It’s been a big first week for me at the GNOME Foundation! I hear from many folks that they’d like to hear more about the goings-on inside the Foundation and this will hopefully be the first of many reports you’ll get from me. This one might be a tad verbose so please bear with me.
If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter, and all that.
## Bootstrapping
It’s April 23rd. Whether you’re starting a new job, starting a company, or building your first house, everything is bootstrapping. I needed an email account — for obvious reasons but also because I’m the sort of person who won’t respond to GNOME-related email from my personal account. And email’s important. 🙂 But to get an email address, it helps to know our SRE, so Rosanna connected me to Bart so I could start pesting him, despite the fact we hadn’t really had 15 minutes to sit down and chat over tea yet. Bart, as it turns out, is an insanely efficient person and so — despite the cart-before-the-horse email situation — I was set up with email, Nextcloud, and all our other services faster than perhaps any for-profit I’ve ever worked for. Off to a good start. (You can find my email on the Foundation’s Teams page and you are welcome to reach out to me there if you have a GNOME-related topic you’d like to discuss.)
## Linux App Summit
After that, I spent the weekend attending Linux App Summit, which Kristi was organizing. The conference was smooth, down to the tiniest details, and it’s the most included I’ve ever felt in an online conference, as a remote attendee. I even snuck in a couple live questions after the talks! All the talks were great, but if I had to choose my top 3, I’d say:
- End Of 10: A Windows 10 to Linux Upcycling Campaign — Joseph works for our friends at KDE and this campaign is just so much fun. Get outside, meet some new friends, bring an old laptop back to life.
- Tuba: A fork success story by Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis — For us old people, it’s easy to miss just how modern, easy, and delightful building apps like Tuba can be on the modern Linux desktop. GTK is mature, the stack is strong, and you can hack in TypeScript, Python, Rust, or Vala (which this talk is about). This talk does a fantastic job of telling that story. A lot of Linux users are already developers, local-first makes desktop development cool again, and I think they’re missing out on some modern fun.
- I’ll cop out. 😉 Watch any of the Flatpak/Flathub talks. Flatpak rules. Because of it, I can run modern apps on Debian Stable in 2025! — and these were all great.
Of course, there were plenty of other juicy topics: AI, Android, Flutter on Desktop, Open E-ink, SPARQL, printers, GTK4, GNOME Circle, The Linux Ecosystem In The Large, and openKylin. I wish I’d been there.
Thanks to all the organizers, presenters, and attendees!
## FOSS United
I had a conversation with Nemo about his new position on the FOSS United Foundation board, what FOSS United was hoping to achieve, and how GNOME can be involved. I really like what they’re doing over there and I hope it’s the first conversation of many.
## Workgroup Work
We have some tool decisions to make. We’ve got a few places for CRM data at the moment, but it would be nice if we could consolidate. Raising money for the Foundation, in the large, means a lot of conversations. But for the time-being, we’ll stick with Nextcloud, GitLab, CommitChange, and all our current payment providers — as much as it everyone loves it when the newest and least-experienced staff member says “let’s switch tools!” we won’t do that just yet. If/when we outgrow these tools, we might consider Frappe, SuiteCRM, or another freie CRM tool. CRM is a tough nut to crack. There’s a reason Salesforce is worth a quarter-trillion dollars. (No, we will not be using Salesforce.)
We use Nextcloud for everything at the Foundation, including member accounts. I also use it at my friendly neighbourhood self-hosting group. While setting up my calendars, I found a bug in GNOME Calendar which led me to the GitLab issue, which led me to Jeff’s suggestion that someone test out the fix with GNOME Builder. I’d never done this. I hadn’t technically started working for the Foundation yet, and I love me a good yak-shave, so I thought I’d give it a go.
Y’all. GNOME Builder is bananas. I pulled the branch, clicked a button, and had a new GNOME Calendar to test in about… 30 seconds? No makefiles. No docker images. My bug was fixed, I switched from the .deb to the Flatpak (which I probably should have been on anyway), and the very heavens opened up.
