Tag: Community

In the previous parts of this series (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) we looked at how power works within GNOME, and what this means for people wanting to have an impact in the project. An important takeaway was that the most effective way to do that is to get acquainted with the project’s ethos and values, and then working towards things that align with these.

However, you have to start somewhere. In practical terms, how do you do that?

Start Small

Perhaps you have lots of big ideas and futuristic plans for the project, and your first impulse is to start working on those. However, if you’re a new contributor keep the following in mind:

• There’s often important context and history around a subject that you may not be aware of yet. Having this context inform your ideas generally makes them better and easier for others to get on board with.
• It’s important to build trust with the community. People are likely to be skeptical of super ambitious proposals from people they don’t know yet, and who may not stick around long term.
• Learning to effectively advertise your ideas and get buy-in from various people takes time. This goes especially for bigger changes, e.g. ones which impact many different modules.

Ideally the size of the things you propose should be proportionate to how well-integrated into the community you are. Trying to do a complete rewrite of GNOME Shell as your first contribution is likely not going to result in much. Something simple and self-contained, such as an individual view in an app is usually a good place to get started.

This doesn’t mean newcomers shouldn’t dream big (I certainly did). However, realistically you’ll be more successful starting with small tasks and working your way up to larger ones as you gain a better understanding of the project’s history, the underlying technologies, and the interests of various stakeholders.

Jumping In

What exactly to do first depends on the area you’re planning on contributing to. I’ll keep this focused on the areas I’m personally most involved with and which have the most immediate impact on the product, but of course there are lots of other great ways to get involved, such as documentation, engagement, and localization.

• For programming there is a newcomer guide that guides you towards your first merge request. Check out the developer portal for documentation and other resources. Beyond the newcomer projects you can of course also just look at open newcomer (and non-newcomer) issues in specific projects written in your language of choice on GNOME Gitlab.
• For design it’s easiest to just reach out to the design team and ask them to help you find a good first task. Ideally you’d start working with developers on something real as soon as possible, and the design team usually know what urgently needs design at the moment.

Of course, if you’re a developer there’s also the option of starting out by writing your own third-party apps, rather than contributing to existing ones. A great third-party app is a very valuable contribution to the project, and with GNOME Circle there is a direct path to GNOME Foundation membership.

Community

Becoming a part of the community is not just about doing work. It’s also about generally being active in community spaces, whether that’s hanging out in chat rooms, interacting with fellow contributors on social media, or going to physical meetups, hackfests, and conferences.

Some starting points for that:

• Join the Matrix channels for the projects you’re interested in. Depending on the channel it’s possible that not much is going on at the moment, but this tends to be seasonal. Especially app-specific channels can fluctuate wildly in activity depending on how many people are working on the app right now.
• Join some of the larger “general” GNOME Matrix channels for project-wide discussions and community stuff.
• Reach out to people who work on things you want to get into and ask them about ways to get involved more closely. Of course it’s important to be respectful of people’s time, but most people I know are happy to answer a few quick questions once in a while.
• Come to GUADEC, LAS, or other real-world meetups. Meeting other contributors face to face is one of the best ways to truly become part of the community, and it’s a lot of fun! Once it’s possible again COVID-wise, I highly recommend attending an in-person event.

Doing the Work

If you follow the above steps and contribute on a regular basis for a few months you’ll find that you’ve organically become a part of the project.

People will start to ask your opinion about what they’re currently doing, or for you to review their work. You’ll probably specialize in one or a few areas, and maybe become the go-to person for those things. Before you know it someone will ask you if you’re coming to the next hackfest, if you’ve already got your Foundation membership, or if you’d like to become co-maintainer of a module.

If you’ve joined the project with big ideas, this is the point where you can really start moving towards making those ideas a reality. Of course, making big changes isn’t easy even as a long-time contributor. Depending on the scope of an initiative it can take months or years to get something done (for example, our adaptive apps initiative started in 2018 and is still ongoing).

However, as an experienced contributor you have the technical, social, and ideological context to push for your ideas in a way that aligns with other people’s goals and motivations. This not only makes it less likely that your plans will face opposition, but if you’re doing it right it people will join you and help make it happen.

Conclusion

This concludes my 5-part series on how power works in the GNOME community, and how to get your pet feature implemented. Sorry to disappoint if you thought it was going to be quick and easy :)

On the plus side though, it’s a chance to be part of this amazing community. The friends you make along the way are truly worth it!

While this is the end of the series as I originally planned it, there are definitely areas it doesn’t cover and that I might write about in the future. If there are specific topics you’d be interested in, feel free to leave a comment.

Happy hacking!

In the first three parts of this series (part 1, part 2, part 3) we looked at how power works within GNOME and what that means for getting things done. We got to the point that to make things happen you (or someone you’ve hired) need to become a trusted member of the community, which requires understanding the project’s ethos.

