Category: Foundation

Nine months ago, I had to field quite a few angry comments from folks who told me they intended to drop their GNOME Foundation memberships in the wake of confusing and opaque board behaviour. I say to you now what I told each of them back in September:

Stay and fight.

The GNOME Foundation saw a much needed — and long overdue — changing of the guard back in August of 2025. In the past 12 months, the Foundation has finally made the improvements it should have been making over the past decade:

• 2025-05-09 – GNOME’s infra team had its first management review — it was the cleanest infrastructure review I’ve performed in my career. [edit]
• 2025-05-16 – Foundation Reports begin in earnest as a first small step toward a transparent GNOME Foundation. We begin the hunt for a new Treasurer.
• 2025-05-23 – We started a Foundation Handbook to match handbook.gnome.org. (This has since migrated to a wiki.) We started moving all the Foundation’s documents into a central location. Project management began at the Foundation for the first time ever.
• 2025-05-28 – The Foundation publicly acknowledged that attacks on our Matrix servers, using illegal images, constitute crimes.
• 2025-06-06 – Both donate.gnome.org and (later) fellowship.gnome.org are pitched and accepted by the board. We brought on Deepa Venkatraman as Treasurer. Bart Piotrowski set up vault.gnome.org for passwords.
• 2025-06-14 – Andrea Veri completed the transition to donated AWS resources for GNOME infra.
• 2025-06-20 – donate.gnome.org is released, thanks to the hard work of Bart, Sam Hewitt, and Jakub Steiner.
• 2025-06-26 – The “Donate Less” campaign begins, in anticipation of the outbound program that would become fellowship.gnome.org.
• 2025-07-05 – The concept of fellowship.gnome.org goes public. Work on the corresponding donate.gnome.org shell notification starts. We tightened fiscal controls. We added redundancy to all our financial, legal, and operational processes. We interviewed a pipeline of candidates and selected Ignacy Kuchciński to complete the work under the Digital Wellbeing grant.
• 2025-07-12 – We invited postmarketOS to the Advisory Board.
• 2025-07-21 – We started stabilizing the GNOME Foundation’s finances for the long term by redefining the Board Reserve and taking a hard look at balancing year-on-year (annual recurring) revenue and expenses. We added the first-ever redundant signatories on bank accounts.
• 2025-08-08 – We created a shared online space for Advisory Board members to collaborate.
• 2025-09-05 – First corporate sponsor.
• 2025-09-12 – Deepa’s budget process is “the best the Foundation has ever had,” according to multiple directors.
• 2025-10-10 – Digital Wellbeing is delivered. The Foundation gets a much-needed credit card policy.
• 2025-10-24 – A new Finance Advisor arrives. (An important role at a 501c3.)
• 2025-11-28 – The budget is balanced. More importantly, the budget report contains the commitment to balancing recurring expenses and recurring revenue, continuously.
• 2025-12-19 – Deepa joins as a full director and remains Treasurer.
• 2026-01-09 – A new automated accounts payable and accounts receivable system is installed.
• 2026-03-20 – Financial reporting moves from quarterly to monthly.
• 2026-04-17 – The Fellowship Program begins! Users’ donations come full-circle: a percentage of every donation now goes directly to developers.
• 2026-05-15 – Finances are on-target. The Foundation opens a position for Finance Director.
• 2026-05-29 – Four old finance platforms are retired as the finances of the Foundation are automated and simplified. The Foundation introduces a Concern Escalation Policy: if members feel that directors or staff are abusing their positions with policy violations, illegal activity, discrimination, or conflicted behaviour, they’re provided the reassurance that they can blow the whistle without risk of retaliation.

That’s a lot for one little nonprofit. But this is the beginning of GNOME Foundation 2.0, not the end. The work must continue and there is still plenty to be done.

If you let your membership expire in recent years, get it back. If you are thinking of leaving, don’t. And if you are thinking of running for board elections, run.

