The Everyone Environment

Category: Community

  • 2025-06-20 Foundation Report

    Welcome to the mid-June Foundation Report! I’m in an airport! My back hurts! This one might be short! haha

     

    ## AWS OSS

    Before the UN Open Source Week, Andrea Veri and I had a chance to meet Mila Zhou, Tom (Spot) Callaway, and Hannah Aubry from AWS OSS. We thanked them for their huge contribution to GNOME’s infrastructure but, more importantly, discussed other ways we can partner with them to make GNOME more sustainable and secure.

    I’ll be perfectly honest: I didn’t know what to expect from a meeting with AWS. And, as it turns out, it was such a lovely conversation that we chatted nonstop for nearly 5 hours and then continued the conversation over supper. At a… vegan chinese food place, of all things? (Very considerate of them to find some vegetarian food for me!) Lovely folks and I can’t wait for our next conversation.

     

    ## United Nations Open Source Week

    The big news for me this week is that I attended the United Nations Open Source Week in Manhattan. The Foundation isn’t in a great financial position, so I crashed with friends-of-friends (now also friends!) on an air mattress in Queens. Free (as in ginger beer) is a very reasonable price but my spine will also appreciate sleeping in my own bed tonight. 😉

    I met too many people to mention, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of organizations and different folks in attendance. Indie hackers, humanitarian workers, education specialists, Digital Public Infrastructure Aficionados, policy wonks, OSPO leaders, and a bit of Big Tech. I came to New York to beg for money (and I did do a bit of that) but it was the conversations about the f/oss community that I really enjoyed.

    We did do a “five Executive Directors” photo, because 4 previous GNOME Foundation EDs happened to be there. One of them was Richard! I got to hang out with him in person and he gave me a hug. So did Karen. It was nice. The history matters (recent history and ancient history) … and GNOME has a lot of history.

    Special shout-out to Sumana Harihareswara (it’s hard for me to spell that without an “sh”) who organized an extremely cool, low-key gathering in an outdoor public space near the UN. She couldn’t make the conf herself but she managed to create the best hallway track I attended. (By dragging a very heavy bag of snacks and drinks all the way from Queens.) More of that, please. The unconf part, not the dragging snacks across the city part.

    All in all, a really exciting and exhausting week.

     

    ## Donation Page

    As I mentioned above, the GNOME Foundation’s financial situation could use help. We’ll be starting a donation drive soon to encourage GNOME users to donate, using the new donation page:

    https://donate.gnome.org

    This blog post is as good a time as any to say this isn’t just a cash grab. The flip side of finding money for the Foundation is finding ways to grow the project with it. I’m of the opinion that this needs to include more than running infrastructure and conferences. Those things are extremely important — nothing in recent memory has reminded me of the value of in-person interactions like meeting a bunch of new friends here in New York — the real key to the GNOME project is the project itself. And the core of the project is development.

    As usual: No Promises. But if you want to hear a version of what I was saying all week, you can bug Adrian Vovk for his opinion about my opinions. 😉

    The donation page would not have been possible without the help of Bart Piotrowski, Sam Hewitt, Jakub Steiner, Shivam Singhal, and Yogiraj Hendre. Thanks everyone for putting in the hard work to get this over the line, to test it with your own credit cards, and to fix bugs as they cropped up.

    We will keep iterating on this as we learn more about what corporate sponsors want in exchange for their sponsorship and as we figure out how best to support Causes (campaigns), such as development.

     

    ## Elections

    Voting has closed! Thank you to all the candidates who ran this year. I know that running for election on the Board is intimidating but I’m glad folks overcame that fear and made the effort to run campaigns. It was very important to have you all in the race and I look forward to working with my new bosses once they take their seats. That’s when you get to learn about governance and demonstrate that you’re willing to put in the work. You might be my bosses… but I’m going to push you. 😉

    Until next week!

  • 2025-06-14 Foundation Report

    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.

     

  • 2025-06-06 Foundation Report

    Imagine a punchy, news-broadcast-sounding intro tune and probably some 3D text swinging around a shiny, silver globe. Dun da da dun: The June 6th, 2025 GNOME Foundation Report!

    Sorry. These reports need a little colour or I’m going to get bored of writing them. Also sorry this one is late again! Busy week.

