Month: July 2025

## Annual Report

The 2025 Annual Report is all-but-baked. Deepa and I would like to be completely confident in the final financial figures before publishing. The Board has seen these final numbers, during their all-day work day two days ago. I heard from multiple Board members that they’re ecstatic with how Deepa presented the financial report. This was a massive amount of work for Deepa to contribute in her first month volunteering as our new Treasurer and we all really appreciate the work that she’s put into this.

 

## GUADEC and Gratitude

I’ve organized large events before and I know in my bones how difficult and tiresome it can be. But I don’t think I quite understood the scale of GUADEC. I had heard many times in the past three months “you just have to experience GUADEC to understand it” but I was quite surprised to find the day before the conference so intense and overwhelming that I was sick in bed for the entire first day of the conference — and that’s as an attendee!

The conference takes the firehose of GNOME development and brings it all into one place. So many things happened here, I won’t attempt to enumerate them all. Instead, I’d like to talk about the energy.

I have been pretty disoriented since the moment I landed in Italy but, even in my stupor, I was carried along by the energy of the conference. I could see that I wasn’t an exception — everyone I talked to seemed to be sleeping four hours a night but still highly energized, thrilled to take part, to meet their old friends, and to build GNOME together. My experience of the conference was a constant stream of people coming up to me, introducing themselves, telling me their stories, and sharing their dreams for the project. There is a real warmth to everyone involved in GNOME and it radiates from people the moment you meet them. You all made this a very comfortable space, even for an introvert like me.

There is also incredible history here: folks who have been around for 5 years, 15 years, 25 years, 30 years. Lifelong friends like that are rare and it’s special to witness, as an outsider.

But more important than anything I have to say about my experience of the conference, I want to proxy the gratitude of everyone I met. Everyone I spoke to, carried through the unbroken days on the energy of the space, kept telling me what a wonderful GUADEC it was. “The best GUADEC I’ve ever been to.” / “It’s so wonderful to meet the local community.” / “Everything is so smooth and well organized.”

If you were not here and couldn’t experience it yourself, please know how grateful we all are for the hard work of the staff and volunteers. Kristi, for tirelessly managing the entire project and coordinating a thousand variables, from the day GUADEC 2024 ended until the moment she opened GUADEC 2025. Rosanna, for taking time away from all her regular work at the Foundation to give her full attention to the event. Pietro, for all the local coordination before the conference and his attention to detail throughout the conference. And the local/remote volunteer team — Maria, Deepesha, Ashmit, Aryan, Alessandro, and Syazwan — for openly and generously participating in every conceivable way.

Thank you everyone for making such an important event possible.

 

## Opaque Stuff

• some preliminary internal policy drafts

 

## Annual Report

Most of this week was spent creating a draft of the 2025 annual report. I’ve never created an annual report for a non-profit before, so it was a fun exercise! It did consume enough time that I’ll be creating my GUADEC slides on the airplane, though. 😉

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Annual Report / 2025 Successes issue in GitLab. I know this was a bit of a scramble, and I appreciate everyone taking the time to chip in.

The draft is at the bottom of that issue. You can use Toolbx (as described in the README) or Mise to run it locally. If your GNOME contributions from this year are missing, please shout at me on Matrix! I’m certain I’m missing achievements from the past 18 months.

 

## 501(c)(3) Details

I was curious to know if an annual report was a legal requirement for 501(c)(3)s in California. Much like limits to retaining capital, the answer is “no” … but there is a sort of soft compliance value in producing an annual report in the same way that it looks better to the IRS if a non-profit doesn’t sit on a half-billion dollars like a cave dragon. (Not naming any names, of course.)

We spent a bit of time this past week looking at the Public Support Test. This is yet another great reason to have regular, recurring, unrestricted contributions from a wide variety of GNOME users. These donations don’t just keep GNOME humming but they also validate the Foundation as a 501(c)(3). The Public Support Test takes users’ love of GNOME and transmogrifies it into IRS compliance. 😉

The language on that page is obnoxiously vague (UNITS, people) so let’s take a look at the first and most important sentence to see what it actually means:

The simplest definition of the IRS public support test states that at least 1/3 (33.3%) of donations must be given by donors who give less than 2% of the nonprofit’s overall receipts.

“33.3% of donations” specifically means dollars. The “2% of receipts” also just means, uh, dollars. It’s unclear to me why they don’t just, you know, say that. Anyway, this explanation/example is clearer than any of the 3 listed on the page, in my opinion:

If your nonprofit’s total support over 5 years is $1,000,000:

• 2% = $20,000
• If Donor A gives $50,000, only $20,000 counts toward public support
• The extra $30,000 is still counted as total revenue, but not toward the “public support” percentage

This rule only applies to large individual, corporate, or private foundation donors — not to:

• Government grants
• Public charities
• Broad-based fundraising (small donors)

In short, while it’s possible to pass the Public Support Test with revenue from grants and other charities, the most resilient public support (and revenue stream!) comes from individual donors like you. (Or, like, your users if you’re a hacker.)

 

## Hackers

While the Steven Levy book (Hackers, 1984) is a bit dated now, there’s just so much I love about it. It was easily my favourite Covid lockdown read. In the earlier days of GNOME, I remember the term “hacker” being thrown around a lot more. I’d like to encourage folks to bring that back.