The GNOME Foundation is the healthiest it’s ever been. It’s reducing costs and focusing on its actual mission: GNOME. The excellence demanded of GNOME hackers is now demanded of the Foundation, too. You can be a part of continuing that trajectory.

There has never been a more meaningful time to join the GNOME Foundation board.

EDIT: “GNOME’s infra team had its first management review — it was the cleanest infrastructure review I’ve performed in my career.” was previously “GNOME’s infra team had its first management review — it was spotless.” Someone on Reddit took issue with the use of the word “spotless”. This edit serves to accommodate them.

As the board announced earlier today, I will be stepping down from the Executive Director role this week. It’s been an interesting four months. If you haven’t been following my work with the Foundation during that period, you can peruse the weekly Foundation Reports starting from May 3rd. You can also hear me in a few places at GUADEC 2025: the Day 1 Panel Discussion (where I was extremely sick), my Day 3 keynote, and the AGM from Day 3.

As Allan mentions in his post, he’s taken over the role of board President. This means he will also be taking over as acting Executive Director when I step down, as per GNOME Foundation bylaws, and picking up where I left off. I’m enthusiastic about this transition. I have enjoyed working closely with Allan over the past four months and, with him at the helm, my only disappointment is that I won’t get to continue working closely with him.

It’s not only Allan, of course. In a few short months I’ve found it remarkable how hardworking the entire GNOME community is. You folks accomplish so much in such short spans of time, with limited resources. But even more surprising to me was just how warm and welcoming all the contributors are. A lot of folks have built a real home here: not just a professional network, but an international village. Language, cultural, and economic barriers are broken down to make GNOME such an inviting project and I’m honoured to have served GNOME as ED, even if only for a brief period.

With that in mind, I would like to thank a number of hackers I’ve had the good fortune of speaking to over the past four months.

First, those folks with non-development roles. Maria, Pietro, and other volunteer conference organizers. The unnamed contractors who balance the Foundation’s books, clear invoices, provide legal advice, consult, and run trainings. Karen, Deb, Loren, Amy, Stefano, Sumana, Michael D, and others who are long-time GNOME supporters and mentors. Andrea, who still contributes an inordinate amount of volunteer time to GNOME infrastructure and the elections process. Emmanuele, Alice, Michael C, Jordan, Chris, Brage, Sri, and others who quietly moderate GNOME’s social spaces to keep them safe. GNOME owes a great deal to all these folks. Their contributions largely go unnoticed. Everything that just magically works? That’s because someone is putting in a lot of time and effort to keep it that way.

Second, the Design Team. I’ve had so many wonderful interactions with Jakub, Allan, Tobias, Sam H, Jamie, and Kramo that I’ve lost count. I’m in awe of how quickly you folks work and I’m grateful for every opportunity I’ve had to work with you, big or small. Jamie and Kramo, for your help outside the Design Team, in particular: thank you for keeping me honest, calling me out on my shit, and never giving up on me even if I say or do something stupid. 🙂 It means a lot.

Thank you to GNOME’s partners, Advisory Board reps, and other folks who the community may not see on a regular basis. Jehan, thank you for everything you do for GIMP. Scott, it was a pleasure meeting you at GUADEC and learning more about SUSE! Jef, thank you for your continued advice and guidance. Jeremy and Michael: I really enjoyed our AdBoard day and I hope GNOME gets even more vertically integrated with upstreams like Debian and LibreOffice. Aaron, Mauro, Marco, and Jon: I’m optimistic you folks can bring Ubuntu development and core GNOME development closer together, and I’m grateful for all the time you’ve given me toward that goal. Matt, Alejandro, and Ousama: I genuinely believe the way the Linux desktop wins is by shipping pre-installed to your customers at Framework and Slimbook. Mirko and Tara: as a user, I’m grateful for STF continuing to finance the underpinnings of GNOME’s infrastructure, and I look forward to seeing what else STA can do. Aleix, Joseph, and Paul: KDE is lucky to have you folks and GNOME is lucky to have you as friends. Paul especially, thank you for all your fundraising advice based on your experience with KDE’s campaigns. Robin, Thib, and Jim, thank you for giving us a federated Slack alternative! I feel many people don’t appreciate how relentless you are in improving your product. Mila, Spot, Henri, Hannah, Chad, Rin, Esra’a, and others: thanks for being on our team, even if you work for proprietary software companies. 😉

