Hey everyone 
My name is Julian Hofer and you can contact me via julianhofer@gnome.org.
Hereby, I am applying for the Board of Directors.
For the past five years, I have contributed to GNOME as a volunteer. During that time, I became a co-maintainer of Podcasts, Workbench and apps.gnome.org. Additionally, I write and maintain the book GUI Development with Rust and GTK 4.
For the past four years, I worked for the NGO Deltares with the motto “dare to share”. That also means that all software Deltares produces is open source. Here, I encountered the usual problems of open source organisations: Convincing stakeholders to prefer open source software, to fund the development, and finally, to fund maintenance and not only new features.
I expect that many of the insights I gained there can be transferred to GNOME. Starting from July, I will be working at prefix.dev on open source software utilizing the conda ecosystem.
There are two major reasons that motivate me to run for the Board:
Fixing governance issues, and particularly the dysfunctional relationship between the Foundation and the rest of the community.
- The Foundation lacks transparency. It is difficult to navigate how decisions are made, how they benefit GNOME, and why they were made in the first place.
- The Foundation’s executive organs work isolated from the community. Interactions between the staff and the community are very limited. We need to work as one and not against each other.
Supporting the Foundation on the way to sustainability, which requires bold changes. This means scaling the team up or down depending on the opportunities the Foundation finds, how realistic they are, and how they fit into our budget. Therefore, I want to help the Foundation to set realistic goals to get back on track.