The Everyone Environment

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  • 2025-05-23 Foundation Report

    Welcome to the third instalment of the Foundation Report! Instalment? Installment? English is dumb. Okay, here goes!

    ## Opaque Stuff

    • 3rd party consultation on safety issue continues
    • researching some software choices for process automation
    • asking individuals about their goals – no name-dropping because I’m not sure everyone would be comfortable
    • international finance is the worst but the problem is fixed now

     

    ## Meeting People

    I’m meeting fewer people and getting more grunt work accomplished but I still met plenty of lovely folks this week. I also met some people after last week’s report: Jef Spaleta is the Fedora Project’s new Lead. He and I agreed all new business deals will be done in the curling rink instead of the golf course. Matthias Clausen gave me a bit of a history lesson and also convinced me I need to talk to more old-timers: the sense of perspective decades of involvement brings is valuable.

    I met Tobias and chatted about how the Foundation can increase support to contributors. Rosanna introduced me to our bookkeeper and her advisor so I could get an intro to our bookkeeping process and a walk-through of our last CPA review. Maria and I had a lovely chat about her 20+ years as a GNOME user/contributor and the value of logistics, communications, and admin folks in a very tech-heavy organization… I found myself nodding along with so much she had to say.

    I got a chance to meet Aaditya from GNOME Nepal! What he and his team are doing there is after my own heart: getting GNOME, Linux, and other freie software into the hands of aspiring hackers and students. He’s essentially already running the style of repair cafe that the endof10.org campaign will teach people to run and I sincerely hope he’ll have time to help with End Of 10 (but he’s a busy guy!) as I think he has so much to offer. I was shocked to learn that GNOME Nepal is only one year old. They’ve already accomplished so much.

    Rosanna and I met the CommitChange team, who help us with gnome.org/donate. They have some neat stuff going on and they explained where they can help us with tweaks to their software and API, analytics, and campaign management. We’re hoping to do something with CommitChange very soon but I won’t say what until it’s baked because it’s not my baby. 🙂

    Last, we met a couple great folks who are interested in helping out in the Treasurer role at the Foundation. If you know anyone who’s a spreadsheet powerhouse, the Tufte of Reporting, or obsessed with carefully-balanced budgets, please encourage them to email me or Rob!

     

    ## Ideas, Docs, Walls, Files

    I’ve started to corral my scatterbrained ideas into some homes. They’re still spread out between paper notebooks, Markdown files, voicenotes, and my extremely frazzled family members. I’ll probably stop telling them about all the cool people I’m meeting and all the ideas I have by … GUADEC? Maybe. 😉

    We’ve started an internal “Foundation Handbook” to match handbook.gnome.org. This is only visible to Staff and Board members, as it contains a great deal of PII and other private information. It has a loooong way to go, but the goal is for it to provide the same beautiful, central documentation location (for banking, staff tools, ops, and so on) that the Project Handbook does. Public information about the Foundation won’t go in here, of course, as it still belongs on foundation.html. If you join the Board, you’re welcome to help us keep it clean and organized so we easily know where everything is and so it’s easy to onboard future Boards, EDs, and other Staff. (No, I’m not planning to leave anytime soon.)

    We’ve rebooted the Staff project wall. We don’t keep track of Ops tasks in here (since they’re recurring) but, rather, anything Executive: Follow up with so-and-so, document XYZ process, make a one-time social media post for an organizational partner, etc. We’re also making heavier use of the Board wall, bit by bit.

    Nextcloud! We’re… trying to use it. Collecting all our files into Nextcloud will take some time, but we’ve started to push toward using it with some boring old policy junk. We just have to keep up the gardening and it will become a thing of beauty, eventually.

     

    ## Fundraising

    We’ve talked a little about fundraising with the Board (I’m still relatively new) but as the smaller fires are each extinguished, fundraising is taking up more headspace. This is a major concern for me. Perhaps the major concern. The conversation with CommitChange yesterday was one small step toward this. We’ve also started some “market research.” (I’m not sure what else to call it.) When it comes to individuals and organizations that have never donated to GNOME before, I want to know:

    • Do they understand how important GNOME is, as infrastructure?
    • Where do we find them to ask them to donate? (If not within GNOME itself.)
    • Do they want anything for their donation? Or do we just need to reach them?