     

    ## Fundraising

    This week’s big activity (for me) was preparing a fundraising proposal for the Board of Directors at a special meeting on Tuesday. The day before, everyone on staff patiently listened to me shout and spit and sweat and then patiently gave me feedback. Thanks y’all.

    Sidenote: I love the notion of a “special meeting.” I know it’s not meant to feel cute and silly, but it feels very cute and silly. That said, we got a lot done!

    The Board is on-board. Yay. We had a project kickoff the next day. We have a repo, we have some early work done already. I’m not allowed to make any promises. 😉 So you’ll just have to watch this space, I guess.

     

    ## Treasurer

    During the special meeting, it was voted that we would make an offer to a new Treasurer. I’m really looking forward to this announcement if they accept!

     

    ## Project Wall!

    The Staff project wall is really taking off, and it feels like we have some momentum with it now. Too many things in flight and too many cards in the “blocked” column, but we’re steadily improving.

     

    ## Vaultwarden

    Bart’s hooked us up with Vaultwarden for the Foundation’s shared passwords, as our tooling was a little broken and/or scattered previously. Yay! Thanks Bart.

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing Frontend

    We held a Digital Wellbeing meeting on Tuesday and we now have a Call for Proposals up:

    https://discourse.gnome.org/t/request-for-proposals-digital-wellbeing-frontend/29289

    If you still know C and you want to help take this project over the line, it’s a neat piece of integration work.

     

    ## 501(c)3s

    I met my friend Brihas, who is also an Executive Director of another 501(c)3. It was good to pick his brain about:

    • Limits to capital retention: Despite a widely-held misconception, there aren’t any.
    • 990 Schedule B redactions: When and why. The GNOME Foundation fully redacts our Schedule Bs… that seemed weird to me at first but he says it’s fairly common, which agrees with what others have told me.
    • How to keep the Board engaged: Whether one has a Working Board or not (we do), “engagement” in this question refers to the level of governance, not execution. He said his organization has found real benefit in a stricter adherence to Policy Governance. I’m inclined toward a stricter form of this model myself, and would encourage potential Board members (this year and in future years) to glance through that Wikipedia page.
    • How to take vacation: He prepares a year in advance. Seems about right.

     

    ## Meeting The Matts

    I had a chance to sit down with an old friend (Matt Godbolt, of Compiler Explorer fame) and a new friend (Matt Hartley, of Framework Computer fame). We talked variously about how to raise money, the future of the Linux desktop, the “sandwich problem” (that GNOME neither has the name recognition of Linux nor the product recognition of distros), and the fact that every cool kid at Strange Loop 2024 was running a Framework, not a Mac.

    I left both calls super excited to talk to them both again. Great folks. (I also just noticed their respective website have very similar gear favicons.)

     

    ## Grants

    I got to talk to Richard! He’s still very busy. He had some grant suggestions. It was nice to see him.

     

    ## End of 10

    I’ve still got an eye toward the https://endof10.org/ project. Increasingly, I have a fantasy of a simple, brightly-coloured A4 that explains how to get started with GNOME, in ~6 steps, if you’re coming from Windows:

    • what’s the equivalent of the “start” button? (do they still… call it that?)
    • how do I run a program?
    • how do I install a program?
    • how do I start the web browser? which one should I use? how do I get chrome[ium]?
    • where are my files?
    • where are my settings?

    Extras for the back side of the paper:

    • “modern” apps: Discord, Slack, Spotify, Telegram, Signal, etc.
    • how to install games
    • GNOME-specific features (virtual desktops and such)
    • core platform apps
    • “everyday” settings: wifi, bluetooth, light/dark mode, etc.
    • GNOME Online Accounts and Office files

     

    What do you think? Would you want to help with this? Is this a silly idea? Does this already exist somewhere?

