2025 Board Candidate: Aaditya Singh

Community Elections and Referendums
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Aaditya Singh

Affiliation: Shangrila Pvt. Ltd.
Email: aadityasingh@gnome.org

Hey folks,

I am Aaditya, Community Lead of GNOME Nepal, representing Open Source and GNOME from the Himalayan country of Nepal.

I am a normal person who loves contributing to FOSS, particularly GNOME. Most of my contributions have been non-technical. I led the local team for GNOME Asia Summit 2023, Kathmandu, Nepal. This was followed by my involvement as a global organizer for the GNOME Asia Summit 2024, Bengaluru, India.

GNOME Nepal is now a community of more than 300+ members on its platform. The community was started last year in April when I got the permission from the foundation to have a local chapter in Nepal. The journey from a single person to a significant community that has now won the bid to organize UbuCon Asia 2025 has taught me a lot about how we can grow GNOME awareness and its applications within the local community and people of the countries that are yet to adopt open source.

GNOME Nepal has till now provided instruction and training sessions to 1000+ individuals, in just a duration of 1 year. Started own projects to encourage newcomers into the open source contributions, both technical and non-technical, which can later be instrumental in the global projects. Increased the representation of the Nepali speakers from 1 to 5+ in the recent GNOME Asia summit. GNOME Nepal itself became a cornerstone for the revival of Ubuntu Nepal, which was inactive for a decade.

I believe that I have the leadership and teamwork capability that is valuable for the position for which I am giving my candidacy. If elected, my focus will be to :

  • Maintain better communication and support to the local GNOME communities and groups from all over the globe, like GNOME Germany, GNOME Africa, GNOME Nepal, etc., and their contributors.

  • Encourage newcomers from countries with less open source adoption to join and contribute to the Foundation’s project.

  • Facilitate the formation and sustainability of the Local GNOME Chapters around the globe. This will increase GNOME Foundation and its project’s awareness right from the grassroots level.

  • Bring in more non-technical contributors to contribute to the areas like Design, promotion, and event management for the Foundation.

  • Offer comprehensive support for events such as GUADEC, GNOME Asia Summit, and GNOME LATAM by facilitating contributor engagement, securing sponsorships, and assisting with event management and operational logistics.

So, my focus will be more on facilitating the formation of GNOME’s local communities and user groups all over the globe, contributing to the already formed communities’ sustainability, encouraging and bringing in newcomers and contributors, and helping the Foundation’s Conferences and events.

Regardless of the outcome of the elections, I have been an active contributor and always will remain one.

Thank you for your consideration.

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I strongly second Aaditya’s candidacy!

It is very much needed to have a strong framework to support local communities and grow them.

I also have some follow-up questions.

  1. What steps and measures would you like to take to improve the local community’s ecosystem, and what support you’d ideally like from the foundation?
  2. How would you ensure a steady flow of sponsorships? As both events and local communities would require significant investments.
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I second Aaditya’s candidacy as well!

He’s doing amazing work building FOSS communities in Nepal and has a great understanding of how to organise local communities and promote them internationally. I believe he would be a great asset to the GNOME Foundation and will help make GNOME more global. As a GNOME Foundation member from Iran, it’s important to me to have someone on the board who genuinely cares about local communities.

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Thank you, Aryan, for this.

Also answering your questions:

The steps and measures I would take are :

  • The first step will be to create a proper framework for onboarding new chapters. Appropriate guidelines and documentation will be made to make the chapters easy to follow during the formation. The mentorship format, the events, and the session structures. The team format and many more will be defined in a properly documented way so that those interested in forming a new chapter don’t have to take the burden to do these fundamental works. Also, the branding kit and guidelines too.

  • For the already formed chapters, we will have to review the process and workings. Suggest wherever possible to make it better, and learn wherever possible where we can do better. We need to create a communication channel for better transmission of goals and activities.

  • Facilitate cross-regional collaboration between the chapters and user groups. We must let the newer ones learn from the mature ones. Also, this will encourage newcomers from diverse regions.

  • We have to establish a shared resource pool, which consists of design, session proposals, presentations, tools, branding kit, documents, and many more. Also, we have to create a platform where the contributors can contribute to other chapters too, which need it.
    E.g. GNOME Nepal’s designer will be helping GNOME Germany with design work when needed.

  • We have to promote regional events, hackfests, challenges, meetups, experience sharing, and training workshops.

The support I would ideally like from the foundation would be time-to-time updates on what is going on in the local communities, hearing what they need support with, and trying to facilitate it if the foundation finds the requests appropriate.

The first phase would be to create local communities. Once the communities and the network are formed, the following steps can be taken:

  • My personal belief is that the local communities have to be sustainable on itself and less dependent on foundations for monetary support in case of normal community activities and processes.

  • Local communities can establish long-term partnerships and relations with local companies that follow FOSS values or use open-sourced technologies and ed-tech groups in terms of promotions. The companies will be promoted in the events and sessions of the local communities.

  • Provide training and instruction sessions to educational institutions, which in turn provide financial and venue support for the communities.

  • Foundation to help the local communities expand their networks of sponsors so that they can get more sponsors and funding.

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Thank you so much @Revisto for the support. Your interest in supporting the local communities really is impressive, and I hope we can together expand the GNOME’s local community more in Iran.

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Valid candidacy - is_foundation_member.