Whew. How is it Friday already? Here’s my attempt at a more concise Foundation Report for my second official week at the Foundation. Spoiler: If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.
## Opaque Things
I wasn’t expecting to interact with external organizations in such a way that I can’t mention them directly in these reports this early in my time here. But that’s a part of the job, and it’s begun already.
To provide some context on where those opaque interactions sit on the ol’ transparency spectrum, here is a wildly unscientific breakdown of transparency levels of material I (sometimes) have access to:
- The thoughts in my head
- The paper notes on my desk
- My unshared, private git repo
- Restricted conversations with third parties, shared with the relevant Board members
- My “ED Notes” repo, shared with the Board
- My
.planfile, shared with the Board - The Executive Session from the monthly Board meeting (I leave the room for these, as do all other Foundation Staff who might be attending the Board meeting for some reason)
- Confidential items from the monthly Board meeting
- Restricted GitLab repos/issues
- Shared drives
- Matrix
- Discourse
- GitLab
- Social Media
- Blogs
Most of the Foundation’s and the project’s activity happen in those last 5 locations. It’s actually very manual and inconvenient to create a private GitLab repo on gitlab.gnome.org. And so it should be! Public and published should be the first option, always… but there are clearly times when privacy or confidentiality is warranted.
Note that most of the Very Private things aren’t private because they’re top secret. The paper on my desk isn’t shared with anyone because, well, it can’t be. I don’t keep sensitive information on my desk. If I need to record something sensitive, it goes in a private git repo. There’s almost nothing in there and I don’t expect to see that grow much. The “ED Notes” directory is mostly a kludge and a scratchpad. Ultimately, my kludgey notes make their way into GitLab issues. Some of these are public, but not all. Board discussions frequently go on inside GitLab issues. It’s a good permanent record.
As for the opaque conversations mentioned in the first paragraph above, I can say this: they’re not particularly sexy or exciting. [edit] One is bureaucratic, in the most literal and boring sense: just the usual compliance requirements of a 501c3. The other was meeting with a third party about a safety issue. (Thanks to Rob and Allan for suggesting these edits.) [/edit] Both of these conversations directly benefit GNOME and its community. There’s no secret society stuff going on, as much as that may disappoint some folks outside the community. 😉
## Transparency
(How meta.) So, many conversations this week have been about transparency: how do we be more transparent? How do we condense the firehose of information in GitLab, Matrix, Discourse, and calls into something digestable? Who wants to see what? Who thinks transparency (or general communication) mistakes have been made in the past and what were those mistakes? What can we learn from them? How can we help each other learn more transparent communication methods, processes, and practices?
Almost everyone I spoke to this week (and last) has something to say on this topic. Most people have a pretty clear idea about what they want out of transparency in the project and from the Foundation. Most people are largely in agreement.
Every organization is different. Everyone’s habits are different. We’ll keep iterating.
## Spreadsheets
I sat with Pablo on the 12th to take a look at some of our accounts and to get a handle on our cash position. Rosanna does a better job of this stuff than I do and I sat with her on the same day to look at similar numbers. She also introduced me to the bookkeeper (yay!), our contacts at CommitChange, and our friends over at GNOME Nepal.
GNOME Email lives on a vanilla IMAP server with no server-side filtering or rules. Since I’m a giant pain in the ass who refuses to either (a) just use Thunderbird rules and suck it up when my laptop is closed or (b) run a server in my living room, Andrea set me up with a box in the GNOME OpenShift cloud to run imapfilter. So far, it works a treat. Praise be to SREs.
Andrea also has other very fun ideas for the future. [edit] BUT THEY’RE SECRETS. I was advised this wasn’t a fun tease. It’s not really secret: Andrea and I are both just way too excited about fundraising. A diverse donor portfolio will make for a healthy Foundation. [/edit]
## Executive Meeting
The Exec Committee meets on mondays to Get Things Done. We discussed the need for a Treasurer, chatted about what the Staff was doing (which, on some level, is self-referential when embedded in this report), discussed ways we can be more transparent and also how to talk about transparency.
This may sound like a self-indulgent thought exercise but take a second to mull it over. What, precisely, do you want out of transparency from the GNOME Foundation? I can tell you that you 100% do not want the firehose because I’m spending all day on the firehose and I can’t even keep up. The information has to be sliced, somehow. How do you want it sliced?
You can just tweet your answers to this question directly at me on Mastodon. Please don’t shout.
Once we understand what the expectations of the community are, we can replay them back to you (ie. “does this approach seem right to you?”) which is talking about transparency. A conversation.
## Flathub
I met Rob and some other Flathub folks. We had some lively banter about telemetry. 😉 That wasn’t the primary focus, but it’s fun to imagine it was. In actuality, we discussed the Flathub organization, its relationship to GNOME, and how much we can accomplish in terms of standing up Flathub on its own terms by the fall of 2025. That’s a high bar but there are some great people involved.
I’d love to say something like “Flathub is the future of the Linux desktop” but Flathub is the Today of the Linux Desktop. I probably tell this story too much, but I’m running Debian Stable on a 2011 MacBook Air in my living room. Debian Stable. I can’t even switch bluetooth devices without opening settings because it’s GNOME 43 but I can install an app released yesterday. As someone who ran Debian a lot as a kid, I can’t tell you just how weird and delightful that is.
