropping because I’m not sure everyone would be comfortable
    • international finance is the worst but the problem is fixed now

     

    ## Meeting People

    I’m meeting fewer people and getting more grunt work accomplished but I still met plenty of lovely folks this week. I also met some people after last week’s report: Jef Spaleta is the Fedora Project’s new Lead. He and I agreed all new business deals will be done in the curling rink instead of the golf course. Matthias Clausen gave me a bit of a history lesson and also convinced me I need to talk to more old-timers: the sense of perspective decades of involvement brings is valuable.

    I met Tobias and chatted about how the Foundation can increase support to contributors. Rosanna introduced me to our bookkeeper and her advisor so I could get an intro to our bookkeeping process and a walk-through of our last CPA review. Maria and I had a lovely chat about her 20+ years as a GNOME user/contributor and the value of logistics, communications, and admin folks in a very tech-heavy organization… I found myself nodding along with so much she had to say.

    I got a chance to meet Aaditya from GNOME Nepal! What he and his team are doing there is after my own heart: getting GNOME, Linux, and other freie software into the hands of aspiring hackers and students. He’s essentially already running the style of repair cafe that the endof10.org campaign will teach people to run and I sincerely hope he’ll have time to help with End Of 10 (but he’s a busy guy!) as I think he has so much to offer. I was shocked to learn that GNOME Nepal is only one year old. They’ve already accomplished so much.

    Rosanna and I met the CommitChange team, who help us with gnome.org/donate. They have some neat stuff going on and they explained where they can help us with tweaks to their software and API, analytics, and campaign management. We’re hoping to do something with CommitChange very soon but I won’t say what until it’s baked because it’s not my baby. 🙂

    Last, we met a couple great folks who are interested in helping out in the Treasurer role at the Foundation. If you know anyone who’s a spreadsheet powerhouse, the Tufte of Reporting, or obsessed with carefully-balanced budgets, please encourage them to email me or Rob!

     

    ## Ideas, Docs, Walls, Files

    I’ve started to corral my scatterbrained ideas into some homes. They’re still spread out between paper notebooks, Markdown files, voicenotes, and my extremely frazzled family members. I’ll probably stop telling them about all the cool people I’m meeting and all the ideas I have by … GUADEC? Maybe. 😉

    We’ve started an internal “Foundation Handbook” to match handbook.gnome.org. This is only visible to Staff and Board members, as it contains a great deal of PII and other private information. It has a loooong way to go, but the goal is for it to provide the same beautiful, central documentation location (for banking, staff tools, ops, and so on) that the Project Handbook does. Public information about the Foundation won’t go in here, of course, as it still belongs on foundation.html. If you join the Board, you’re welcome to help us keep it clean and organized so we easily know where everything is and so it’s easy to onboard future Boards, EDs, and other Staff. (No, I’m not planning to leave anytime soon.)

    We’ve rebooted the Staff project wall. We don’t keep track of Ops tasks in here (since they’re recurring) but, rather, anything Executive: Follow up with so-and-so, document XYZ process, make a one-time social media post for an organizational partner, etc. We’re also making heavier use of the Board wall, bit by bit.

    Nextcloud! We’re… trying to use it. Collecting all our files into Nextcloud will take some time, but we’ve started to push toward using it with some boring old policy junk. We just have to keep up the gardening and it will become a thing of beauty, eventually.

     

    ## Fundraising

    We’ve talked a little about fundraising with the Board (I’m still relatively new) but as the smaller fires are each extinguished, fundraising is taking up more headspace. This is a major concern for me. Perhaps the major concern. The conversation with CommitChange yesterday was one small step toward this. We’ve also started some “market research.” (I’m not sure what else to call it.) When it comes to individuals and organizations that have never donated to GNOME before, I want to know:

    • Do they understand how important GNOME is, as infrastructure?
    • Where do we find them to ask them to donate? (If not within GNOME itself.)
    • Do they want anything for their donation? Or do we just need to reach them?

     

    ## GUADEC

    Kristi and I sat and had a long look through the GUADEC budget and our current expenses. She also very patiently explained to me the event expectations of Europeans as they differ from Americans. 😉 Still plenty for me to learn about how our events are planned, but Kristi’s got me off to a great start.

     

    ## End of 10

    Joseph from endof10.org and KDE Eco fame has been in touch continuously. Sri posted a call for a GNOME endof10.org Promo Team on the Engagement blog. It’s going to be here before you know it! If you want to get involved, ping us in #engagement:gnome.org or #endof10-en:kde.org.

    If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch Joseph’s Linux App Summit talk! It’s great and he does a fantastic job of explaining the importance of this effort.

     

    ## “Wow, yay, transparency”

    I’m very grateful to everyone who has thanked me for these little Foundation Reports. I’m glad I’m not just screaming into the void with these and that a few people are getting value out of them. However, I do have one request.

    On occasion (though rarely), these compliments have come paired with (or couched in) a complaint about previous EDs, other folks on staff, or the Board. I would encourage folks who are framing things this way to stop, as it’s a very unhelpful way to communicate. We need to remember that everyone works differently. I’m a loudmouth, so I’m loud. Most people on staff and on the Board are not. Instead, they have their nose to the grindstone. I think most of them struggle to find the time to talk about their work at the end of the workweek. Most of them work late into the night. Most of them work weekends. It’s been a long year (or…five?) for the Foundation and most of them are very tired.

    Because I am loud, I will do my best to be loud for them. Week after week, I’ll talk more about what “we” are doing — please understand that “we” is mostly them. If I tell you about work that’s happening at the Foundation, that work didn’t magically start when I joined in May. It’s been happening for years and I’m just doing my best to make it a little more visible.

    Instead of thanking me for my ridiculous infoblog, please redirect your thanks to someone on staff. Thank someone on the Board for their tireless service. Thank a contributor whose work comes pouring in, year after year. Send a box of chocolates in a DM. Drop them a little thank-you email. Give them a high-five at GUADEC. (Virtual or otherwise.)

    And if you’re feeling very energetic, run for the Board so you can help out. ❤️