However, I’d also like to lean into the idea that “hacking” has more to do with its original definition than it came to mean thanks to ESR’s essays, or whatever. “Hacking” is just the activity of tearing down a system, understanding it, and building something new (and hopefully better) out of it. You can hack on design. You can hack on linguistics. You can hack on event management. You can hack on gardening.

“Contributor” is such a boring word (and ambiguous when donors are in play). When I say “hacker” in the above section, I’m referring to anyone who contributes to GNOME in this way. Not just developers.

 

## Retaining Capital

I’ve had a couple people tussle with me a bit recently — over the idea that the GNOME Foundation should hold onto enough capital to see it through some rough times. At least one of these conversations was off the back of my earlier comment in the June 6th Foundation Report that 501(c)(3)s have no capital retention limits whatsoever. Because they don’t.

I need to clear the air, here. I’m not suggesting that the GNOME Foundation hold on to $20 million USD and slowly fritter it away. I am suggesting that, in conjunction with continuously fighting for smaller recurring revenue sources, the Foundation should ensure it has enough capital reserve to continue operations for a reasonable length of time. Given that the Foundation has run a deficit for 5 years in a row, I would say “a reasonable length of time” is… 5 years. But I know the Board will never set a half-decade-long reserve policy, so my suggestion is 12 months while we’re in lean times (which is to say, now) and 18 to 24 months when the Foundation is in a healthier financial position.

How much is that? For the sake of argument, let’s say our monthly burn rate is $41,666. (It’s not, but I like round numbers.) That means an 18-month capital reserve would be $1.5 million. If you are the sort of person who jumps at that number and says “oh my god! that’s a ton of money!” then I suggest starting a small business, growing it, and deciding what you consider a safe reserve policy for the wellbeing of your 5-100 employees (which is your responsibility, as a business owner). $1.5 million is a lot of money for an individual. It is not a lot for a corporation of any size whatsoever.

But we could cut! The current wording of the Board Reserves Policy uses the words “core spending.” This language drives me a little nuts. It implies there is a “core” to the Foundation that we can drop services and staff to somehow achieve. That’s absurd. If we can cut spending and still retain our core functionality as a non-profit, we should do that immediately, not when we start burning the capital reserve. We run this organization on donations. Some of those donations come from extremely generous people on low incomes. It is my responsibility, under the policy direction of the Board, to responsibly steward the organization such that we take those donations seriously and respect every dollar donated by GNOME’s users. There are many approaches to this: one is to ensure the GNOME Foundation isn’t spending money it shouldn’t or running programs that don’t benefit GNOME, but another is to build network resilience and cross-functional execution into our staff (me included), to ensure that all operations are “core” operations.

Okay, diatribe over.

 

## Community Health

I met Tobias on Monday (and Adrian on Friday) to chat about some efforts we can make to increase the health of the GNOME community, with respect to interactions between individuals. One topic that’s come up (not only with Tobias and Adrian) is a private space for Foundation Members. At the moment, we don’t really have such a space, so we air our grievances in the relative public of Matrix and Discourse. That’s not ideal. A healthy debate — or even an outright argument with heated emotion — might leave the participants in friendly standing at the end, but leave the peanut gallery aghast or agog.

I had a similar conversation with Aaron Prisk and Mauro Gaspari from Canonical later in the week. We need better spaces for hashing out certain discussions, with varying degrees of transparency. Ultimately, the execution is always public. We’re not going to lock down GitLab and start throwing tarballs over the wall to our users. Usually the collaboration can be public, too. But sometimes the earlier stages need to take place in a coffee shop, not the town square.

These are ideas that require contemplation and iteration, obviously. But I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

## More Friends

I met Amy Parker from OpenSSL this week. It’s amazing to me just how friendly and cool people are out there in the wider Freie Software community. We’ve all got some variation of the same difficulties (Open Source Foundations: They Are Weird), and it’s hugely reassuring to have a massive, global network of allies fighting alongside us.

 

## Preliminary Board Assignments

The new board members met on Tuesday to discuss potential officer positions and committee assignments. Nobody was murdered. It was a productive conversation. Yay for us.

 

## More Resilience and More Resilience

We keep chipping away at the GNOME Foundation’s services, inching our way to a position where we’ll have at least three (3) owners/signatories/root users for every service, bank account, and tool. This week was another long Tuesday call with Rosanna, mostly around banks and banking tools. Thanks for the help, Rosanna!

We also met our bank’s account manager later in the week. We finally (finally) have two people with signing authority. Hooray!

 

## Meeting the Bookkeepers

Deepa (our new treasurer) and I had a lovely conversation with our primary bookkeeper on Friday to take an initial look at the draft 2023/2024 financial report we’ll use for the Annual Report.

We have a long list of questions for both our bookkeepers. We have a primary bookkeeper who, naturally, keeps our books. We also have an advisory bookkeeper who helps with the stickier non-profit accounting and treasury questions.

 

## GUADEC

It’s GUADEC soon! The GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board meets on July 23rd, then the conference, and then we have Sunday and Monday for a bit of a “Board Hack Day” … trying to clear out old issues, resolve unfinished business, and give the year with the new board a strong start.

If you’ll be at GUADEC, I’ll see you there! Until next week.

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!

 

## 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.