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2025-07-12 Foundation Update
Gah. Every week I’m like “I’ll do a short one this week” and then I… do not.

## New Treasurers

We recently announced our new treasurer, Deepa Venkatraman. We will also have a new vice-treasurer joining us in October.

This is really exciting. It’s important that Deepa and I can see with absolute clarity what is happening with the Foundation’s finances, and in turn present our understanding to the Board so they share that clarity. She and I also need to start drafting the annual budget soon, which itself must be built on clear financial reporting. Few people I know ask the kind of incisive questions Deepa asks and I’m really looking forward to tackling the following three issues with her:
- solve our financial reporting problems:
  - cash flow as a “burndown chart” that most hackers will identify with
  - clearer accrual reporting so it’s obvious whether we’re growing or crashing
- passing a budget on time that the Board really understands
- help the Board pass safer policies
## postmarketOS

We are excited to announce that postmarketOS has joined the GNOME Advisory Board! This is particularly fun, because it breaks GNOME out of its safe shell. GNOME has had a complete desktop product for 15 years. Phones and tablets are the most common computers in the world today and the obvious next step for GNOME app developers. It’s a long hard road to win the mobile market, but we will. 🙂

(I’m just going to keep saying that because I know some people think it’s extraordinarily silly… but I do mean it.)

## Sustain? Funding? Jobs?

We’ve started work this week on the other side of the coin for donate.gnome.org. We’re not entirely sure which subdomain it will live at yet, but the process of funding contributors needs its own home. This page will celebrate the existing grant and contract work going on in GNOME right now (such as Digital Wellbeing) but it will also act as the gateway where contributors can apply for travel grants, contracts, fellowships, and other jobs.

## PayPal

Thanks to Bart, donate.gnome.org now supports PayPal recurring donations, for folks who do not have credit cards.

We hear you: EUR presentment currency is a highly-requested feature and so are yearly donations. We’re still working away at this. 🙂

## Hardware Pals

We’re making some steady progress toward relationships with Framework Computer and Slimbook where GNOME developers can help them ensure their hardware always works perfectly, out of the box. Great folks at both companies and I’m excited to see all the bugs get squashed. 🙂

## Stuff I’m Dropping

Oh, friends. I should really be working on the Annual Report… but other junk keeps coming up! Same goes for my GUADEC talk. And the copy for jobs.gnome.org … argh. Sorry Sam! haha

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed your thoughts and ideas to the Successes for Annual Report 2025 issue. GNOME development is a firehose and you’re helping me drink it. More thoughts and ideas still welcome!

## It’s Not 1998

Emmanuele and I had a call this week. There was plenty of nuance and history behind that conversation that would be too difficult to repeat here. However, he and I have similar concerns surrounding communication, tone, tools, media, and moderation: we both want GNOME to be as welcoming a community as it is a computing and development platform. We also agreed the values which bind us as a community are those values directly linked to GNOME’s mission.

This is a significant challenge. Earth is a big place, with plenty of opinions, cultures, languages, and ideas. We are all trying out best to resolve the forces in tension. Carefully, thoughtfully.

We both had a laugh at the truism, “it’s not 1998.” There’s a lot that was fun and exciting and uplifting about the earlier internet… but there was also plenty of space for nastiness. Those of us old enough to remember it (read: me) occasionally make the mistake of speaking in the snarky, biting tones that were acceptable back then. As Official Old People, Emmanuele and I agreed we had to work even harder to set an example for the kind of dialogue we hope to see in the community.

Part of that effort is boosting other peoples’ work. You don’t have to go full shouty Twitter venture capitalist about it or anything… just remember how good it felt the first time someone congratulated you on some good work you did, and pass that along. A quick DM or email can go a long way to making someone’s week.

Thanks Emmanuele, Brage, Bart, Sid, Sri, Alice, Michael, and all the other mods for keeping our spaces safe and inviting. It’s thankless work most of the time but we’re always grateful.

## Office Hours

We tried out “office hours” today: one hour for Foundation Members to come and chat. Bring a tea or coffee, tell me about your favourite GUADEC, tell me what a bad job I’m doing, explain where the Foundation needs to spend money to make GNOME better, ask a question… anything. The URL is only published on private channels for, uh, obvious reasons. See you next week!
2025-07-12
2025-07-05 Foundation Update
## The Cat’s Out Of The Bag

Since some of you are bound to see this Reddit comment, and my reply, it’s probably useful for me to address it in a more public forum, even if it violates my “No Promises” rule.

No, this wasn’t a shoot-from-the-hip reply. This has been the plan since I proposed a fundraising strategy to the Board. It is my intention to direct more of the Foundation’s resources toward GNOME development, once the Foundation’s basic expenses are taken care of. (Currently they are not.) The GNOME Foundation won’t stop running infrastructure, planning GUADEC, providing travel grants, or any of the other good things we do. But rather than the Foundation contributing to GNOME’s development exclusively through inbound/restricted grants, we will start to produce grants and fellowships ourselves.

This will take time and it will demand more of the GNOME project. The project needs clear governance and management or we won’t know where to spend money, even if we have it. The Foundation won’t become a kingmaker, nor will we run lotteries — it’s up to the project to make recommendations and help us guide the deployment of capital toward our mission.

## Friends of GNOME

So far, we have a cute little start to our fundraising campaign: I count 172 public Friends of GNOME over on https://donate.gnome.org/ … to everyone who contributes to GNOME and to everyone who donates to GNOME: thank you. Every contribution makes a huge difference and it’s been really heartwarming to see all this early support.