     

    ## GUADEC

    Kristi and I sat and had a long look through the GUADEC budget and our current expenses. She also very patiently explained to me the event expectations of Europeans as they differ from Americans. 😉 Still plenty for me to learn about how our events are planned, but Kristi’s got me off to a great start.

     

    ## End of 10

    Joseph from endof10.org and KDE Eco fame has been in touch continuously. Sri posted a call for a GNOME endof10.org Promo Team on the Engagement blog. It’s going to be here before you know it! If you want to get involved, ping us in #engagement:gnome.org or #endof10-en:kde.org.

    If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch Joseph’s Linux App Summit talk! It’s great and he does a fantastic job of explaining the importance of this effort.

     

    ## “Wow, yay, transparency”

    I’m very grateful to everyone who has thanked me for these little Foundation Reports. I’m glad I’m not just screaming into the void with these and that a few people are getting value out of them. However, I do have one request.

    On occasion (though rarely), these compliments have come paired with (or couched in) a complaint about previous EDs, other folks on staff, or the Board. I would encourage folks who are framing things this way to stop, as it’s a very unhelpful way to communicate. We need to remember that everyone works differently. I’m a loudmouth, so I’m loud. Most people on staff and on the Board are not. Instead, they have their nose to the grindstone. I think most of them struggle to find the time to talk about their work at the end of the workweek. Most of them work late into the night. Most of them work weekends. It’s been a long year (or…five?) for the Foundation and most of them are very tired.

    Because I am loud, I will do my best to be loud for them. Week after week, I’ll talk more about what “we” are doing — please understand that “we” is mostly them. If I tell you about work that’s happening at the Foundation, that work didn’t magically start when I joined in May. It’s been happening for years and I’m just doing my best to make it a little more visible.

    Instead of thanking me for my ridiculous infoblog, please redirect your thanks to someone on staff. Thank someone on the Board for their tireless service. Thank a contributor whose work comes pouring in, year after year. Send a box of chocolates in a DM. Drop them a little thank-you email. Give them a high-five at GUADEC. (Virtual or otherwise.)

    And if you’re feeling very energetic, run for the Board so you can help out. ❤️

     

  • Join the GNOME Board!

    The past two weeks have gone by too quickly. I’ve had so many wonderful conversations with so many of our contributors and community friends at this point that I couldn’t be more confident that I’m in the right place. The next year is going to be a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to working with many more of you.

    This next year will be fun. But it is also going to be a lot of work. I’d like to take a minute to talk about some of the work we need to do, and how you can help. Because the 2025 election cycle has begun.

     

    ## Governance

    Being on the GNOME Foundation Board is, first and foremost, about governance. If you join the Board, you will probably do your onboarding with Rob. He’s good at it. He’ll walk you through a slide deck and the very first slide will contain this quote in 480pt font:

    Governance is not management.

    The full quote, from the second page of Kenneth Dayton’s book is:

    Governance is not management. In my opinion, one of the worst sins of charitable organizations is that too often they do not distinguish between the two. Rather, they confuse the two responsibilities and in the process hamper the mission of the institution.

    This is an important distinction. Joining the Board does not mean you’ll be managing staff. The Board exists to perform the functions you’ll see in the source material for the remaining 30 slides:

    These include (but are not limited to) responsibilities like:

    • Oversight
    • Making high-level decisions
    • Long-term strategy
    • Fiduciary responsibility
    • Ensuring the right ED is in place
    • Reviewing budgets
    • Deciding policy
    • Understanding the structure and duties of a 501(c)3 nonprofit

    Riveting, I know. But! This isn’t everything. And if you’re still awake, I will tell you that we don’t just need policy wonks and 50-year strategists. There’s some hands-dirty work associated with the GNOME Foundation Board, too. Even though the Board is not designed to manage, it can help execute. Once upon a time, the Board member were the people who scrambled to arrange GUADEC every year. It helps to be a little scrappy and we could learn to reclaim a bit of that history.