     

    ## Meeting People

    I had a nice conversation with Lorenz, as he’s the only Board candidate I hadn’t spoken to yet. I met Sumana Harihareswara, who is extremely cool and I ran out of time while picking her brain about the various ways the GNOME Foundation can start its own grants program. I got some advice from Federico about how to improve our docs-creation process… among other things, he had the pretty sensible idea of just letting people barf streams of consciousness at me (or other folks comfortable with reStructuredText) and letting the documentation gnomes clean it up before publishing it. Seems legit! I had my first formal feedback session with Rosanna — she had prepared a 5-point structured document and I had to admit to her it was the most rigorous feedback I’ve ever received. 🙂

     

    ## UN Open Source Week

    I found a couch to crash on in NYC and a cheap flight, so I’ll be there! If you’re in NYC the week of the 16th to the 20th, reach out!

     

    That’s all for this week. See you in the next one and I’m sorry I didn’t make it in time for TWIG again.

     

  • Pride At GNOME

    After some discussion about where to announce our Pride Month celebrations, I’ve decided it might be easiest to do it on my own blog. It’s a little more personal that way. And if I say something silly or out of turn, it’s on me.

    Let me begin by trying to explain why Pride feels particularly important in the world of Free Software.

     

    Free Software Is Inclusive

    GNOME is a weird project. It’s not a household name, like Linux. Nor is it a shrinkwrapped brand, like Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. But it is a massive, collective software project that includes many different components under its umbrella.

    What binds all these interconnected projects together if not a brand and not a singular BDFL technical vision? It is the founding principle and vision for the project: everyone should be allowed in. To use GNOME, to modify GNOME, and to collaborate on GNOME.

    GNOME has more active threads of contribution than any one person could possibly follow and more active users than we could possibly count. So this simple mission of making a desktop that includes everyone is actually a lot harder than it seems. Will it run on a 14-year-old Chromebook? Perhaps that’s the only computer someone has access to. Is it translated into Farsi? Perhaps that’s the only language the user reads. “Everyone” is a lot of people — and the world is a big place.

     

    Pride Is Inclusive

    Far be it from me to equate the mission of an open source project with that of a worldwide civil rights movement. But Pride carries a very similar message: everyone is allowed in. Everyone should be allowed into a country or city or business. Everyone is allowed to be themselves.

    I’m very fortunate. I live in Halifax. It is, as far as I can tell, the Gayest City in Canada. Year-round, the Pride flag hangs from our bridges, is painted on crosswalks, and fills storefront windows. The rainbow adorns backpacks, laptops, skateboards, cars, and checkout counters. On an individual level, the Pride flag is a symbol of safety: “I promise you’re safe with me.” On a societal level, it’s an invitation: “You are welcome here.”

    I know that not everyone is this lucky.

     

    Pride Is Not The Same Everywhere

    Pride is a celebration of how far the community has come. The 1970s and 1980s feel far away and the decades-long fight for liberation (in countries where liberation has begun) provides us with the history and war stories we all benefit from today.

    But GNOME is global. And for many in the global 2SLGBTQIA+ (queer) community, the war is ongoing. Or it’s barely even begun. In some countries, members of the community are shunned, silenced, ostracized, harmed, or killed. Most of us know someone who didn’t survive.

    We also need to demonstrate support for everyone because no one is safe simply because they live in a city filled with rainbow flags. Many of us still struggle with our identity and our place in society, no matter where we live.

    And so Pride is bittersweet: a celebration of the freedom Pride represents but also an awareness of the dangers that continue to exist.

     

    A Request To The Foundation

    While discussing Pride preparations, there was a simple request, addressing these dangers, from one queer Foundation Member: “We just want to know you have our back.”

    To all GNOME’s queer users and contributors: absolutely, the Foundation has your back. Not just this June, but always. ❤️

    May everyone enjoy a peaceful and joyful Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

     

    (Special thanks to Laura Kramolis for her thoughtful feedback and guidance while writing this post.)

  • 2025-05-30 Foundation Report

    ## Opaque Stuff

    • the usual policy drafting work; thank you Allan for ensuring we’re on top of this
    • moving some operational deadlines forward (“preponing”) was discussed but this hasn’t been confirmed yet
    • a bunch of tactical paperwork minutiae I’ll be very happy to see completed

     

    ## Safety

    I published a post this week entitled On Safety. I won’t revisit it here in the Foundation Report but it is an important topic and I encourage you to go read it. Thank you to Allan Day for his thoughtful and patient editing.