In this post we’ll go over that ethos, both in terms of high level values, and what those translate to in more practical terms.

Values and Principles

GNOME is a very principled project, and there’s a fair amount of writing on this topic already.

Allan Day’s “The GNOME Way” (2017) is a great starting point, but I’d also recommend Havoc Pennington’s classic “Choosing our Preferences” (2002), and Emmanuele Bassi’s “Dev v. Ops” (2017). I’ve also written about some aspects of this in the past, including “There is no Linux Platform (2019)”. For some broader historical context also check out Emmanuele’s excellent History of GNOME podcast.

To give you an overview though, here’s my personal bullet point summary. It follows the same structure as the development process laid out in part 2 based on what areas specific values and ideas apply to. It’s not meant to be comprehensive, but rather give you an idea of the way people inside the project think.

The Why

Base motivations that inform everything we do.

• We believe in software freedom as an inclusive, accountable model for producing technology in the commons.
• Our software is built to be usable by everyone. We care deeply about user experience, accessibility, internationalization, and support for a diverse range of hardware.
• Software should be structurally and aesthetically elegant, both in terms of underlying technology and user interface.

The What

What kinds of things we think are worth pursuing, and (just as important) what kinds of things should be avoided.

• Third-party apps are the best abstraction to extend the core system with additional functionality. This is why we put a huge amount of work into empowering third party app developers to build more and better apps.
• Every preference has a cost, and this cost rises exponentially as you add more of them. This is why we avoid preferences as much as possible, and focus on fixing the underlying problems instead.
• Similarly, there is a direct relationship between how vertically integrated a product is and how cohesive you can make it. Every unnecessary variable you eliminate across the stack frees up time and energy, and creates opportunities for features you couldn’t otherwise build.
• People’s attention is precious. We pride ourselves in being distraction free.

The How

Useful rules of thumb around how we go about making things.

• We don’t do hacks. Rather than working around a problem at the wrong layer of abstraction, we believe in going to the root of the problem and fixing it for everyone, even if that means digging into lower layers (and ends up being far more difficult as a result).
• We see design holistically, rather than as an isolated thing the design team does. It’s not just about functionality and aesthetics, but also underlying technology, and what to build in the first place. Even if you’re not contributing on the design team, developing an affinity for design will make you a more effective contributor.
• Looking at relevant art is important, but simply copying the competition doesn’t usually produce great results. We have a proud history of inventing new paradigms that are better than the status quo.
• As a general rule, start from the user experience you want and then go about building the technology necessary to create it, not the other way around. However: This is not an excuse for bad engineering or pursuing ideas that are conceptually impossible (e.g. multi-protocol chat clients).
• Defer to the Expert. Everyone has different areas of expertise, such as user experience, security, accessibility, performance, or localization. Listen to the people most experienced in a given domain.
• Design is all about trade-offs. Be wary of hard and fast rules that only look at one part of a problem (e.g. “vertical space is at a premium, therefore…”), and instead try to balance various concerns in a way that works well overall.

In Practice

Some of the above principles are quite abstract, so what do they translate to when actually building software day to day? Here are some examples of how they apply to real-world questions.

• App developers should do their own packaging. It’s the only way to do it sustainably at scale.
• Flatpak is the future of app distribution.
• The “traditional desktop” is dead, and it’s not coming back (Note: I’m talking about Windows 95 era UI patterns here, not desktop vs. mobile). Instead of trying to bring back old concepts like menu bars or status icons, invent something better from first principles.
• System-wide theming is a broken idea. If you don’t like the way apps look, contribute to them directly (or to the platform style).
• Shell extensions are always going to be a niche thing. If you want to have real impact your time is better invested working on apps or GNOME Shell itself.
• “Filling the available space” is rarely a good goal by itself, and an easy way to design yourself into a corner.

All of the above is of course my personal perception, and you’ll find variations on these ideas depending on who you talk to. However, in my experience most of them are shared fairly consistently by people across the community, especially given our informal structure.

Now that we’ve covered how things get done, by whom, and why, you’re in a great position to start making your mark. In the next part of this series we’ll look at practical first steps for contributing.

Until then, happy hacking!

In parts 1 and 2 of the series we looked at how different groups inside the GNOME community work together to get things done. In this post we’ll look at what that means for people wanting to push for their personal agenda, e.g. getting a specific feature implemented or bug fixed.

Implicit in the theoretical question how power works in GNOME is often a more practical one: How can I get access to it? How can I exercise power to get something I want?

At a high level that’s very easy to answer: You either do the work yourself, or you convince someone else to do it.

Do It Yourself

If you’re the person working on something you have a ton of power over that thing. Designing and building software is in essence an endless stream of decisions. The more work you do, the more of those decisions you end up making.