     

    ## Finance

    We could really use help with our finances. Our bookkeepers are absolutely metal and we’re very lucky to have them. Our Ops staff are super hard-working. But the Board rotates continuously. Not every Board will be able to read a balance sheet. We need to present the Board with a continuous view of finances — not just quarterly reports, but monthly reports which clearly describe our positions, our trajectory, and our best case / likely case / worst case. Financial clarity is paramount for an effective Board… but it’s also easier said than done.

    If you love spelunking through spreadsheets, tying together multiple data sources, documentation, automation, or doing a wee bit of data science and visualization on Small Data, the Board might be for you! Know that this effort will take time and patience, though. You won’t find clarity overnight. Determination — to the point of stubbornness, perhaps — will be your best ally, here.

     

    ## Executive

    In addition to finances, there are a number of committees in the Foundation. Some of these are Board committees and some are delegated committees. Committees, whether Board committees or not, all have some executive powers.

    The most obvious of these is the aptly-name Executive Committee. A lot of work gets done here and it’s safe to say meaningful participation in the Exec Committee is almost a daily commitment in 2025. But there are other committees that could certainly use help (or even rebooting) and don’t require a daily commitment as a volunteer:

    • Governance Committee (see Governance)
    • Finance Committee (see Finance)
    • Travel Committee
    • Internship Committee
    • etc.

    Committee participation doesn’t specifically require that you join the Board. It’s also possible for the Board to appoint Officers … and we’ll do that! But if you really want to get stuck in, I strongly suggest standing for election. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lawyer, an accountant, a designer, or developer.

    But beyond roles, who should stand for election? Let’s dig into that for a second.

     

    ## Representation

    The GNOME community is massive. I still have so many people to meet. And there seem to be people from every walk of life, every community, every corner of the planet, every cultural background, every linguistic background. If you’re one of the unlucky people I’ve forced one of my excited 3-hour sermons upon, you probably know by now I’m a huge fan of Network Resilience. I gave a keynote once that talks about this (among many other things). The Foundation, and the Board in particular, is more resilient when it’s more diverse. If we all think the same way, all have the same upbringing, same background, same weaknesses in our thinking… this weakens the Foundation.

    Someone recently told me they’ve thought about standing for elections for years but feel some Imposter Syndrome. I was shocked. This person has been contributing to GNOME for decades. They’re clearly very smart, hardworking, and talented. If such a strong candidate is just waiting there in the wings, I can’t help but believe there are other strong potential Board members just waiting for the right moment.

    The right moment is now.

    We have 2SLGBTQIA+ folks on the Board. We do have folks with disabilities, different language backgrounds, different continents. But we have only one woman (who also happens to be our only lawyer). We have no one from east of Europe. We can do better. I’m not worried any of you are going to apply to the Board because of your background. I worry that you, like my new friend mentioned above, might fight the temptation to stand for election because you think you don’t belong here.

    You absolutely belong here. Bring your talent, your energy, your tenacity. Help us kick ass.

     

    ## No Nonsense

    I’d like to take a minute to discuss some of the reasons not to join the Board.

    First, we need Board members who will help paddle our wee canoe in the same direction. GNOME, both the Project and the Foundation, have experienced some real hardship in recent years. If it’s your intention to join the Board only so you can paddle sideways (or backwards), please put that thought on hold for a couple years. We just can’t support that level of disruption right now. We will have our disagreements but we all need to be on the same page.

    Second, if everything above bores you but you have a single issue that you’re really dreaming of hammering home… that’s also a recipe for ineffective Board participation. If elected, you will be on the Board for TWO YEARS. That’s a long time. Make sure you want to be there to work with us for the entire two years. It will be hard work. And it will be worth it.

     

    ## Hard Work

    While talking to Maria (@marimaj) today — one of my favourite contributor conversations so far — she said something that resonated with me: “Almost no one appreciates just how much work is required! The Foundation requires so, so much work to function properly.” She then proceeded to name a bunch of folks who contribute day and night. Her hard-won understanding is built upon experience. She’s been a part of the community for a long time, and she’s seen how hard staff and volunteers work to keep the Foundation moving.

