2026 Board Candidate: Sriram Ramkrishna

Community Elections and Referendums
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Sriram Ramkrishna (sri@gnome.org) No Affiliation

GNOME Board of Directors 2026 Candidacy

I’m announcing my candidacy to run for the board seat for 2026.

Who Am I

I’m a long serving member of the GNOME project, spanning some decades. Not worth counting how long. :slight_smile: This will be the third time running for the board. I served two continuous runs from 2013 - 2015. The primary thing of note in those terms was I was one of the active directors involved with Groupon trademark battle. Where I worked with Andrea Veri and launched the fight against Groupon on Twitter that lead to one of the most significant examples of community winning against a major corporation in open source history.

Others may know me in my active work with the GNOME extensions community that I launched with Andy Holmes. That community is now mostly running under the capable hands of JustPerfection. I step in when the community needs a hand. I’m also active in the GNOME OS community helping with odds and ends as needed.

Day to day work is mostly on managing Reddit and helping the Engagement Team.

I recently finished along with Kristi Progri and folks from KDE, Linux App Summit in Berlin.

Why Am I Running?

I’ve been involved in fundraising for GNOME and I’ve realized that it’s difficult to do this without being on the board. Meaning, I need to see both sides of the equation and be able to contribute to it from all sides. The fundraising is still something that will need a direct hand and I believe that I can make a difference.

What I Bring

I bring 28 years of experience working in open source working in professional open source. I have a background in fundraising for events, building and managing developer programs, and creating, planning, and running professional events. I understand legal issues from trademarks to privacy laws mostly within the U.S. I’m connected to a lot of open source non-profits like the Open Documentation Foundation, Python Software Foundation, and so on.

People know me as someone who, when enamoured of an idea will bring it to fruition. Linux App Summit and GNOME Extensions are two examples of a pipeline of idea to investment. I work through hard problems and try to solve them. I am present and I do the work.

For fundraising, I spent ten years fundraising for Linux App Summit, fundraising upwards to $15k-18k in those early years. I lead one fundraising campaign during my tenure as a director. Finally, I’ve fundraised for other conferences like SeaGL working to bring sponsors.

I will close with that I bring 20+ years of retrospective GNOME knowledge, advocacy, and representation through talks, keynotes, and booths. I have represented GNOME at conferences, communities, and worked with ad board members.

Thank you for considering my candidacy and happy to answer any questions from the community.

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GNOME Board of Directors Foundation Elections 2026 - Candidates
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I second Sri’s candidacy.

Sri, thank you for everything you do for the community and your unending excitement for GNOME’s success.

For those who don’t know, it’s worth mentioning that Sri moderates non-developer spaces like Reddit and that he is at the forefront of connecting with GNOME’s user community. This is an important aspect of the Foundation’s new fundraising model.

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Hi Sri!

I’ve been involved in fundraising for GNOME and I’ve realized that it’s difficult to do this without being on the board.

As a current board member, I’d like to hear more about this – the community should be able to contribute to these sorts of efforts without being on the Board. It would be a good input into how we could make the Fundraising Committee effective.

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Hi Arun,

Thanks for your question. Since I was on the initial fundraising committee which is now merged with the engagement team. The issue here is that sharing financials is a trust issue when sharing with volunteers.

My approach to fundraising is to be able to take goals and then build a strategy towards those goals and looking to see what is in my toolbox. Some of those strategies incorporate working with external entities. For example, let’s look at this issue that Victoria posted - Collaboration idea with Gnome for Good (#1076) · Issues · Teams / Board · GitLab

This idea came from a conversation I had in the engagement channel. Since I have no authority to reach out for partnerships as I am not a representative of the foundation I have to ask someone else to do it and approve it but then we have to do many iterations with a board representative especially if we’re dealing with sensitive information.

Secondly, I can help take some of the pressure off of Maria who has her hands full doing the engagement. I’ve mostly stepped out of that role because I’m more interested in the fundraising and GNOME OS. I still help of course and mostly through adding automation so that Maria and the others can do social media more efficiently.

