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.
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