The Everyone Environment

Category: Community

  • 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!