Form and Function – Allan Day's GNOME Blog

Form and Function – Allan Day's GNOME Blog
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Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been four weeks since my last post, due to a vacation and public holidays, so there’s lots to cover. This period included a major announcement, but there’s also been a lot of other notable work behind the scenes.
Fellowship & Fundraising
The really big news from the last four weeks was the launch of our new
Fellowship program
. This is something that the Board has been discussing for quite some time, so we were thrilled to be able to make the program a reality. We are optimistic that it will make a significant difference to the GNOME project.
If you didn’t see it already,
check out the announcement for details
. Also, if you want to apply to be our first Fellow, you have just three days until the application deadline on 20th April!
donate.gnome.org
has been a great success for the GNOME Foundation, and it is only through the support of our existing donors that the Fellowship was possible. Despite these amazing contributions, the GNOME Foundation needs to grow our donations if we are going to be able to support future Fellowship rounds while simultaneously sustaining the organisation.
To this end, there’s an effort happening to build our marketing and fundraising effort. This is primarily taking place in the
GNOME Engagement Team
, and we would love help from the community to help boost our outbound comms. If you are interested, please join the Engagement space and look out for announcements.
Also, if you haven’t already, and are able to do so:
please donate
Conferences
We have two major events coming up, with
Linux App Summit in May
and
GUADEC in July
, so right now is a busy time for conferences.
The schedules for both of these upcoming events are currently being worked on, and arrangements for catering, photographers, and audio visual services are all in the process of being finalized.
The Travel Committee has also been busy handling GUADEC travel requests, and has sent out the first batch of approvals. There are some budget pressures right now due to rising flight prices, but budget has been put aside for more GUADEC travel, so
please apply if you want to attend and need support
April 2026 Board Meeting
This week was the Board’s regular monthly meeting for April. Highlights from the meeting included:
I gave a general report on the Foundation’s activities, and we discussed progress on programs and initiatives, including the new Fellowship program and fundraising.
Deepa gave a finance report for October to December 2025.
Andrea Veri joined us to give an update on the Membership & Elections Committee, as well as the Infrastructure team. Andrea has been doing this work for a long time and has been instrumental in helping to keep the Foundation running, so this was a great opportunity to thank him for his work.
One key takeaway from this month’s discussion was the very high level of support that GNOME receives from our infrastructure partners, particularly
AWS
and also
Fastly
. We are hugely appreciative of this support, which represents a major financial contribution to GNOME, and want to make sure that these partners get positive exposure from us and feel appreciated.
We reviewed the timeline for the upcoming 2026 board elections, which we are tweaking a little this year, in order to ensure that there is opportunity to discuss every candidacy, and reduce some unnecessary delay in final result.
Infrastructure
As usual, plenty has been happening on the infrastructure side over the past month. This has included:
Ongoing work to tune our Fastly configuration and managing the resource usage of GNOME’s infra.
Deployment of a
LiberaForms
instance on GNOME infrastructure. This is hooked up to GNOME’s SSO, so is available to anyone with an account who wants to use it – just head over to
forms.gnome.org
to give it a try.
Changes to the Foundation’s internal email setup, to allow easier management of the generic contact email addresses, as well as better organisation of the role-based email addresses that we have.
New translation support for donate.gnome.org.
Ongoing work in Flathub, around OAuth and flat-manager.
Admin & Finance
On the accounting side, the team has been busy catching up on regular work that got put to one side during last month’s audit. There were some significant delays to our account process as a result of this, but we are now almost up to date.
Reorganisation of many of our finance processes has also continued over the past four weeks. Progress has included a new structure and cadence for our internal accounting calls, continued configuration of our new payments platform, and new forms for handling reimbursement requests.
Finally, we have officially kicked off the process of migrating to our new physical mail service. Work on this is ongoing and will take some time to complete.
Our new address is on the website
, if anyone needs it.
That’s it for this report! Thanks for reading, and feel free to use the comments if you have questions!
Hello and welcome to another update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been two weeks since my last update, and there’s been plenty going on, so let’s dive straight in.
GNOME 50!
My update wouldn’t be complete without mentioning
this week’s GNOME 50 release
. It looks like an amazing release with lots of great improvements! Many thanks to everyone who contributed and made it such a success.