    If you want to know how much work the Foundation requires, ask her. Ask me. Ask any Board member.

    If you want to put in the work, I want you to stand for election. I’m looking forward to seeing your nomination. 🙂

    To announce your candidacy, read Andrea’s post and follow the instructions. (Thanks Andrea!)

     

  • 2025-05-16 Foundation Report

    Whew. How is it Friday already? Here’s my attempt at a more concise Foundation Report for my second official week at the Foundation. Spoiler: If I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.

     

    ## Opaque Things

    I wasn’t expecting to interact with external organizations in such a way that I can’t mention them directly in these reports this early in my time here. But that’s a part of the job, and it’s begun already.

    To provide some context on where those opaque interactions sit on the ol’ transparency spectrum, here is a wildly unscientific breakdown of transparency levels of material I (sometimes) have access to:

    1. The thoughts in my head
    2. The paper notes on my desk
    3. My unshared, private git repo
    4. Restricted conversations with third parties, shared with the relevant Board members
    5. My “ED Notes” repo, shared with the Board
    6. My .plan file, shared with the Board
    7. The Executive Session from the monthly Board meeting (I leave the room for these, as do all other Foundation Staff who might be attending the Board meeting for some reason)
    8. Confidential items from the monthly Board meeting
    9. Restricted GitLab repos/issues
    10. Shared drives
    11. Matrix
    12. Discourse
    13. GitLab
    14. Social Media
    15. Blogs

    Most of the Foundation’s and the project’s activity happen in those last 5 locations. It’s actually very manual and inconvenient to create a private GitLab repo on gitlab.gnome.org. And so it should be! Public and published should be the first option, always… but there are clearly times when privacy or confidentiality is warranted.

    Note that most of the Very Private things aren’t private because they’re top secret. The paper on my desk isn’t shared with anyone because, well, it can’t be. I don’t keep sensitive information on my desk. If I need to record something sensitive, it goes in a private git repo. There’s almost nothing in there and I don’t expect to see that grow much. The “ED Notes” directory is mostly a kludge and a scratchpad. Ultimately, my kludgey notes make their way into GitLab issues. Some of these are public, but not all. Board discussions frequently go on inside GitLab issues. It’s a good permanent record.

    As for the opaque conversations mentioned in the first paragraph above, I can say this: they’re not particularly sexy or exciting. [edit] One is bureaucratic, in the most literal and boring sense: just the usual compliance requirements of a 501c3. The other was meeting with a third party about a safety issue. (Thanks to Rob and Allan for suggesting these edits.) [/edit] Both of these conversations directly benefit GNOME and its community. There’s no secret society stuff going on, as much as that may disappoint some folks outside the community. 😉

     

    ## Transparency

    (How meta.) So, many conversations this week have been about transparency: how do we be more transparent? How do we condense the firehose of information in GitLab, Matrix, Discourse, and calls into something digestable? Who wants to see what? Who thinks transparency (or general communication) mistakes have been made in the past and what were those mistakes? What can we learn from them? How can we help each other learn more transparent communication methods, processes, and practices?

    Almost everyone I spoke to this week (and last) has something to say on this topic. Most people have a pretty clear idea about what they want out of transparency in the project and from the Foundation. Most people are largely in agreement.

    Every organization is different. Everyone’s habits are different. We’ll keep iterating.

     

    ## Spreadsheets

    I sat with Pablo on the 12th to take a look at some of our accounts and to get a handle on our cash position. Rosanna does a better job of this stuff than I do and I sat with her on the same day to look at similar numbers. She also introduced me to the bookkeeper (yay!), our contacts at CommitChange, and our friends over at GNOME Nepal.

     

    ## Email

    GNOME Email lives on a vanilla IMAP server with no server-side filtering or rules. Since I’m a giant pain in the ass who refuses to either (a) just use Thunderbird rules and suck it up when my laptop is closed or (b) run a server in my living room, Andrea set me up with a box in the GNOME OpenShift cloud to run imapfilter. So far, it works a treat. Praise be to SREs.

