2025 Board Candidate: Arun Raghavan

Community Elections and Referendums
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2025 Board Candidate: Arun Raghavan

Name: Arun Raghavan
Email: arunsr@gnome.org
Affiliation: Asymptotic Inc.

Hi all!
After over a decade of really wanting to do this, I would finally like to put myself forward as candidate for the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors.

By way of history, I have been a user and advocate of free software for over 25 years, and have been in the GNOME community for about 20 of those years. In the past (~2003-2010), I also helped organise F/OSS and GNOME-specific events in India (primarily during the Linux Bangalore and FOSS.in days).

My first code contributions were to Beagle in 2007 as part of the Google Summer of Code, after which I was part of the Gentoo GNOME team for several years. For the last 15 years, I have been a developer and maintainer of GStreamer, PulseAudio, and more recently PipeWire.

This has also been the basis for most of my professional life. I currently run my own open source consulting firm where I work with different kinds of organisations that use and contribute to the projects that I am part of upstream. In this role, I am also often working with folks who are new to the community, and provide mentorship and guidance as they find their way in.

Over this period, I have mostly observed the structure of the GNOME community and its relationship with the Foundation from the outside. Now, I would like to take a more active part in helping the Foundation set itself to be a solid platform for serving the community well into the future.

To this end, the immediate priorities for the board as I see it are:

  • Financial stability: Sustainably financing the commons is imo one of the large, unsolved problems of our times, and our problems on this front are well known. It is critical that the Foundation finds itself on more solid ground if we want to be able to accomplish our goals.

  • Communication: Transparency is always a hot topic in these manifestos, but I think the starting point must be communication. The This Week in GNOME effort and our new Executive Director’s weekly posts are good demonstrations of its importance in keeping our community vital and feeling connected.

I’m keeping that list short, because the rest of it is on-going work. I have been delighted to see a steady inflow of fresh faces in the community, and I would love for the Foundation to help the community continue building this momentum.

The part the Foundation can play in this is having events and outreach to build an inclusive, global community, as well as raising funding for all the work that needs to be done – I would like to help it do that.

Happy to answer any questions!

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Strongly second Arun’s candidacy!

I also have some follow-up questions.

Concretely, what steps do you intend to take to improve things along those two lines? If not steps, what’s your framework for solving these problems?

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Thank you for seconding and the questions!

For the two items I highlighted, here’s a rough summary of my thoughts/ideas:

  1. Financial stability: maybe this is already in place, but I think we should have a clear idea of our “burn rate” at all times, and raise alarm bells if we don’t have sufficient “runway” available (sufficient is highly dependent on the organisation, so I hesitate to fix a number here – is it 6 months? 1 year? 3 months? TBD). I would start by understanding how our financial reporting/tracking works, and make sure we have the visibility to keep abreast at regular intervals of these metrics. I tend to be somewhat conservative in my thinking about financial preparedness, and I hope that is a positive in this context.

  2. Communication: In addition to Steven’s updates, one thing I was thinking of is a summary of Board minutes being more widely distributed. I am happy to see that minutes are posted more regularly than they were at some point in the past. Increasing their visibility by putting summaries on Planet and/or TWIG might be a good way to keep the community abreast of goings-on. I have some less fleshed-out, pie-in-the-sky ideas about adding some avenues to gather community feedback for the Board and Foundation in addition to the AGM.

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Knowing Arun for more than 15 years, I believe he would be a great candidate for the board and also strongly second his candidacy.

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I have known Arun for more than a decade and I am very happy to see his candidacy, which I strongly second. I believe he would be a very valuable Board member.

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Valid candidacy - is_foundation_member.

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Hi All,
A quick update/disclosure: after I announced my candidacy, my partner has independently come to be in consideration for the position of Treasurer of the Foundation. This should not have any impact on my candidacy, but I did want to add this explicit note for transparency.

Cheers,
Arun

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