2024 Board Candidate: Manuel Genovés

My name is Manuel Genovés (manugen@gnome.org) and I’m hereby announcing that I’ll be a candidate in the 2024 board elections.

I currently work for the Economy Faculty at the University of Valencia and I’ve been a GNOME contributor for 7+ years. My primary contributions are around the Apostrophe Markdown app, which I’ve been the maintainer of since 2017, and Libadwaita’s animation framework.

I’m running for the board this year with four main goals:

  1. Increase community involvement in the foundation
  2. Fix foundation finances
  3. Find ways for the foundation to help solve important app platform issues
  4. Introduce new/better conflict resolution processes

1. Community involvement

The foundation has suffered from a lack of involvement by members for years, both on the board and in support structures such as committees (e.g. travel, CoC, Circle, and so on). By running for the board I want to send a signal to others to get involved, but as part of my work on the board I also want to make these support structures more attractive to members and actively try to get other people to help with this important work.

2. Finances

I want to make sure the foundation comes back to stable financial footing. This will necessarily require big changes, but in doing this I want us to learn from the mistakes of the past. The foundation’s current course of trying to cover most support functions with staff is not sustainable financially, but it’s also had the additional negative effect of alienating the foundation from its members. Many of us stopped expecting anything from the foundation, because it has been non-functional in supporting the actual members for so long. Cutting our expenses and getting community members more involved in support structures works to fix both issues at the same time.

3. App platform

The GNOME developer platform is great in many ways, and has seen very important improvements over the last years that have made it a very attractive platform to develop for, but some of the core modules (e.g. GTK) suffer from a severe lack of maintainer person power. As app developers this often means that parts of the platform are way behind others, which can leave our apps in a problematic limbo for years. For example, Apostrophe could not be ported to GTK4 for 2+ years because it required WebKitGTK and spell checking. Both of these are still not fully fixed at the platform level, by the way.

We have seen that in practice corporate support for these modules is not sufficient, which is why I think the foundation should fundraise specifically for the goal of contracting or employing developers from the community to fix critical platform issues like these.

There’s also a gap between the platform stack developers and its users, that is, GNOME app devs. This kind of gaps lead to frustration on both parts, frustration that could be alleviated if the foundation was to enable spaces where this could be addressed. While GUADEC aims to fill that role, it can be argued that it has not been enough. Other foundations have addressed this issue, which is not unique to GNOME, in creative ways. I’d like for ours to at least explore what can be done in that regard.

4. Conflict resolution

Over the past years, it feels like we have had more internal conflicts than we used to, and generally a more divided project. And no project is worth the mental health of the people who are keeping it alive. I believe this is in part because we lack good structures and processes for conflict resolution outside the CoC committee, which is not the correct venue for this.

I would like to establish a new committee or other structure that can be brought in to mediate conflicts, and guidelines or some kind of formal process for handling disagreements, both technical and social.

14 Likes

Yes to everything in your letter. I’m particularly interested in fixing the conflict prone culture of the project. I would be interested in joining a committee to help de-escalate issues before they grow too big.

3 Likes

Candidacy has received enough endorsements and is approved.