The Foundation plays a critical role in these releases, whether it’s providing development infrastructure, organising events where planning takes place, or providing development funding. If you are reading this and have the means, please consider signing up as a
Friend of GNOME
. Even small regular donations make a huge difference.
Board Meeting
The Board of Directors had its regular monthly meeting on March 9th, and we had a full agenda. Highlights from the meeting included:
The Board agreed to sign the
Keep Android Open
letter, as well as endorsing the
United Nations Open Source Principles
We heard reports from a number of committees, including the Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Travel Committee, and Code of Conduct Committee. Committee presentations are a new addition to the Board meeting format, with the goal of pushing more activity out to committees, with the Board providing high-level oversight and coordination.
Creation of a new bank account was authorized, which is needed as part of our ongoing finance and accounting development effort.
The main discussion topic was Flathub and what the organizational arrangements could be for it in the future. There weren’t any concrete decisions made here, but the Board indicated that it’s open to different options and sees Flathub’s success as the main priority rather than being attached to any particular organisation type or location.
The next regular Board meeting will be on April 13th.
Travel
The Travel Committee met both this week and last week, as it processed the initial batch of GUADEC sponsorship applications. As a result of this work the first set of approvals have been sent out. Documentation has also been provided for those who are applying for visas for their travel.
The membership of the current committee is quite new and it is having to figure out processes and decision-making principals as it goes, which is making its work more intensive than might normally be the case. We are starting to write up guidelines for future funding rounds, to help smooth the process.
Huge thanks to our committee members Asmit, Anisa, Julian, Maria, and Nirbheek, for taking on this important work.
Conferences
Planning and preparation for the 2026 editions of LAS and GUADEC have continued over the past fortnight. The call for papers for both events is a particular focus right now, and there are a couple of important deadlines to be aware of:
If you want to
speak at LAS 2026
, the
deadline for proposals is 23 March
– that’s in just three days.
The GUADEC 2026 call for abstracts has been
extended to 27 March
, so there is one more week to
submit a talk
There are teams behind each of these calls, reviewing and selecting proposals. Many thanks to the volunteers doing this work!
We are also excited to have sponsors come forward to support GUADEC.
Accounting
The Foundation has been undertaking a program of improvements to our accounting and finance systems in recent months. Those were put on hold for the audit fieldwork that took place at the beginning of March, but now that’s done, attention has turned to the remaining work items there.
We’ve been migrating to a new payments processing platform since the beginning of the year, and setup work has continued, including configuration to make it integrate correctly with our accounting software, migrating credit cards over from our previous solution, and creating new web forms which are going to be used for reimbursement requests in future.
There are a number of significant advantages to the new system, like the accounting integration, which are already helping to reduce workloads, and I’m looking forward to having the final pieces of the new system in place.
Another major change that is currently ongoing is that we are moving from a quarterly to a monthly cadence for our accounting. This is the cycle we move on to “complete” the accounts, with all data inputted and reconciled by the end of the cycle. The move to a monthly cycle will mean that we are generating finance reports on a more frequent basis, which will allow the Board to have a closer view on the organisation’s finances.
Finally, this week we also had our regular monthly “books” call with our accountant and finance advisor. This was our usual opportunity to resolve any questions that have come up in relation to the accounts, but we also discussed progress on the improvements that we’ve been making.
Infrastructure
On the infrastructure side, the main highlight in recent weeks has been the migration from Anubis to Fastly’s
Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF)
for protecting our infrastructure. The result of this migration will be an increased level of protection from bots, while simultaneously not interfering in peoples’ way when they’re using our infra. The Fastly product provides sophisticated detection of threats plus the ability for us to write our own fine-grained detection rules, so we can adjust firewall behaviour as we go.
Huge thanks to
Fastly
for providing us with sponsorship for this service – it is a major improvement for our community and would not have been possible without their help.
That’s it for this update. Thanks for reading and be on the lookout for the next update, probably in two weeks!
This post is the latest in my series of GNOME Foundation updates. I’m writing these in my capacity as Foundation President, where I’m busy managing a lot of what’s happening at the organisation at the moment. Each of these posts is a report on what happened over a particular period, and this post covers the current week as well as the previous one (23rd February to 6th March).
Audit time
I’ve mentioned the GNOME Foundation’s audit on numerous occassions previously. This is being conducted as a matter of routine, but it is our first full formal audit, so we have been learning a lot about what’s involved.