We’ve taken the first step out of our cozy f/oss spaces: Reddit. One user even set up a “show me your donation!” thread. It’s really cute. 🙂 It’s hard to express just how important it is that we go out and meet our users for this exercise. We need them to know what an exciting time it is for GNOME: Windows 10 is dying, MacOS gets worse with every release, and they’re going to run GNOME on a phone soon. We also need them to know that GNOME needs their help.

Big thanks to Sri for pushing this and to him and Brage for moderating /r/gnome. It matters a lot to find a shared space with users and if, as a contributor, you’ve been feeling like you need a little boost lately, I encourage you to head over to those Reddit threads. People love what you build, and it shows.

## Friends of GNOME: Partners

The next big thing we need to do is to find partners who are willing to help us push a big message out across a lot of channels. We don’t even know who our users are, so it’s pretty hard to reach them. The more people see that GNOME needs their help, the more help we’ll get.

Everyone I know who runs GNOME (but doesn’t pay much attention to the project) said the same thing when I asked what they wanted in return for a donation: “Nothing really… I just need you to ask me. I didn’t know GNOME needed donations!”

If you know of someone with a large following or an organization with a lot of reach (or, heck, even a little reach), please email me and introduce me. I’m happy to get them involved to boost us.

## Friends of GNOME: Shell Notification

KDE, Thunderbird, and Blender have had runaway success with their small donation notification. I’m not sure we can do this for GNOME 49 or not, but I’d love to try. I’ve opened an issue here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/issues/274

We may not know who our users are. But our software knows who our users are. 😉

## Annual Report

I should really get on this but it’s been a busy week with other things. Thanks everyone who’s contributed their thoughts to the “Successes for 2025” issue so far. If you don’t see your name and you still want to contribute something, please go ahead!

## Fiscal Controls

One of the aforementioned “other things” is Fiscal Controls.

This concept goes by many names. “Fiscal Controls”, “Internal Controls”, “Internal Policies and Procedures”, etc. But they all refer to the same thing: how to manage financial risk. We’re taking a three-pronged approach to start with:
1. Reduce spend and tighten up policies. We have put the travel policy on pause (barring GUADEC, which was already approved) and we intend to tighten up all our policies.
2. Clarity on capital shortages. We need to know exactly what our P&L looks like in any given month, and what our 3-month, 6-month, and annual projections look like based on yesterday’s weather. Our bookkeepers, Ops team, and new treasurers are helping with this.
3. Clarity in reporting. A 501(c)(3) is … kind of a weird shape. Not everyone in the Board is familiar with running a business and most certainly aren’t familiar with running a non-profit. So we need to make it painfully straightforward for everyone on the Board to understand the details of our financial position, without getting into the weeds: How much money are we responsible for, as a fiscal host? How much money is restricted? How much core money do we have? Accounting is more art than science and the nuances of reporting accurately (but without forcing everyone to read a balance sheet) is a large part of why that’s the case. Again, we have a lot of help from our bookkeepers, Ops team, and new treasurers.
There’s a lot of work to do here and we’ll keep iterating, but these feel like strong starts.

## Organizational Resilience

The other aforementioned “other thing” is resilience. We have a few things happening here.

First, we need broader ownership, control, and access to bank accounts. This is, of course, the related to, but different from, fiscal controls — our controls ensure no one person can sign themselves a cheque for $50,000. Multiple signatories ensures that such responsibility doesn’t rest with a single individual. Everyone at the GNOME Foundation has impeccable moral standing but people do die, and we need to add resilience to that inevitability. More realistically (and immediately), we will be audited soon and the auditors will not care how trustworthy we believe one another to be.

Second, we have our baseline processes: filing 990s, renewing our registration, renewing insurance, etc. All of these processes should be accessible to (and, preferably, executable by) multiple people.

Third, we’re finally starting to make good use of Vaultwarden. Thanks again, Bart, for setting this up for us.

Fourth, we need to ensure we have at least 3 administrators on each of our online accounts. Or, at worst, 2 administrators. Online accounts with an account owner should lean on an organizational account owner (not an individual) which multiple people control together. Thanks Rosanna for helping sort this out.

Last, we need at least 2 folks with root level access to all our self-hosted services. This of course true in the most literal sense, but we also need our SREs to have accounts with each service.

## Digital Wellbeing Kickoff

I’m pleased to announce that the Digital Wellbeing contract has kicked off! The developer who was awarded the contract is Ignacy Kuchciński and he has begun working with Philip and Sam as of Tuesday.

## Office Hours

I had a couple pleasant conversations with hackers this week: Jordan Petridis and Sophie Harold. I asked Sophie what she thought about the idea of “office hours” as I feel like I’ve gotten increasingly disconnected from the community after my first few weeks. Her response was something to the effect of “you can only try.” 🙂

So let’s do that. I’ll invite maintainers and if you’d like to join, please reach out to a maintainer to find out the BigBlueButton URL for next Friday.

## A Hacker In Need Of Help

We have a hacker in the southwest United States who is currently in an unsafe living situation. This person has given me permission to ask for help on their behalf. If you or someone you know could provide a safe temporary living situation within the continental United States, please get in touch with me. They just want to hack in peace.
2025-07-05
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.

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 #a11y very seriously), Eitan Isaacson, Mike Gorse, Samuel Thibault, Georges Stavracas, and many more.

2025-07-01
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!

2025-06-27
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.

2025-06-26
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 #a11y 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!

2025-06-20
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.
2025-06-14
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.
2025-06-07
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.)

2025-06-01
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!
2025-05-30