Please answer this questions with a maximum of 150 words per question.
Deadline: Monday 15th 9 am CET
What will you do to improve environmental sustainability of the Foundation?
What’s the use case for the GNOME Foundation?
What will you do to improve/protect diversity using options available to Foundation?
@aadityasingh @adrianvovk @deepa @gbernard @jrb @jsparber @ramcq @sri
What will you do to improve environmental sustainability of the Foundation?
While I believe that the environment is important, it’s not my number one issue. Certainly, there’s always room to be more mindful of our energy use, and I would be interested to evaluate and vote on proposals that help our environmental sustainability. But I don’t have the expertise nor, truthfully, the spoons to tackle this topic myself.
It seems that this is a topic where we have some knowledgeable and enthusiastic community members, so the most effective way to bring some kind of improvement here would be to empower them.
What’s the use case for the GNOME Foundation?
The Foundation exists to support the Project, and represent the Project in a legal/official capacity.
By “support” here I mean the Foundation’s usual activities: hosting the infrastructure, organizing events, Code of Conduct, etc. But I also believe that we could support the community a bit more directly, using donations and grants to fund work within the project. The Fellowship that just launched is a great step in this direction, and I hope that we’ll be able to expand this program and others like it.
What will you do to improve/protect diversity using options available to Foundation?
I will be the first to admit that I am a privileged cishet white guy, and I haven’t rigorously studied the topic, so I don’t have any direct experience with the problems here. However, I strongly believe that diversity is not only just plainly the right thing to do, but also different perspectives are a crucial part of good decision making.
What I will be able to do is ask for, and listen to, feedback. Luckily, GNOME is already a diverse community, so we have the opportunity to learn how we could better accommodate from the people most affected.
Rather than simply reducing travel, I want to continue the work done to rethink how we gather. Local communities (groups in each country or region) would let contributors connect with their community without necessarily travelling to the host country for GUADEC for instance. This builds lasting local ties while reducing footprint.For travel that does happen, I would advocate simple guidelines: favour train over plane where feasible, and encourage low-impact behaviours like staying with community members or friends rather than hotels. These things have no price tag but real value and they also strengthen the human links of community members.
Finally, publish a yearly environmental footprint report as part of our radical transparency commitment.
The Foundation exists to protect and sustain GNOME as a public good: legally, financially, and institutionally. It holds trademarks, employs staff, receives donations, and provides the stable backbone that lets a volunteer community build software used by millions. Without it, GNOME is exposed to capture, fragmentation, or simply neglect, and in my mind, the Foundation is the guarantee that GNOME belongs to everyone.
GNOME’s Code of Conduct states clearly that the safety of marginalized people matters more than the comfort of others. I take that statement very seriously.
This means CoC processes must be safe to use. Speaking up as a victim is already a challenge because processes that feel hostile, opaque, or unlikely to be believed will cause people to self-exclude silently. Every report must be received with good faith and taken seriously. At the same time, precisely because we take victims seriously, false accusations must be treated with equal firmness: they damage individuals and erode the credibility of the entire process.
The Foundation also has a direct role to play: marginalized contributors may face structural barriers to employment and financial support that others do not. Grant allocation and hiring practices should actively account for this, not as charity but as a recognition that the commons is enriched when everyone can participate.
I care a great deal about the environment, but I acknowledge with my Foundation hat on: it isn’t the Foundation’s core mission, nor why most people donate to us. There are ways we can support - e.g. strengthening regional communities and being deliberate about global travel, reserving it for where it’s most valuable. Some in-person connection is absolutely needed - our community is held together by humans meeting to build our relationships and common purpose, which you can’t do just on Matrix and Discourse. I’ve been impressed by KDE Eco’s work on energy-efficiency certification, and I’d love GNOME to follow suit. Most of this has to be community-driven, with the Foundation supporting and empowering where it can. One concrete idea I’ve seen work at OpenUK: our bylaws let us create officer roles, so we could appoint a volunteer as, say, a Chief Environment Officer, with a real mandate to drive it.
Tell the story of GNOME and why it matters, convince people to use and support it, raise money, invest it in the project, and look after everything that keeps the community running: events, infrastructure, community support. In short, boost the signal for GNOME, and do the supporting work that lets the project thrive. What the Foundation is not, despite the original 25-year-old vision, is the project’s governance body. That isn’t what happened, and I don’t think it would work. I’m really excited by recent work on governance: the project is better placed to set its own direction, and can tell the Foundation clearly what it needs, letting us plan, fundraise and invest more proactively. Clearer project-side governance is one of the most useful things that could happen for the Foundation.