Of course, in practice it’s not quite that simple. User-visible features need design reviews, and unless you’re the sole maintainer of a project you also need to go through code reviews to get your changes merged. As a designer, most things you design need to be implemented by someone else, so you have to convince them to do that.

However, it’s definitely possible to have a huge impact simply by doing a lot of work, and not only because of all the decisions you end up making directly as you implement things. If you contribute regularly to a module you’ll eventually end up reviewing other people’s work, and generally being asked for your opinion on topics you’re knowledgeable about.

Making Your Case

If you can’t, don’t want to, or don’t have time to do the work yourself, you’ll need to find someone else to do it for you. This is obviously a difficult task, because you’re essentially trying to convince people to work for you for free.

Some general tips for this:

• Get an idea of what kinds of things the people you’re trying to convince are interested in, e.g. technologies they like and types of problems they care about.
• Make the case that your idea fits into something they are already working on, or will help them reach goals they are already pursuing.
• Generally speaking, you’ll have a much better chance with new-ish contributors. They tend to be less overworked since they don’t maintain as many mission-critical modules.

Realistically, unless your idea is very small in scope, or exactly what someone was already looking for, this strategy is not very likely to succeed. Most contributors, volunteer or paid, already have a huge backlog of their own to work through. There are only so many hours in the day, and GtkTimeMachine is not yet a thing :)

However, the chances are not zero either, and it’s always possible that even if your idea isn’t picked up right away it will spark something later on, or influence future discussions.

Paying Someone Else

You can of course also convince people to work on something you want by hiring them (radical, I know!).

There are plenty of very talented people in the GNOME community who do contract development, from individuals to fairly large consultancies. You can also hire someone from outside the project, but then they will have to build trust with the community first, which is non-trivial overhead. In most cases, hiring existing contributors is orders of magnitude more effective than people who aren’t already a part of the project.

How to hire people to implement things for you is out of scope for this series, but if you’d like advice on it feel free to contact me or leave a comment. If there’s enough interest I might write about it in the future.

All of that said, if the thing you want doesn’t align with the ethos of the project it’s going to be difficult regardless of which strategy you go with. This is why familiarizing yourself with that ethos is important if you want to make your mark on the project. To help with that we’ll go over GNOME’s principles and values in the next part of this series.

Until then, happy hacking!

In part 1 of this series we looked at some common misconceptions about how power works inside the GNOME project and went over the roles and responsibilites of various sub-groups.

With that in place, let’s look at how of a feature (or app, redesign, or other product initiative) goes from idea to reality.

The Why

At the base of everything are the motivations for why we embark on new product initiatives. These are our shared values, beliefs, and goals, rooted in GNOME’s history and culture. They include goals like making the system more approachable or empowering third party developers, as well as non-goals, such as distracting people or introducing unnecessary complexity.

Since people across the project generally already agree on these it’s not something we talk about much day-to-day, but it informs everything we do.

This topic is important for understanding our development process, but big enough to warrant its own separate post in this series. I’ll go into a lot more detail there.

The What

At any given moment there are potentially hundreds of equally important things people working on GNOME could do to further the project’s goals. How do we choose what to work on when nobody is in charge?

This often depends on relatively hard to predict internal and external factors, such as

• A volunteer taking a personal interest in solving a problem and getting others excited about it (e.g. Alexander Mikhaylenko’s multi-year quest for better 1-1 touchpad gestures)
• A company giving their developers work time to focus on getting a specific feature done upstream (e.g. Endless with the customizable app grid)
• The design team coming up with something and convincing developers to make it happen (e.g. the Shell dialog redesign in 3.36)
• A technological shift presenting a rare opportunity to get a long-desired feature in (e.g. the Libadwaita stylesheet refresh enabling recoloring)

For larger efforts, momentum is key: If people see exciting developments in an area they’ll want to get involved and help make it even better, resulting in a virtuous cycle. A recent example of this was GNOME 40, where lots of contributors who don’t usually do much GNOME Shell UI work pitched in during the last few weeks of the cycle to get it over the line.

If something touches more than a handful of modules (e.g. the app menu migration), the typical approach is to start a formal “Initiative”: This is basically a Gitlab issue with a checklist of all affected modules and information on how people can help. Any contributor can start an initiative, but it’s of course not guaranteed that others will be interested in helping with it and there are plenty of stalled or slow-moving ones alongside the success stories.

The How

If a new app or feature is user-facing, the first step towards making it happen is to figure out the user experience we’re aiming for. This means that at some point before starting implementation the designers need to work through the problem, formulate goals, look at relevant art, and propose a way forward (often in the form of mockups). This usually involves a bunch of iterations, conversations with various stakeholders, and depending on the scale of the initiative, user research.