    Andrea also has other very fun ideas for the future. [edit] BUT THEY’RE SECRETS. I was advised this wasn’t a fun tease. It’s not really secret: Andrea and I are both just way too excited about fundraising. A diverse donor portfolio will make for a healthy Foundation. [/edit]

     

    ## Executive Meeting

    The Exec Committee meets on mondays to Get Things Done. We discussed the need for a Treasurer, chatted about what the Staff was doing (which, on some level, is self-referential when embedded in this report), discussed ways we can be more transparent and also how to talk about transparency.

    This may sound like a self-indulgent thought exercise but take a second to mull it over. What, precisely, do you want out of transparency from the GNOME Foundation? I can tell you that you 100% do not want the firehose because I’m spending all day on the firehose and I can’t even keep up. The information has to be sliced, somehow. How do you want it sliced?

    You can just tweet your answers to this question directly at me on Mastodon. Please don’t shout.

    Once we understand what the expectations of the community are, we can replay them back to you (ie. “does this approach seem right to you?”) which is talking about transparency. A conversation.

     

    ## Flathub

    I met Rob and some other Flathub folks. We had some lively banter about telemetry. 😉 That wasn’t the primary focus, but it’s fun to imagine it was. In actuality, we discussed the Flathub organization, its relationship to GNOME, and how much we can accomplish in terms of standing up Flathub on its own terms by the fall of 2025. That’s a high bar but there are some great people involved.

    I’d love to say something like “Flathub is the future of the Linux desktop” but Flathub is the Today of the Linux Desktop. I probably tell this story too much, but I’m running Debian Stable on a 2011 MacBook Air in my living room. Debian Stable. I can’t even switch bluetooth devices without opening settings because it’s GNOME 43 but I can install an app released yesterday. As someone who ran Debian a lot as a kid, I can’t tell you just how weird and delightful that is.

     

    ## Matrix Spam

    If you use Matrix to work on GNOME, or to watch GNOME development, or for just about any other reason, really… you know about the spam. “Spam.”

    Let’s please have a moment of silence for the mods, admins, devs, and SREs who are fighting to bring peace back to our little village.

    Thank you everyone on the front lines. I’ve only spoken to a few of you so far but you’ve provided me tremendous reassurance. I hope I can proxy some of that reassurance:

    This situation is truly awful but please know just how seriously and competently the people behind the scenes are working to resolve it.

     

    ## The Board

    Cassidy and I got a Board orientation! Thanks Rob. Even if a lot of this is known, I think it might be helpful to publish some of the onboarding material so folks inside (and outside) the community know what is involved in running a 501c3.

    The GNOME Project Handbook is a great resource to start with, if governance is your jam.

     

    ## The Board Meeting

    The Board meets every second Tuesday of the month. We looked at finances, talked about GUADEC, talked about ways to get more money in the hands of developers, and discussed the option of a “hackfest” to axe some of the pending tasks on the Foundation’s project wall. I think that’s Allan’s way of trying to make administrivia sound fun. 😀

     

    ## Digital Wellbeing

    Allan kindly invited me to a DW design meeting. I learned that it’s not just my Location Services that are broken… that’s just apparently a very global bug. That realization was in the context of a discussion about how the modern desktop may find itself increasingly reliant on networked services, and how to mitigate the risks posed by that situation. Design goes all the way to the bottom of the stack, and across the network.

     

    ## Safety

    I have a lot to say on this topic. I’ve had a lot of conversations on this topic already. It’s too much to cram into a weekly Foundation Update, but expect more once I’ve done more research.

     

    ## History

    I got some history lessons from Federico, Cassidy, and Adrian Vovk. We talked about tensions in the community, Pride month in 2024, significant past events under other EDs, the history of in GNOME, the brand, the logo, the Brand-in-the-Large (otherwise known as “the product”), the STF grant, YouTubers, podcasters, burnout, and GNOME OS.

    In my conversation with Adrian, I began to understand that GNOME OS is a much, much bigger idea than what he laid out in his blog post, A Desktop for All. Not bigger in terms of implementation… bigger in terms of the dream. That conversation took, uh, a while. The excitement that people feel for the GNOME project is really unlike I’ve ever seen for any other product.