## Meeting People!
I had a proper conversation with Bart, instead of just hounding him for favours. I’ll have to get accustomed to him dropping punchlines in the middle of random conversations so I don’t spit my chai all over my keyboard. Bart’s rad and if you use any GNOME services, he’s … the guy. It’s a good thing he’s very good at what he does. (Okay, he’s one of two guys, but we’ll get to Andrea soon enough.)
I chatted with Federico, who is one of GNOME’s original founders and someone I knew back in the early 2000s only by his hackergotchi. He sits on the board now. He’s sent me more policy docs and GitLab issues than I’ve even had time to read yet… thankfully, he’s a very sweet and patient person. GNOME is incredibly lucky to have one of its founders with the project after so many years.
I met my friend Richard, who’s a non-profit CRM consultant. I’m new to the non-profit game (at least as an employee), and I’m going to tap every resource I can. He had a lot of really good questions about GNOME’s brand awareness and where our revenue comes from. As I said in my intro post, we need to stabilize the Foundation’s books if we want to support development with more than infrastructure, operations, and events (not that those aren’t important!) and the more friends we have helping out, the better.
I began publishing my own onboarding docs for the Board and I started a Carmack-style .plan, in case any of the Board are interested in a firehose of transparency. I have a lot of thoughts on effective transparency but, when in doubt, start with the firehose. The .plan isn’t public because it contains a lot of PII. Sorry. Most of it will be turned into the base for these weekly notes. (Assuming I can keep up with these notes.)
It’s May 1st. My first official day of work. I chatted with Allan for a few hours. This would be one of many 3-hour calls with Allan, and I appreciate his seemingly-infinite patience. He’s contributing an absolute ton of time to keep things running but he also seems unphased by the work. British sensibilities, maybe, but I look forward to a time when I’m giving him space rather than taking it away from him. I started working on notes, documentation, and my first blog post in the GNOME world.
On May 2nd, I published my first post, explaining what this blog will be and added the blog to Planet. I had a call with Kristi, where I had an opportunity to thank her for all her work on LAS the previous weekend. Kristi really knows how to make these things work and I’m looking forward to helping her integrate those skills more deeply with the community. I have a lot to learn from her.
I had a call with Rosanna — our first since she interviewed me! Like Allan and Federico, she’s a walking archive of information about the project, the Foundation, and their history. It’s a good thing she’s so easy to talk to … I’m going to be spending a ton of time with her as I get booted up. Every minute spent with Rosanna is valuable. She’s currently handling all sorts of accounts, EORs for contractors and staff like me, conversations, contracts, financial reports, the bookkeeper… you name it. Again, I hope I’m soon net-positive in these interactions, instead of just asking a million questions over 3-hour meet.gnome.org calls.
As an aside: BigBlueButton is really good! Or maybe Bart’s maintenance of it is really good. I don’t know. But it’s been a fantastic resource. If you are tired of colleagues inviting you to Zoom calls with a thousand pop-ups stealing focus before you can even get on the call, meet.gnome.org is a membership benefit that I bet a lot of GNOME contributors under-utilize. If you’re a contributor, start using it! If you’re not, start contributing! 😉
I spoke to an old colleague who was also an Outreachy intern in a former life. She had nothing but good things to say about the program and her mentor. I wanted to learn more about the program, how it could be improved (from her perspective, as a hacker), and other effective ways to introduce people to the GNOME community and GNOME hacking… Outreachy or otherwise. In the end, I felt she had some pretty lucid advice:
- Meet people where they are. They might not be on Free Software platforms, so welcome them on Telegram, Slack, Discord, social media, etc.
- Explain why GNOME is so significant in the first place. These folks are new to the industry and this is the least background they’ll ever have.
- Help them submit a patch.
- Help them learn skills to find a job. I hear TypeScript and Rust might be popular soon.
That was a long two days of video calls, but really energizing. I had a belief that people were working hard in (and around) GNOME, but evidence is the only true friend of science. I wasn’t wrong.
## Paperwork
May 5th, I configured some tax junk, drafted my intro blog post, got the lowdown on the horrible, illegal spam attacks on Matrix, and attended the Staff and Executive Committee meetings.
May 6th, I got my intro post onto Planet and Discourse … so the cat was out of the bag and I started getting inbound calls. And messages. And so on.