This week has been the audit fieldwork itself, which has been quite intense and a lot of work for everyone involved. The audit team consists of 5 people, most of whom are accountants of different grades. Our own finance team has been meeting with them three times a day since Tuesday, answering questions, doing walkthroughs of our systems, and providing additional documents as requested.
A big part of the audit is cross-referencing and checking documentation, and we have been busy responding to requests for information throughout the week. On last count, we have provided 140 documents to the auditors this week alone, on 20 different themes, including statements, receipts, contracts, invoices, sponsorship agreements, finance reports, and so on.
We’re expecting the draft audit report in about three weeks. Initial signs are good!
GUADEC 2026
Planning activity for
GUADEC 2026
has continued over the past two weeks. That includes organising catering, audio visual facilities, a photographer, and sponsorship work.
Registration for the event is now open. The Call for Papers is also open and will close on 13 March – just one week away! If you would like to present this year, please submit an abstract!
If you would like
travel sponsorship
for GUADEC, there are two deadlines to submit a request: 15th March (for those who need to book travel early, such as if they need a visa) and 24th May (for those with less time pressure).
LAS 2026
This year’s
Linux App Summit
is happening in Berlin, on the 16th and 17th May, and is shaping up to be a great event. As usual we are co-organizing the event with KDE, and the
call for proposals
has just opened. If you’d like to present, you have until 23rd March to submit a paper.
The Travel Committee will be accepting
travel applications
for LAS attendees this year, so if you’d like to attend and need travel assistance, please submit a request no later than 13th April.
Infrastructure
On the infrastracture side, GNOME’s single sign on service has been integrated with blogs.gnome.org, which is great for security, as well as meaning that you won’t need to remember an extra password for our WordPress instance. Many thanks to
miniOrange
for providing us with support for their OAuth plugin for WordPress, which has allowed this to happen!
That’s it for my update this week. In addition to the highlights that I’ve mentioned, there are quite a number of other activities happening at the Foundation right now, particularly around new programs, some of which we’re not quite ready to talk about, but hope to provide updates on soon.
Welcome to another GNOME Foundation update post, covering highlights from the past two weeks (this week and last week). It’s been a busy time, particularly due to conference planning and our upcoming audit – read on to find out more!
Linux App Summit 2026
We were thrilled to be able to
announce the location and dates of this year’s Linux App Summit this week
. The conference will happen in Berlin on the 16th and 17th of May, at Betahaus Berlin. More information is available on the
LAS website
As usual, we are very pleased to be collaborating with KDE on this year’s LAS. Our partnership on LAS has been a real success that we hope to continue.
Travel sponsorship for LAS 2026 is available for Foundation members through the Travel Committee, so head over to the
travel page
if you would like to attend and need financial support.
February’s Board meeting
The Board of Directors it’s regular monthly meeting last week, on 9th February. Highlights from the meeting included:
We finally caught up on our minutes, approving the minutes from
a total of nine meetings
. This was a big relief, and hopefully we will be able to stay on top of the minutes now that we’re caught up.
The Board was thrilled to formally add Nirbheek Chauhan as a member of the Travel Committee. Many contributors will know Nirbheek as a longstanding GStreamer hacker, and he’s already been doing some great work to help with travel. Thanks Nirbheek!
The Board approved a new
document retention and destruction policy
, which is something that we are encouraged to have by regulators.
I gave an update on the operational highlights from the last month, including fundraising, conference planning, and audit preparation.
The Board considered a proposal for an exciting new program that we’re hoping to launch very soon. More details to follow soon.
The next Board meeting is scheduled for March 9th.
Audit submissions
As I’ve mentioned in previous updates, the GNOME Foundation is due to be audited very soon. This is a routine occurrence for non-profits like us, but this is our first formal audit, so there’s a good deal of learning and setup to be done.
Last week was the deadline to submit all the documentation for the audit, which meant that many of us were extremely busy finalising numbers, filling in spreadsheets, and tidying up other documentation ready to send it all to the auditors.
Our finance team *really* went the extra mile for us to get everything ready on time, so I’d like to give them a huge thank you for helping us out.
The audit inspection itself will happen in the first week of March, so preparations continue, as we assemble and organise our records, update our policies, and so on.
GUADEC 2026
Planning for this summer’s conference has continued over the past two weeks. In case you missed it, the
location and dates
have been announced, and
accommodation bookings are open
at a reduced rate. In the background we are gearing up to open the call for papers, and the sponsorship effort is on its way. Now is a good time to start thinking about any talk proposals that you’d like to submit.