And, of course, the text hackers. Thanks to Alice, Jordan, Emmanuele, Martin, Neils, Adrian, Jeff, Alexandre, Georges, Hari Rana, Ignacy, Mazhar, Aaditya, Adrien, swick, Florian, Sophie, Aryan, Matthias C, Matthias K, Pablo, Philip W, Philip C, Dan, Cassidy, Julian, Federico, Carlos, Felix, Adam, Pan, Kolja, and so many others for your conversations not just about GNOME development but the entire process and ecosystem around it. My conversations with you guided my entire time as ED and I hope you continue to provide the board with the same strong feedback you’ve given me. Joseph G and Andy, I’m sorry we never managed to sync up!

Last but not least, I’d like to thank the previous EDs over the past four years. Holly and Richard both had incredibly difficult situations to deal with. Richard, I’m very lucky to have met you in person and to get a real hug from you in June when I was struggling. I’ve said it before, but GNOME (and the board, in particular) is extremely lucky to have you as a friend and advisor.

I have undoubtedly forgotten people. Thankfully, you can complain to me directly. 😉 If you like the work I’ve done at the Foundation, you can also speak to me about other roles in the space. I would love to continue working within the wider Free Software ecosystem and especially on the Linux desktop.

I will be fully off-grid for two weeks mid-September so I can meditate a 10-Day “self course.” (Our proper 10-Day Vipassana course was cancelled due to the ongoing Nova Scotia wildfires.) But I’m back to the real world after that.

I’ll be around on Matrix and Discourse as a GNOME Foundation Member. I’m on Mastodon. I have another blog. My name was a Googlewhack once. You can also reach me using the standard flastname@gnome.org email format. You can find me. My door is always open.

We have a new donation page. But before you go there, I would like to impress upon you this idea:

We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

First of all, cash flow matters just as much to a non-profit as it does to a corporation. If a business only saw revenue once or twice a year — say, in the form of $300,000 cheques — it would need to be very careful with expenses, for fear of one of those cheques disappearing.

And so it is with non-profits. A non-profit built on chasing grants and begging for large cheques is inherently fragile. Financial planning that is based on big, irregular revenue sources is bound to fail sooner or later. Conversely, financial planning based on monthly recurring revenue trends close to reality. The organization is more stable as a result.

Second, if your monthly donation is negligible, you probably won’t worry too much about whether you keep your donation going or not. Maybe you decide $10/mo is such a small number (the price of two coffees in any country where I’ve lived over the past 15 years) that you’re happy to keep on donating at the end of one year? Great! If not? No hard feelings. The consistency still made the $120 figure extremely valuable to us.

We want your donation to represent a number that is very comfortable for you. Personally, I make two larger (for me) donations every month. Out of my bank account in India, I donate $50/mo to a charity in Sikkim. Out of my Canadian bank account, I donate $100/mo to a charity in Nova Scotia. I have enough money available in both countries that these donations will not run out before I die. These are the two most important charities I donate to… but I’m not putting myself at risk by donating to them.

If you value GNOME, we would appreciate your support. But your comfort is essential. $50/mo is too much? Don’t stretch yourself! $25/mo or $15/mo still makes a massive difference. We’re asking all GNOME users, developers, and fans to consider supporting us in this way. (If you’re not sure if you run GNOME, it’s the default desktop on Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Red Hat.)

GNOME brings incredible value to the world. This is how you ensure that it continues to exist.

Donate less.