    In my conversation with Cassidy, he brought up the concept of the difference between the GNOME Community (the devs, the designers, the translators, the infra folks, the ops folks, everyone who builds GNOME) and the GNOME Fandom (the stans, the users, the news, the pundits, the peanut gallery, the haters). I think this distinction matters. I’ve been stanning GNOME for two decades. I’ve only been a community member for two weeks. This isn’t to say that one group is more important than the other … just that there are two distinct groups.

    Side note: I’d love to see the “U” back in GUADEC. If you’re someone who simply loves a universal free desktop, and you happen to choose GNOME, I’d encourage you to come to GUADEC this summer and stan with me.

     

    ## Treasurer

    [edit] I misspoke — Michael is still our Treasurer, but we do need a new Treasurer to replace him. Thank you Rosanna for pointing out my mistake! [/edit] We could really use a new Treasurer… but we could also really use a dedicated person who’s borderline obsessed with the intersection of finances and freie software. And maybe a dash of data science.

    If you know someone you think would be a good fit, please email me.

     

    ## Elections

    Board elections are coming up! Have you ever wanted to be involved in f/oss governance? Have you ever felt the burning urge to get your hands dirty with a 501c3 non-profit? Do you love accounting? Law? Taking minutes? Following rules? The GNOME Board might be for you!

    Stay tuned for an announcement of the schedule and the publication of some 501c3 infographics and/or slide decks. 🙂

     

    ## Accessibility

    The Foundation has been speaking to Georges and the Engagement folks about how we might fund development more directly. This conversation began before I want to love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back. hit the streets. This conversation isn’t reactionary; the Fireborn blog is serendipitous. The author of that blog is right: the teams do have limited resources and they do experience years of neglect. Yet? They keep fighting. There are plenty of individuals, companies, and governments in this world to support the creation of a completely accessible computer and it is up to us to find that support. While it’s romantic to imagine a scrappy team of volunteers creating an accessible desktop, this isn’t the reality. If teams aren’t funded, the work can’t keep up.

    One line caught my attention in particular:

    This isn’t inconvenience.
    It’s exclusion.

    This is what we mean when we say an environment for everyone. We do not mean you’ll get a switch to make your window borders look like BeOS. There is software that does that already. The goal is to ensure no one is excluded.

    If we aren’t doing that, that’s a problem we need to solve.

    Yesterday was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. It’s an excellent time to intentionally reflect on how we can improve the situation. But matters just as much today. And tomorrow.

    Until we have a fundraising program in place, I strongly suggest reading Georges’ In celebration of accessibility and Matthias’ An Accessibility Update for GTK. There are people out there doing this work already. Thank them. Celebrate them. Support them.

     

    ## Conclusion

    I wrote this on Friday morning. Today I’ll meet Anisa, Jef Spaleta (of Fedora fame), and Matthias.

    Was this more concise? Probably not. But at least I sliced it a different direction than last week. 😉 If you and I did something fun together this week and I forgot, please forgive me. I almost forgot Andrea and he was the last person I saw before I started typing this thing.

  • 2025-05-09 Foundation Report

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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:

    1. Meet people where they are. They might not be on Free Software platforms, so welcome them on Telegram, Slack, Discord, social media, etc.
    2. 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.
    3. Help them submit a patch.
    4. 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!

  • Introducing Myself

    I’m incredibly excited to serve the GNOME Foundation as its new full-time Executive Director.

    As Richard mentioned, I am receiving the baton from him, after his tenure as the GNOME Foundation’s interim Executive Director. Richard helped guide the Foundation through some rough terrain and, after all that, I’m especially grateful that Richard has been so generous with his time. All the best, Richard. Thank you for everything you do! It always feels good to make a new friend like Richard and I don’t think he’ll be a stranger to the GNOME community, even once he’s neck-deep in his PhD thesis.