If the feature is not user-facing but has non-trivial technical implications (e.g. new dependencies) it’s good to check with some experienced developers or the release team whether it fits into the GNOME stack from a technical point of view.

Once there is a more or less agreed-upon design direction, the implementation can start. Depending on the size and scope of the feature there are likely additional design or implementation questions that require input from different people throughout the process.

When the feature starts getting to the point where it can be tested by others it gets more thorough design reviews (if it’s user facing), before finally being submitted for code review by the module’s maintainers. Once the maintainers are happy with the code, they merge it into the project’s main branch.

In the next installment we’ll look at what this power structure and development process mean for individual contributors wanting to work towards a specific goal, such as getting their pet bug fixed or feature implemented.

Until then, happy hacking!

People new to the GNOME community often have a hard time understanding how we set goals, make decisions, assume responsibility, prioritize tasks, and so on. In short: They wonder where the power is.

When you don’t know how something works it’s natural to come up with a plausible story based on the available information. For example, some people intuitively assume that since our product is similar in function and appearance to those made by the Apples and Microsofts of the world, we must also be organized in a similar way.

This leads them to think that GNOME is developed by a centralized company with a hierarchical structure, where developers are assigned tasks by their manager, based on a roadmap set by higher management, with a marketing department coordinating public-facing messaging, and so on. Basically, they think we’re a tech company.

This in turn leads to things like

• People making customer service style complaints, like they would to a company whose product they bought
• General confusion around how resources are allocated (“Why are they working on X when they don’t even have Y?”)
• Blaming/praising the GNOME Foundation for specific things to do with the product

If you’ve been around the community for a while you know that this view of the project bears no resemblance to how things actually work. However, given how complex the reality is it’s not surprising that some people have these misconceptions.

To understand how things are really done we need to examine the various groups involved in making GNOME, and how they interact.

GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation is a US-based non-profit that owns the GNOME trademark, hosts our Gitlab and other infrastructure, organizes conferences, and employs one full-time GTK developer. This means that beyond setting priorities for said GTK developer, it has little to no influence on development.

Update: As of June 14, the GNOME Foundation no longer employs any GTK developers.

Individual Developers

The people actually making the product are either volunteers (and thus answer to nobody), or work for one of about a dozen companies employing people to work on various parts of GNOME. All of these companies have different interests and areas of focus depending on how they use GNOME, and tend to contribute accordingly.

In practice the line between “employed” contributor and volunteer can be quite blurry, as many contributors are paid to work on some specific things but also additionally contribute to other parts of GNOME in their free time.

Maintainers

Each module (e.g. app, library, or system component) has one or more maintainers. They are responsible for reviewing proposed changes, making releases, and generally managing the project.

In theory the individual maintainers of each module have more or less absolute power over those modules. They can merge any changes to the code, add and remove features, change the user interface, etc.

However, in practice maintainers rarely make non-trivial changes without consulting/communicating with other stakeholders across the project, for example the design team on things related to the user experience, the maintainers of other modules affected by a change, or the release team if dependencies change.

Release Team

The release team is responsible for coordinating the release of the entire suite of GNOME software as a single coherent product.

In addition to getting out two major releases every year (plus various point releases) they also curate what is and isn’t part of the core set of GNOME software, take care of the GNOME Flatpak runtimes, manage dependencies, fix build failures, and other related tasks.

The Release Team has a lot of power in the sense that they literally decide what is and isn’t part of GNOME. They can add and remove apps from the core set, and set system-wide default settings. However, they do not actually develop or maintain most of the modules, so the degree to which they can concretely impact the product is limited.

Design Team

Perhaps somewhat unusually for a free software project GNOME has a very active and well-respected design team (If I do say so myself :P). Anything related to the user experience is their purview, and in theory they have final say.

This includes most major product initiatives, such as introducing new apps or features, redesigning existing ones, the visual design of apps and system, design patterns and guidelines, and more.

However: There is nothing forcing developers to follow design team guidance. The design team’s power lies primarily in people trusting them to make the right decisions, and working with them to implement their designs.

How do things get done then?

No one person or group ultimately has much power over the direction of the project by themselves. Any major initiative requires people from multiple groups to work together.

This collaboration requires, above all, mutual trust on a number of levels:

• Trust in the abilities of people from other teams, especially when it’s not your area of expertise
• Trust that other people also embody the project’s values
• Trust that people care about GNOME first and foremost (as opposed to, say, their employer’s interests)
• Trust that people are in it for the long run (rather than just trying to quickly land something and then disappear)

This atmosphere of trust across the project allows for surprisingly smooth and efficient collaboration across dozens of modules and hundreds of contributors, despite there being little direct communication between most participants.

This concludes the first part of the series. In part 2 we’ll look at the various stages of how a feature is developed from conception to shipping.

Until then, happy hacking!