     

    ## Pride

    On a much happier note, we’ve begun celebrating Pride Month a little early! You may see some coloured flags on GNOME’s social media accounts and Jakub Steiner has produced some lovely Pride backgrounds. You can find the source in Design / wallpaper-assets / pride and you can get the high-res renders from the GNOME-48 branch of GNOME / gnome-backgrounds. Low-res previews below. Thanks to everyone who pitched in this year to help us celebrate Pride together. 🙂

            

     

    ## Designers

    Speaking of The Designers, I got to attend their regular meeting this week. It was a pleasure to see just how committed everyone is to resolving the eternal tension of form, function, and performance. What might seem like a trivial decision on the surface (the performance of window drop-shadows, in this case) hides plenty of nuance, once you start digging. The need for performance isn’t arbitrary: a freie desktop needs to support older machines if we want to be the destination for those whose hardware had been abandoned by manufacturers and those who can’t afford to buy the fanciest gadget every 5 years. I enjoyed my time as a fly on the wall until Firefox crashed and wouldn’t restart.

    Part of my meeting with the designers was selfish. The Foundation will need their help to revisit the audiences for our fundraising efforts. I’m actually looking forward to a little bit of pairing time with some of them, if they’ll let me. 🙂

     

    ## Fundraising

    Rosanna and I sat down to drill through a mountain of spreadsheets and formulate a simplified picture of the Foundation’s finances — that “round to the nearest $100” napkin non-accounting that’s useful for visualization but not much else. I’m really grateful for the time Rosanna spent with me; it gave me a much better picture of where we stand, month on month, year on year.

    We need these cartoony visuals so we can start painting a fundraising picture for ourselves. I’ve been told by many people “don’t make any promises!” And I am not promising anything in particular. At this stage, we’re just sweeping the floor and sketching out our strategy.

     

    ## End of 10

    We’ve assembled a small Promo Team to coordinate with the End of 10 core team and the KDE folks. If you would like to be a part of this, shout at me or Sri. If you want to get involved more generally, jump into #endof10-en:kde.org.

    I’ve already pitched to the local hacker community here in Halifax that we should put on a repair cafe some weekend. Step One? Find a cheap venue so none of us are paying out-of-pocket. We have a gorgeous public library here that hosts community events for free. Maybe your city does, too?

     

    ## GTD (Getting Things Done)

    We’ve made some great progress with the new Staff project wall and the Foundation-wide “Staff Ops” calendar. The new Foundation Handbook keeps plodding along, though I will admit it’s still a disorganized dumping ground for links I wish I had when I started. Baby steps.

     

    ## Nextcloud / OnlyOffice

    Speaking of tooling, we have had repeated issues with data loss in OnlyOffice and it’s been decided to shut it down for now. If you are using Nextcloud for office files, your best option is to set up a mount in Nautilus (by adding ‘you@cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/dav’ to Online Accounts) and work on them locally.

    If the lack of collaborative office tools is a big issue, we can revisit this. If you have collaboration requirements, please document them in the Multiplayer Office Files HedgeDoc. Thanks!

     

    ## Vaultwarden

    We threw around a few suggestions for better group passwords across the Foundation. Somewhat unfortunately, we can’t lean on Nextcloud for this, as their “share” password feature doesn’t actually allow sharing groups of passwords yet.

    For the time-being, it looks like Vaultwarden is our most likely candidate. Commercial Bitwarden was considered, but we can’t guarantee we wouldn’t rely on non-free features and passwords are too big a deal to find ourselves accidentally relying on proprietary software.

     

    ## Treasurer

    We are still on the hunt for a solid Treasurer. The clock is ticking now, so if you know of anyone who might be appropriate, do reach out! I’m happy to speak to them over the weekend, if it will help, though they would need to have a conversation with Board members early next week, as it’s not me who decides who the Treasurer will be.

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing

    We are looking at adding some additional development capacity to the Digital Wellbeing work to ensure it’s delivered on time. If you’re keen on a bit of Calm Computing and family-focused frontend work, please keep an eye out for the job posting and/or poke us in #foundation:gnome.org.

     

    ## UN Open Source Week

    Looking to the future a bit, it’s UN Open Source Week in NYC, starting June 16th. I’m considering going if I can find a couch to crash on. If you’re planning to be in NYC that week, let me know!

    See you next week!