2026 Board Candidate : Guillaume Bernard
- Name: Guillaume Bernard
- Email: gbernard@gnome.org
- Affiliation: MAIF
Background
I joined the free software community in 2013, when I was 15 years old and still in secondary school. I started by contributing to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS through bug reporting, before moving to Mageia and contributing translations. Meanwhile, I wrote for Wikipedia and worked on OpenStreetMap.
At the time, I could not write code. What I could do was understand English, translate into French, and help make software accessible to more people. Translation taught me an important lesson very early: accessibility is not optional. If people cannot use software in their own language, they are excluded from it. I quickly realized that contributing upstream to GNOME would allow me to have a broader impact. Since then, GNOME has been my home.
I have now spent more years of my life inside the GNOME community than outside of it. The people I met here, the values we share, and the work we build together have profoundly shaped who I am today, both personally and professionally.
Today, I maintain and develop Damned Lies, GNOME’s translation platform. I am also involved as an internationalization coordinator and as coordinator of the French GNOME community.
Through these roles, I have worked across many aspects of our ecosystem: translations, contributor onboarding, coordination, community organization, communication, and long-term maintenance work. This experience has convinced me of something important: GNOME is not built by code alone.
GNOME exists because people translate, document, review, organize events, welcome newcomers, communicate, moderate communities, maintain infrastructure, and care for one another. These contributions are just as essential as software development, and I want to represent them on the Foundation Board.
In addition to GNOME, I was elected president, then tresurer of my local free software community, Rochelug and from 2019 to 2022 was the founder of a free software project and non-profit organization, Koala Éduc, in which I was elected treasurer and was responsible for the development and quality of our main project, Koala Educ. This adventure ended in 2022, mainly because of the pandemia and the public subsidy being reallocated elsewhere 
. I acquired experience with boards and project management and requests for sponsorship.
My priorities for the Foundation Board
Supporting non-code contributions
One of GNOME’s greatest strengths is its diversity of contributions. Many people join our community without being software engineers, and that must remain true.
We need to continue valuing and supporting translators, documentation writers, designers, accessibility contributors, event organizers, local communities, communicators, and infrastructure maintainers. These roles are critical to the health and sustainability of GNOME.
I also want to explore ways for the Foundation to better recognize volunteer contributions as real professional experience. Community work develops technical, organizational, linguistic, and leadership skills that deserve visibility and recognition.
Accessibility and inclusion
Accessibility and inclusion are not secondary goals: they are part of GNOME’s mission. This includes accessibility for people with disabilities, but also accessibility across cultures, economic backgrounds, genres, languages and levels of technical expertise.
Internationalization and localization are fundamental to this mission. A free desktop environment should be usable everywhere, by everyone, regardless of where they live or which language they speak.
I want GNOME to continue being a community where people feel welcome contributing in many different ways, and where kindness, mentorship, and collaboration remain central to our culture.
Ecology and digital sustainability
Free software also plays an important ecological role. GNOME’s approach favors openness, local control, and long-term usability rather than forced hardware renewal and permanent dependence on cloud services. Our local-first model helps preserve users’ privacy and confidentiality, reduces infrastructure costs, and allows people and organizations to continue using existing hardware for longer.
In a world where the technology industry increasingly encourages overconsumption, software bloat, and centralized services, this matters. Efficient and sustainable software is not only a technical concern: it is a social and environmental responsibility.
I believe GNOME should continue promoting a computing model that empowers users, respects their data, and extends the lifetime of devices instead of treating hardware as disposable.
Growing GNOME’s public and institutional presence
Across Europe, public institutions are increasingly discussing technological sovereignty and reducing dependence on proprietary platforms. When administrations or companies migrate to GNU/Linux and GNOME, they often highlight the financial savings achieved. But behind those savings lies decades of work by free software communities and much of it volunteer labor.
I believe the GNOME Foundation should more actively promote and defend the value created by our community. This means engaging with public institutions, companies, conferences, and decision makers to explain not only the technical benefits of GNOME, but also the social and economic value of sustaining free software ecosystems.
I want to help strengthen these connections and advocate for greater reinvestment into the communities that make this work possible.
Bringing new contributors into GNOME
Attracting and retaining new contributors is essential for GNOME’s future. Our community already has strong onboarding models, especially through initiatives such as Circle and the Incubator. They lower the barrier to entry and allow people to learn GNOME’s practices, quality standards, and culture while building their own projects.
I would like to see similar approaches expanded beyond application development: for translations, event organization, community building, outreach, and other non-code activities.
This is especially important at a time when many junior workers in the technology sector face increasing uncertainty. Contributing to free software gives people practical experience, mentorship, visibility, and a community in which they can grow.
GNOME can and should remain a place where people learn, contribute, and build meaningful experience together.
GNOME has given me far more than technical skills. It gave me a community, a culture, friendships, and a sense of purpose.
Serving on the Foundation Board would be an opportunity to give back to the project that shaped my life, while helping promote GNOME, free software, accessibility, and our international community to the wider world.
I would be honored to represent our community and help contribute to its future.
