Hi everyone!
I’m writing to announce that I’m running for the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors!
Background
I’ve been around the GNOME community for a few years at this point, so I’ve crossed paths with many of you. Still, I’d love to give a small reintroduction and my background!
Since 2018, I was working on an independent image-based Linux distribution called carbonOS (blog post with some of the pre-history, for the curious). I can summarize the goal as “Building an OS that makes the Linux desktop usable for non-enthusiasts”. By 2023, the project had in many ways converged with GNOME’s development/QA/testing platform GNOME OS, and so I decided to move my efforts upstream. These days I am working on GNOME OS and systemd with the goal to make GNOME OS a general-purpose OS.
I was one of the contractors during the Sovereign Tech Fund’s (STF) ~1 million Euro investment into GNOME during 2023/2024. I worked on building out GNOME’s support for systemd-homed, helped out with Codethink’s systemd-sysupdate work, and started work on a new installer for GNOME OS. Later on in the project I moved into more of an administrative role, where I worked to help navigate the issues of the time and wind the project down as the budget ran out. You can read our final report for more context.
After the GNOME STF project, I got hired to Red Hat’s desktop team and have been working there since. I recently gave a talk about some of the work I’ve done. These days I’m working on save/restore support, and have also gotten involved with Flatpak and xdg-desktop-portal alongside Sebastian, including Flatpak Next. Day-to-day, I maintain gnome-session and co-maintain GDM.
Outside of my development work, I’m heavily involved in organizing STF projects. After the first STF project wound down, Tobias and I put together an STF application for systemd. We were approved, and the STF invested ~400 thousand EUR for 2025/2026. I am now managing this project in both a technical and organizational capacity. My responsibilities include: writing reports to get invoices paid, maintaining the relationship between the team and our fiscal host (Software in the Public Interest) and the STF, meeting with contractors to unblock them both in technical questions and other matters, and much more. More recently, I also helped organize another STF project for 2026/2027, which was approved but has not yet been publicly announced.
Finally, I’ve also been involved in the efforts to stand up Modal, a collective that exists to strategically fund work on the Linux desktop stack. The goal is to fund upstream work such that we build a viable competitor to the proprietary operating systems, including the mobile ones. There are a few great posts on the blog that explain the aims of Modal in more detail.
Priorities
If I am elected director, I would focus my energies within that role on the following.
Supporting the Current Trajectory
The GNOME Foundation is currently on a very positive trajectory. Its financial health has improved significantly, procedures are being refined or established, it has become more transparent, and it is now exploring ways to directly fund the community (via programs like the Fellowship). The Foundation exists to serve the project and the community, and the changes being made improve its ability to do so. There is, however, still plenty of work that needs to be done, and as a director I will vote for continuing this revamp of the way the GNOME Foundation operates.
Grant Work
During the first STF project we learned the dangers of over-loading the Foundation’s organizational capacity. However, as the Foundation re-architects itself, I believe that it may soon become ready to take on coordinated grant work again. Meanwhile, due to the current global circumstances governments are funding FOSS projects. We should not miss the opportunity. As soon as the Foundation becomes ready, we should again prepare an application for the STF, though perhaps at a smaller scale than the first one.
Another concrete step we can take is to execute on an idea I’ve previously work-shopped w/ Steven: the Foundation should start keeping track of community members’ availability for work. This knowledge would greatly help GNOME and related communities plan for such grant projects. In my experience, the number one bottleneck for planning grant work is finding the people we can hire to do it!
Flathub
The Foundation needs to bring Flathub’s payments system over the finish line. Getting our community of app developers paid is crucial for the continued growth of the Linux App ecosystem. We also need to find ways to make Flathub itself more sustainable, especially because the continued growth of the ecosystem (and ongoing wave of AI slop submissions) is putting too much pressure on our limited sysadmin resources and volunteer app review team!
Baseline AI policy
GNOME currently doesn’t have any kind of AI policy in place, and that is a problem. Individual projects and maintainers may have policies that they’ve been using, but for projects that haven’t declared anything there’s nothing to establish some ground rules. The Foundation can establish such a fallback by establishing AI guidelines for the GNOME GitLab infrastructure, or alternatively by changing the definition of “Official GNOME Software” to exclude slop. Either way, we should be banning AI slop, assigning full responsibility for all code to the individual contributors, and allowing individual maintainers to opt into stronger AI policies should they wish to do so.
My Details
- Name: Adrian Vovk
- Email: adrianvovk@gnome.org
- Affiliation: Red Hat