I had a great call with Julian to learn about his time on the Board and his thoughts on some current community tensions, including how we can improve transparency. I had another long call with Rosanna, where she started to provide me all the background on how we manage expenses, our grants, and how we do financial reviews. I had a call with an ex-colleague, Manu, who has a bunch of fundraising network connections for us. (Did I mention we could really use a CRM?) I set up a call with Joseph from endof10.org to talk about how we can collaborate.
May 7th, time to put myself on the Team page, make Rob and Allan suffer through (yet another) 3-hour onboarding call with me, spend 2 hours talking to Pablo about his time on the board, RFCs, GNOME Design’s vision, his transparency expectations of me, and his dreams for pmOS. And another 2-hour call with Rosanna because she apparently has infinite patience for teaching me. We talked about passwords, planning elections, 990s, and more financial reports. (501c3s have a lot of financial reporting!) She also suggested for a second time that I try to speak to Karen Sandler, who everyone I’ve spoken to thus far says is amazing. “You really need to talk to Karen,” is commonly heard. But since everyone on the planet seems to feel that way, Karen’s time is also very limited. 🙂
## End Of 10, Infrastructure
It’s May 8th. I had a long call with Joseph from KDE and End of 10 who, because of who he is, was willing to speak to me on his day off. What a great dude. I wasn’t sure what our relationship with our KDE friends would be like and I still have a lot to learn there. But I really hope we can find some strong alliances with them and other freie computing platforms. They are doing some amazing work — not just with eco.kde.org, but everywhere.
I got a chance to speak to Neil McGovern. I’ve spoken to Holly and Richard about their experiences as Executive Director, but Neil was in the role for a long time and it was really helpful to hear his perspective and pick up some of his old 501c3-focused resources.
Then: infra! I gobbled two hours of Bart’s valuable time to get an infrastructure walkthrough. Where are all our boxes? What services are we running? What’s our backup strategy/ies? How bad does a service outage need to be before I call you while you’re on vacation? The usual. Then I spoke to Andrea for a couple hours. He was previously with the Foundation as an SRE and he’s now a Principal SRE at Red Hat… but he still gives us a lot of time and love. He walked me through our costs and just how much in-kind donations we receive from AWS, DigitalOcean, Canonical, CDN77, and Fastly every year. It’s… a lot. GNOME infrastructure is non-trivial and it’s amazing it’s entirely handled by two people, one of which is a volunteer. And they maintain Flathub! Yeesh.
tl;dr – Our infra is well taken care of. I hope we can find people to help Bart and Andrea sooner than later, but the project’s in good hands.
Boring stuff: review the election schedule (Andrea again — thank you, Andrea!), get access to the bank, review a contract, clean up some GitLab vestiges from bygone eras.
I stayed up too late talking to Adrian (Vovk) on Matrix. We were both a little excited. 🙂 I’m looking forward to chatting with him on a call soon. I don’t know much about GNOME OS, but I plan to!
## Today
MORE ONBOARDING. Yes. There’s plenty to learn. Our relationship to GIMP, the future of Flathub (both in management and sysadmin worlds), GUADEC, elections, the STF grant, Digital Wellbeing, the Travel Committee, Conflict of Interest policies, grant programs, event financing, the trifecta of Flathub + KDE + GNOME, and fundraising. Always Be Fundraising.
Rob and Allan have sat with me for ages, at this point. There’s more to go through. But I can tell you that if you were worried your President and Vice President aren’t grinding for you… well, they are. I don’t know when they sleep or do their day jobs.
This afternoon, I got a chance to speak with Alice about her work on libadwaita and with Rosanna about next week’s board meeting and her report prep for that. Also… more user accounts. There are quite a few financial tools required to keep the Foundation moving along, contractors paid, invoices cleared, and compliance met.
On that note: if you love accounting and want to spend some time on the Board with these lovely folks, there are elections coming up! Mmm. Spreadsheets.
I do apologize. This first weekly update was (a) more than a week long because I cheated and (b) mostly about my experiences… which isn’t very informative. I hope to tell more stories about what’s going on with the staff, the board, the community, our friends, and the project (as I see it) in the future.
See you next week!
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