2025 Board Candidate: Lorenz Wildberg

Community Elections and Referendums
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  • Name: Lorenz Wildberg
  • Affiliation: Development-Political Volunteer in Cambodia with Bread for the World
  • Email: lwildberg@gnome.org

Hello, I am Lorenz. Here I post the announcement of my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors.

Most people will know me for my involvement in the Vala project and the GNOME Berlin community. Also, I have been GSoC mentor in 2024 and 2025.
You can find me in the fediverse at lw64@chaos.social and in many GNOME matrix channels as lw64:gnome.org (please no DM requests if I don’t know you).

First I want to tell a story, a story that many in our community share. It is mostly my story too:

In this example, a highschooler starts using linux and is interested in the idea behind open source.
They picked GNOME as the project to contribute to, because of its philosophy. Though usually they start with software through other projects.
First a bug fix, soon a first app work in progress, eventually published on flathub. Maybe also non-code contributions. But everything only in their free time.

Sadly, this is where the story stops for many people. The next steps get harder and harder:

  • Become GNOME Foundation member
  • start contributing in the lower parts of the stack
  • join teams and take over responsibilities
  • go to conferences

The fact that many people don’t take these steps is a big problem.
GNOME is a community project. That means that to keep it running, constantly new contributors need to be recruited, to fill the gaps opened by leaving community members.
And since we want the project to grow to achieve greater results, the community also needs to grow.
New apps are nice, but also very important are the core platform, the operating system, the runtime for the apps.
They need to be maintained and adapted to new technologies with time. Right now, it is well known how underresourced they are.
Also, we need more cooperation with other open source projects, to build solutions more quickly and easily, without doing everything on our own.
It is an unbelievable achievement that we have so much code that is partly still the same from more than 30 years ago, but we need to make sure we can continue for the next 30 years as well.

In other words: GNOME needs to improve at recruiting more newcomers and supporting them better.

To change this, I want to have a better representation of the interests of those:

  • who are “newcomers” or treated like it
  • without foundation membership yet
  • without a paid position to work on GNOME
  • who just contribute and not maintain yet
  • who cannot fund long travel
  • who are not in any team or couldn’t acquire any responsibility yet
  • who have a lot of motivation, but are being held back
  • who have backgrounds in other projects and only contribute to GNOME in part of their time
  • yet without recognition, reputation, power

When I am on the board, I will do exactly that. At the moment they are barely represented. And I believe it is in the interest of the whole GNOME project to listen to these people more.
I have this background. I told my story. I have only been contributing to GNOME for 4 years, and I am very happy I was able to take all the steps until here, but I want to empower others to do the same.

One other topic I will try to focus on is the distrust of the community towards the GNOME foundation. This is my point of view:

  1. I see the foundation as part of the community. Board directors are elected from the community, by the community. They do not have any other privileges. Everyone from the community should be able to join efforts led by the foundation. The foundation should always actively involve the community and ask for feedback in all their decisions.
  2. We need more transparency and accountability.
  3. Better and more communication towards contributors, as well as the larger community
  4. The community should be more encouraged to organize efforts by themselves (including local events, fundraising, …). Of course, when it is useful or necessary, the foundation should still provide support.
  5. Improved moderation & CoC enforcement, and also better care over community health and internal conflict resolutions
  6. A proper resolution and communication for the community on the Sonny Piers CoC process

Additionally:

  • I am very concerned about the GNOME Foundation’s dependency on the USA.
  • I believe we need more GNOME OS on real hardware (preinstalled)! (also fundraising opportunity)
  • More local communities and events!
  • I love watching GNOME streamers, we need more!

If there are any questions about something I mentioned above, everyone should feel free to ask :slight_smile:

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Valid candidacy - is_foundation_member.