    It is precisely that community — that global network of friends — that has me so excited to work with the GNOME Foundation. The word “excited” really doesn’t do it justice. I have been involved in many free software, open design, and open docs efforts over the years. But none of those have the gargantuan history, community, and installed base of GNOME. It is a privilege to serve GNOME, and I’m grateful. That gratitude is the entire reason I’m here and I’d like to take the rest of this post to explain where that feeling comes from — and what I hope to do with it.

     

    ## My story

    Since I am new to the GNOME community, I’ll start by sharing some background on myself.

    I grew up in a village of 1000 people in western Canada and, within that village, I was unquestionably “that computer nerd kid.” I built a graphical MUD before the term “MMORPG” was coined. The code was awful. I started my first web development company when I was 15 years old. It was very 1996.

          

    I started a couple more businesses in University, around the time I started using Linux and GNOME: MonoHost, which provided ASP.net webhosting on Linux, and a small software consultancy. Neither of those stuck.

    After University, my professional software career can be broken down into two 10-year chunks: pre-crash and post-crash.

    The first ten years is a blur. I joined ThoughtWorks when they had fewer than 500 employees, got involved in the early agile (lower-case “a”) software movements, used Rails before 1.0, wrote C#, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and Clojure, joined DRW, built large distributed systems, led teams, got bored, moved to India, and started Nilenso Software with seven friends. Nilenso Software is India’s first employee-owned technology cooperative and it still exists today.

    Two years into Nilenso, I had a bicycle crash and three botched eye surgeries while visiting a client in California. I was left partly blind. I have a crushed optic nerve, vitrectomy, and scleral buckle. (I suggest… not looking up example videos.)

    After the bicycle crash, I found it difficult to code — or even use a computer at all, at certain contrasts. White backgrounds, for example, still cause me instant headaches. And so I began a decade of recruiting, sales, management, startups, fundraising, and product consulting. After leaving Nilenso, I volunteered with nonprofits and worked on two open source database products: XTDB and Endatabas. After closing down Endatabas, I began interviewing with the GNOME Foundation, which brings me here.

    I moved back to Canada during Covid and I now live in Halifax, on the east coast. (One timezone east of New York, Europeans will be happy to note!) I still ride bicycles. I run in the park, swim in the ocean, canoe to islands, and climb rocks. I play board games. I write a little code on weekends. I meditate Vipassana. I have an off-grid cabin by the ocean that requires constant repairs. I drive an old truck. Due to an inside joke that went too far, I only wear black suits with white shirts. On any given day, I can smoothly transition between business meetings, weddings, and funerals. As one does.

    Over the past three decades, I have been inspired by many open source projects but the aspect of GNOME that inspires me the most is the clarity of its mission. There is never any disagreement about the mission: GNOME is a universal computing environment. It is for everyone, everywhere.

    I’m in awe of this.

    If you’ve ever been involved in the creation of a software product, you’ll appreciate just how exceptional it is for one product (especially one so large) to retain a single mission like this for a quarter century. That kind of continuity doesn’t just magically happen. Let’s talk about that for a second.

     

    ## Gratitude

    Over the past few days, with each conversation I’ve had with folks in the community, I found myself increasingly grateful for the decades of work put into GNOME. A person forgets just how much time, energy, leadership, and passion has gone into a project of this size.

    I’ve been using GNOME since 2002. By the late 2000s, it was becoming very easy to take GNOME for granted. By GNOME 3, it’s safe to say I did take GNOME for granted. This is a good thing, in a way. We take the water utility or electricity in our homes for granted precisely because they work so perfectly and invisibly that their origins can be forgotten.

    But GNOME isn’t financed by billions of tax dollars. It’s easy to forget that, too. My friends and colleagues over the years have compared GNOME to MacOS and Windows, apples-to-apples, as if GNOME were also built by a 3-trillion-dollar corporation. If your open source project is compared favourably to competitors with a $6T aggregate market cap, you’re doing something right.

    This continuity is magical, but it’s magic created by the many contributors who make GNOME happen, release to release, year after year.

    I don’t want to feel this gratitude alone. As part of our work at the Foundation, I hope we can bring this feeling to many of GNOME’s users.