## Matrix Spam
If you use Matrix to work on GNOME, or to watch GNOME development, or for just about any other reason, really… you know about the spam. “Spam.”
Let’s please have a moment of silence for the mods, admins, devs, and SREs who are fighting to bring peace back to our little village.
Thank you everyone on the front lines. I’ve only spoken to a few of you so far but you’ve provided me tremendous reassurance. I hope I can proxy some of that reassurance:
This situation is truly awful but please know just how seriously and competently the people behind the scenes are working to resolve it.
## The Board
Cassidy and I got a Board orientation! Thanks Rob. Even if a lot of this is known, I think it might be helpful to publish some of the onboarding material so folks inside (and outside) the community know what is involved in running a 501c3.
The GNOME Project Handbook is a great resource to start with, if governance is your jam.
## The Board Meeting
The Board meets every second Tuesday of the month. We looked at finances, talked about GUADEC, talked about ways to get more money in the hands of developers, and discussed the option of a “hackfest” to axe some of the pending tasks on the Foundation’s project wall. I think that’s Allan’s way of trying to make administrivia sound fun. 😀
## Digital Wellbeing
Allan kindly invited me to a DW design meeting. I learned that it’s not just my Location Services that are broken… that’s just apparently a very global bug. That realization was in the context of a discussion about how the modern desktop may find itself increasingly reliant on networked services, and how to mitigate the risks posed by that situation. Design goes all the way to the bottom of the stack, and across the network.
## Safety
I have a lot to say on this topic. I’ve had a lot of conversations on this topic already. It’s too much to cram into a weekly Foundation Update, but expect more once I’ve done more research.
## History
I got some history lessons from Federico, Cassidy, and Adrian Vovk. We talked about tensions in the community, Pride month in 2024, significant past events under other EDs, the history of #a11y in GNOME, the brand, the logo, the Brand-in-the-Large (otherwise known as “the product”), the STF grant, YouTubers, podcasters, burnout, and GNOME OS.
In my conversation with Adrian, I began to understand that GNOME OS is a much, much bigger idea than what he laid out in his blog post, A Desktop for All. Not bigger in terms of implementation… bigger in terms of the dream. That conversation took, uh, a while. The excitement that people feel for the GNOME project is really unlike I’ve ever seen for any other product.
In my conversation with Cassidy, he brought up the concept of the difference between the GNOME Community (the devs, the designers, the translators, the infra folks, the ops folks, everyone who builds GNOME) and the GNOME Fandom (the stans, the users, the news, the pundits, the peanut gallery, the haters). I think this distinction matters. I’ve been stanning GNOME for two decades. I’ve only been a community member for two weeks. This isn’t to say that one group is more important than the other … just that there are two distinct groups.
Side note: I’d love to see the “U” back in GUADEC. If you’re someone who simply loves a universal free desktop, and you happen to choose GNOME, I’d encourage you to come to GUADEC this summer and stan with me.
## Treasurer
[edit] I misspoke — Michael is still our Treasurer, but we do need a new Treasurer to replace him. Thank you Rosanna for pointing out my mistake! [/edit] We could really use a new Treasurer… but we could also really use a dedicated person who’s borderline obsessed with the intersection of finances and freie software. And maybe a dash of data science.
If you know someone you think would be a good fit, please email me.
## Elections
Board elections are coming up! Have you ever wanted to be involved in f/oss governance? Have you ever felt the burning urge to get your hands dirty with a 501c3 non-profit? Do you love accounting? Law? Taking minutes? Following rules? The GNOME Board might be for you!
Stay tuned for an announcement of the schedule and the publication of some 501c3 infographics and/or slide decks. 🙂
## Accessibility
The Foundation has been speaking to Georges and the Engagement folks about how we might fund #a11y development more directly. This conversation began before I want to love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back. hit the streets. This conversation isn’t reactionary; the Fireborn blog is serendipitous. The author of that blog is right: the #a11y teams do have limited resources and they do experience years of neglect. Yet? They keep fighting. There are plenty of individuals, companies, and governments in this world to support the creation of a completely accessible computer and it is up to us to find that support. While it’s romantic to imagine a scrappy team of volunteers creating an accessible desktop, this isn’t the reality. If #a11y teams aren’t funded, the work can’t keep up.
One line caught my attention in particular:
This isn’t inconvenience.
It’s exclusion.
This is what we mean when we say an environment for everyone. We do not mean you’ll get a switch to make your window borders look like BeOS. There is software that does that already. The goal is to ensure no one is excluded.
If we aren’t doing that, that’s a problem we need to solve.
Yesterday was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s an excellent time to intentionally reflect on how we can improve the situation. But #a11y matters just as much today. And tomorrow.
Until we have a fundraising program in place, I strongly suggest reading Georges’ In celebration of accessibility and Matthias’ An Accessibility Update for GTK. There are people out there doing this work already. Thank them. Celebrate them. Support them.
## Conclusion
I wrote this on Friday morning. Today I’ll meet Anisa, Jef Spaleta (of Fedora fame), and Matthias.
Was this more concise? Probably not. But at least I sliced it a different direction than last week. 😉 If you and I did something fun together this week and I forgot, please forgive me. I almost forgot Andrea and he was the last person I saw before I started typing this thing.
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