Membership certificates
cool community effort
is currently underway to provide certificates for GNOME Foundation members. This is a great idea in my opinion, as it will allow contributors to get official recognition which can be used for job applications and so on. More volunteers to help out would definitely be welcome.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading, and feel free to ask questions in the comments.
Welcome to another GNOME Foundation weekly update! FOSDEM happened last week, and we had a lot of activity around the conference in Brussels. We are also extremely busy getting ready for our upcoming audit, so there’s lots to talk about. Let’s get started.
FOSDEM
FOSDEM happened in Brussels, Belgium, last weekend, from 31st January to 1st February. There were lots of GNOME community members in attendance, and plenty of activities around the event, including talks and several hackfests. The Foundation was busy with our presence at the conference, plus our own fringe events.
Board hackfest
Seven of our nine directors met for an afternoon and a morning prior to FOSDEM proper. Face to face hackfests are something that the Board has done at various times previously, and have always been a very effective way to move forward on big ticket items. This event was no exception, and I was really happy that we were able to make it happen.
During the event we took the time to review the Foundation’s financials, and to make some detailed plans in a number of key areas. It’s exciting to see some of the initiatives that we’ve been talking about starting to take more shape, and I’m looking forward to sharing more details soon.
Advisory Board meeting
The afternoon of Friday 30th January was occupied with a
GNOME Foundation Advisory Board
meeting. This is a regular occurence on the day before FOSDEM, and is an important opportunity for the GNOME Foundation Board to meet with partner organizations and supporters.
Turn out for the meeting was excellent, with Canonical, Google, Red Hat, Endless and PostmarketOS all in attendance. I gave a presentation on the how the Foundation is currently performing, which seemed to be well-received. We then had presentations and discussion amongst Advisory Board members.
I thought that the discussion was useful, and we identified a number of areas of shared interest. One of these was around how partners (companies, projects) can get clear points of contact for technical decision making in GNOME and beyond. Another positive theme was a shared interest in accessibility work, which was great to see.
We’re hoping to facilitate further conversations on these topics in future, and will be holding our next Advisory Board meeting in the summer prior to GUADEC. If there are any organizations out there would like to join the Advisory Board, we would love to hear from you.
Conference stand
GNOME had a stand during both FOSDEM days, which was really busy. I worked the stand on the Saturday and had great conversations with people who came to say hi. We also sold a lot of t-shirts and hats!
I’d like to give a huge thank you to Maria Majadas who organized and ran our stand this year. It is incredibly exhausting work and we are so lucky to have Maria in our community. Please say thank you to her!
We also had plenty of other notable volunteers, including Julian Sparber, Ignacy Kuchciński, Sri Ramkrishna. Richard Litteaur, our previous Interim Executive Director even took a shift on the stand.
Social
On the Saturday night there was a GNOME social event, hosted at a local restaurant. As always it was fantastic to get together with fellow contributors, and we had a good turnout with 40-50 people there.
Audit preparation
Moving on from FOSDEM, there has been plenty of other activity at the Foundation in recent weeks. The first of these is preparation for our upcoming audit. I have written a fair bit about this in these previous updates. The audit is a routine exercise, but this is also our first, so we are learning a lot.
The deadline for us to provide our documentation submission to the auditors is next Tuesday, so everyone on the finance side of the operation has been really busy getting all that ready. Huge thanks to everyone for their extra effort here.
GUADEC & LAS planning
Conference planning has been another theme in the past few weeks. For GUADEC,
accommodation options have been announced
, artwork has been produced, and local information is going up on the website.
Linux App Summit
, which we co-organise with KDE, has been a bit delayed this year, but we have a venue now and are in the process of finalizing the budget. Announcements about the dates and location will hopefully be made quite soon.
Google verification
A relatively small task, but a good one to highlight: this week we facilitated (ie. paid for) the assessment process for GNOME’s integration with Google services. This is an annual process we have to go through in order to keep Evolution Data Server working with Google.
Infrastructure optimization
Finally, Bart, along with Andrea, has been doing some work to optimize the resource usage of GNOME infrastructure. If you are using GNOME services you might have noticed some subtle changes as a result of this, like Anubis popping up more frequently.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading; I’ll see you next week!