     

    ## Transparency

    Bringing that feeling to users means showing them the people and processes behind GNOME. None of us can understand infrastructure like GNOME without a window into it. So many of the systems we rely on every day are hidden from us. I have always loved this Hans Rosling comment:

    Sometimes, when I turn the water on to wash my face in the morning and warm water comes out just like magic, I silently praise those who made it possible: the plumbers. When I’m in that mode I’m often overwhelmed by the number of opportunities I have to feel grateful to civil servants, nurses, teachers, lawyers, police officers, firefighters, electricians, accountants, and receptionists. These are the people building societies. These are the invisible people working in a web of related services that make up society’s institutions. These are the people we should celebrate when things are going well.

    The contributors, maintainers, board members, and Foundation staff are these plumbers. Even in my short few days with the Foundation, I’ve seen everyone working hard behind the scenes to keep the lights on and ensure GNOME 49 will be a success, even if it feels like GNOME 48 was just released moments ago.

    I want millions of GNOME users to see what I’ve had the privilege to see: the life and energy of the folks who keep GNOME running for us.

    We should celebrate. We have every reason to.

     

    ## Intentions

    Of course, transparency isn’t a switch we can just turn on. It’s a constant effort we apply to our own processes. It’s iterative. It’s work. But it can also be fun! Knowing that everyone else is trying their hardest can be the most energizing motivation, and I’m excited to help.

    Beyond transparency, I hope we can re-establish the GNOME Foundation’s … well, foundations. The Foundation exists to support GNOME, to support design and development, to support contributors.

    A big part of this is financial stability. Ultimately, the Foundation should support new growth. But to begin with, we need bedrock.

    One word to describe these intentions is resilience: across finances, people, documentation, and processes. Let’s build an environment that lasts another 27 years.

     

  • The Everyone Environment

    Welcome! In classic new-blog tradition, I felt it was a good idea to explain the title given to this little corner of blogs.gnome.org — and provide fair warning as to what sort of thoughts I’ll post here.

     

    GNOME is the Computer

    I’ve spent a lot of time lately answering the question “what is GNOME?” This question usually comes from my friends outside the tech industry. They work on film sets and fishing boats. They work in law firms, book stores, and hospitals. I don’t usually have a whiteboard handy to explain what GNOME is, so I’ve found myself approaching the question like this:

    Me: Have you heard of “Linux”?

    Them: Yes.

    Me: Okay, so. When you open your laptop and the thing you see is Windows? And when you unlock your phone and the thing you see is iOS? When you use a Linux computer, the thing you see is GNOME.

    I’m committing multiple sins with this oversimplification but if any of my friends are willing to let me elaborate, I do. That rarely happens. To these folks, and to me, GNOME is the computer. It’s the human part. The UI. The UX. The part you touch.

     

    An Environment for Everyone

    For those few friends who do permit me to elaborate, I’ll spend a moment explaining free desktops. But if they’re willing to put up with me, I’ll turn the conversation back to GNOME.

    After spending over two decades in the software industry, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for simple, opinionated, well-designed software. After a bicycle crash and three botched surgeries in 2014, I’ve also developed a deep appreciation for accessible software.

    The word “accessibility” contains a lot of nuance. Our industry tends to associate that word with an icon of a little human, arms outstretched. Of course it’s important for software to reach folks like me, who need to use computers in specific ways. But “accessibility” goes much farther than that.

    The root of accessibility is access:

    • Does the computer speak your language?
    • Does the computer understand your culture?
    • Can you afford it?
    • Can you share it?
    • Can you fix it yourself?
    • Is it really yours?

    Unlike most desktop software these days, GNOME can answer “yes” to all these questions.

     

    GNOME is Infrastructure

    Not only does accessible computing for everyone already exist, it is everywhere. I’ve seen GNOME in schools, wood shops, trading firms, government offices, universities, and every software company in my 20-year career.

    Infrastructure — whether libraries, parks, roads, or sewers — is a drab topic compared to “computing for everyone”. But it is no less important. Really, it is the other side of that coin and I’ll have a lot more to say on this topic.

     

    This blog will live at the intersection of these three topics: GNOME’s identity, mission, and reach.