## 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Leave a Reply