The thing with fundraising that makes it a challenge is that you have to really build an institution that is numbers based. How do you measure success in fundraising? These are the things that I’m now instituting in LAS and anything I’m doing. I just posted this retrospective on my blog on LAS:

While the ask is simple, the conversation will be expansive and translates to cultural changes that might need to happen similar to the work Emmanuele Bassi is doing with releases. That’s tough to do as a mere volunteer.

I’ll add one other thing since I’ve see that other candidates are also interested in fundraising. The fundraising that other candidates are focused pertains to development not sustainability. Meaning, grants and STMs fund GNOME development and moves the needle forward and that’s important. We also want to fund or continue to fund the foundation itself so that we have dedicated paid people like an executive director, program manager, and so on. The folks in these roles provide a framework to build on to handle conferences, invoicing, grants and STM funds. Ultimately, even there you need to provide structural metrics because those entities doing grants and funding will want reports and accountability.

Ultimately, I’m asking that this organization take goal taking and try to meet them and measure yourself against them. The best way to do that is to show don’t tell and that’s why I’m running.

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Hi Sri,

Thanks for your reply to Arun! This is pretty clear but I have one question. You mention an Executive Director and Programme Manager. At present, the trajectory of the Foundation is the opposite: reducing costs in favour of a lean and efficient 501(c)(3) operated by involved community members. Historically, the vast majority (80% - 90%) of Foundation expenses went to paying staff and contractors. The shift toward development is, in my mind, profound — and it fundamentally changes what the Foundation represents.

The Foundation is currently hiring a Finance Director. This seems like the perfect paid role to “lay the foundation” (so to speak). But I think it’s clear the community wants the board to keep staff roles lean, in favour of the Foundation focusing its spend on GNOME itself. If you are elected, would you get behind this new mission? Or would you push for additional staff?

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Hi Steven, thanks for the question!

I used staff as an example of sustainability and the importance of a robust general fund. I believe in the mission of a lean GNOME Foundation.

The more nuanced answer is, I support the investment of funds that supports the mission. Like the short term, mission focused staff like the finance director role. But that isn’t the central thrust of what I’m interested in. I’m interested in the fundraising. What we do with it is of course is what the board philosophically wants to do with it. But having a robust general fund in addition to earmark’d fund is my goal..

To achieve that, my focus is really building a data driven organization so that we can do better fundraising, get new advisory board members, and having and tracking achievable goals.

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Makes total sense. Thanks, Sri!

To clarify something: money for the Fellowship is not, to my knowledge, “earmarked” (in 501c3 parlance, “restricted”). My understanding is that it comes from a general fund of unrestricted money. A board member can correct me if I’m wrong about this. This was a large part of what we tried to accomplish last year with recurring donations and the Fellowship: move away from restricted funds and toward general-purpose, unrestricted funds, targeting GNOME itself. The reason is two-fold: (1) restricted funds are a pain to manage and plan around and (2) restricted funds are, almost by definition, one-offs… it’s hard to accomplish anything significant with restricted funds (i.e. most grants) as a revenue source.

It pays to be realistic about this. You are unlikely to find more money than the GNOME Foundation has today unless it is from corporate sponsors. It would take about eight corporate sponsors, at Bronze (the lowest tier), to pay for a single entry/mid-level employee. We might get there! But probably not in the next 24 months if we’re being pragmatic and using yesterday’s weather as it pertains to financial projections. Recurring revenue is the strongest financial backing the Foundation can have, and is the only reasonable source for recurring expenses.

As a result, I would suggest the way to look at this is really reversed: assuming sustained year-on-year growth of recurring revenue which outstrips current expenses, most of your energy as a board member will be invested in projection, budgeting, and risk management. Fundraising, as I’m sure you’re painfully aware, is a slow burn. :wink:

If you are elected to the board, I would strongly encourage you to look into ways to widen the pool of fundraisers for the Foundation so that members don’t feel like they need to run for board elections just to get involved in growing Foundation revenue. But I’m guessing you already have that in the back of your mind. :slight_smile:

Apologies that none of that is actually a question… I mostly wanted to provide a loose explanation of restricted funds for any foundation members not familiar with the concept. Both donate.g.o and the Fellowship are an attempt to move away from restricted funds, not the reverse.

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Giving people the tools to be able to participate as a volunteer and have the opportunity to gain trust over time and be able to do things without having to go through gatekeepers should always be a goal.

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