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Hi Lorenz. I agree that making it easier for newcomers to become more involved in GNOME is important for the health of the project. We have a thriving app community through initiatives like Circle, but the core platform always needs attention as well. So, I’d like to second your candidacy

I have a follow up question: do you have any concrete actions or changes in mind to encourage and support newcomers to become more involved across the project? Are there decisions that you feel were taken without due consideration for newcomers in the community? What are the pain points that you feel could be addressed through increased representation on the board?

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Thanks for the questions! I will try to answer them:

do you have any concrete actions or changes in mind to encourage and support newcomers to become more involved across the project?

I do have some things in mind already, but I think the ideas don’t need to come only from the board. I am always looking for new ideas from others. Recently there was for example a really interesting discussion in the foundation matrix chat (everyone should join there) where a couple of ideas were raised, for example:

But also, I think that it has a lot to do with the general “culture” in the gnome community. At least for newcomers it often doesn’t feel as welcoming as it should be. And this has many causes. It goes from improvable onboarding documentation for some teams for example, to (seemingly) harassment in chats in the worst case.

Additionally, there is not a lot of space to talk about such issues. At least I have never seen big discussions about this, people prefer to avoid certain topics, or just don’t know or care enough. And as a newcomer usually you don’t join and immediately complain. What I see is that either people drop out, or accept everything.

And then, there are the power structures. In GNOME, those who are already for a long time contributing, maybe in a paid position, hold most of the power to make decisions. It is very hard to acquire recognition and a reputation as a new contributor. Without them you are invisible.

To address this I want to first bring this topic up, I want to let everyone know that they can and should talk about this. And then of course we need to think about how to improve it. For example how to make it easier for newcomers to get recognized for their work. Or to make onboarding ramps smoother.

This applies also to the foundation. I would like to make it easier to join committees for example.

And often it is not even that hard, but many people just “feel” that it might be, because that is what they get told. I want to communicate that this is not true. I want to encourage others to join.

About increased representation on the board: It is one step to make the people visible. And I hope it can give more confidence to those who didn’t speak up yet.

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Can you elaborate on what fundraising opportunity you see here?

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There are two reasons:

  1. “normal people” don’t know what a “desktop environment” is, but they probably do know what an “operating system” is. Because that is what the user cares about, the final product they get on their device. Also it is well established already: “Windows”, “MacOS”, etc are “operating systems”.
  2. The other reason is that while there are of course many operating systems that ship with GNOME, there is none that does everything we want. And this is very understandable as every community has their own objectives and interests. But it becomes a problem when we want to showcase the results for example of a funded development effort. Needing to wait for the next stable release or users to manually install some component to see the results is really bad. And often we work across the whole stack including even services like flathub. GNOME OS is the only way this can all work together right away.

About GNOME OS being preinstalled on devices, I just see that as a very interesting way to get more users, more visibility, and more funding opportunities.

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Two questions:

  • What do you think we can do better than the distributions that already exist, to convince OEMs to ship GNOME OS?
  • Considering travel is complicated for a lot of people, including local events, is there something we can do to make smaller online communities thrive?
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  • What do you think we can do better than the distributions that already exist, to convince OEMs to ship GNOME OS?

Convincing OEMs is of course for us probably just as difficult as for distributions. That’s why I would start where those were already successful. And then see what comes next.
But the big advantage that GNOME OS has is, that it is made by GNOME. No one else can claim that. Just like app developers publishing their apps themselves on flathub, GNOME developers ship GNOME via GNOME OS to their users.
GNOME OS is not made by packagers.

  • Considering travel is complicated for a lot of people, including local events, is there something we can do to make smaller online communities thrive?

I am not sure about that, its a bit unspecific. It would be a question of what the current problems are. I see the global GNOME community and also sub-project-, team- or initiative-specific communities already thriving in many places. But sure if there is space for improvements I would be very interested. Also I know others have already a lot of experience with such topics.
I can tell about my experiences in the Vala community and the GNOME Berlin (online) community, but I don’t know if this is the right place for this :sweat_smile:

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