The Foundation has a long track record of investing in GNOME.Asia, and more recently in events in Africa and LatAm. We should do more to boost grassroots GNOME communities worldwide and help them connect to the wider ecosystem like @aadityasingh has done in Nepal. Governance matters here too: opaque, “who you know” structures make it harder for people from different backgrounds to feel confident joining, and to know who to talk to; clearer processes remove that barrier. Economic opportunity is another lever: internships, grants, fellowships, and developer donations via Flathub all help remove the barrier of who can afford to give their time. And safety is a precondition: a trusted, effective Code of Conduct process is essential. I deeply appreciate the committee’s hard work, and think there’s more listening, learning and fixing still to do.
My primary focus, as per my candidacy announcement, is on the local community’s building and expansion, along with its sustainability.
I believe local communities can contribute positively by organizing regional events and contributor activities, reducing the need for long-distance travel while still fostering collaboration and contributor growth.
As a board member, my role would be to support policies and initiatives that are realistic, measurable, and aligned with the Foundation’s mission. Sustainability should be integrated into how we operate, without creating barriers to participation, especially for contributors from underrepresented regions who may already face challenges in engaging with the project.
The Foundation exists to support and sustain the GNOME project, its contributors, and its ecosystem.
GNOME’s strength comes from its contributors, but contributors need infrastructure, governance, legal protection, fundraising, events, partnerships, and long-term strategic support. The Foundation provides these functions so that contributors can focus on building and improving the project.
The foundation has played a great role in supporting the local community, such as GNOME Nepal. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the foundation’s support. The infrastructure that runs our project is being provided by the foundation :
Foundation has helped the local contributors connect with the global scene through organizing conferences and supporting the travel of the local contributors. This has provided local contributors to meet the virtual folks in person and experience how open source bridges cultures and people from different locations and backgrounds.
Diversity is strengthened when people can meaningfully participate, contribute, and grow within the project. My focus would be on expanding access and lowering barriers to contribution.
I would support stronger onboarding pathways, contributor education, mentorship, and outreach through local communities. Many talented people from underrepresented regions want to contribute but lack awareness, guidance, or connections to get started.
I would also encourage the Foundation to continue supporting diverse representation in events, leadership opportunities, and community programs. Local communities can be powerful entry points for contributors from different backgrounds, cultures, and regions.
I like these questions! The mission on the gnome foundation website is:
“We believe in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem.”
So I see where they came from. Answering one by one:
What will you do to improve environmental sustainability of the Foundation?
I care deeply about environmental sustainability — it’s a defining global issue of our lifetime. However, to be effective, the Foundation must focus its (limited) attention and resources to where we can make the most impact. For me, that means making a great desktop and ecosystem without spreading our mission too thin.
I think our greatest potential environmental impact lies in our code. With a reduced footprint, we can extend hardware lifespans and reduce energy consumption at scale. We should push an “efficiency as sustainability” message and drive efficiency across our codebase. I would love to see efforts to measure this and track changes over time.
I know other community members likely have more expertise here than I do. I’d love to learn more from those who have studied this space to discover other actionable/impactful ways the Foundation can contribute.
What’s the use case for the GNOME Foundation?
The most important thing about the GNOME Foundation is we are the Foundation. The project is driven by its community, and we are all we’ve got.
That being said, the Foundation also exists as a tool that allows us to safely govern ourselves and interact with the rest of the world. We need a legal and financial entity to protect our trademarks, handle banking, and interface with corporate entities, whether that means managing relationships with major cloud providers for donated resources or handling legal protections.
Financially, it provides the infrastructure required to support our collective work. It gives us the means to employ the staff who keep our services running, maintain our hardware infrastructure, and organize our events. Ultimately, the Foundation exists to protect our legal assets, handle our operational overhead, and tell the story of GNOME to the wider world.
What will you do to improve/protect diversity using options available to Foundation?
Our diversity is absolutely crucial for our success. We cannot make a desktop for the whole world without a diversity of viewpoints, perspectives, and opinions. We’ve got a good start compared to our commercial competitors but there’s still a lot we should do.
In particular I’d I’d love to see three things:
* Continue to work with Outreachy (and GSoC). Those projects bring in new contributors from a wider pool of applicants, and are so great at enriching our community.
* Continue to look for areas where we can expand. I love reading about the grassroots work that Aaditya has done in Nepal, and would love to replicate it in other parts of the world, particularly Latin American and Africa.
* Fundraise around A11Y. A lot of good work has been done the past few years in modernizing the stack. I’d love to see if we can find ways to continue improvements.
I apologize for my late response. I had a medical emergency for the last few days that I needed to focus on.
I think being able to track our CI/CD pipelines is going to be an important part of sustainability. We’ve had a lot of great talks from @pwithnall around sustainability. For me, I think these pipelines is where we really save on carbon. While there are notions of not having GUADEC, I feel like that would be a bridge too far given that in Europe we can take sustainable travel options like trains vs planes. Certainly the travel committee in this case could make sure that we pay for sustainable travel options as one method.
Keeping track of our numbers and having goals will do a lot. Because once you have numbers and can take goals that leads to brainstorming ways to improve. Just saying “let’s improve sustainability” and then not measure your CI/CD usage doesn’t give you a plan to improve this.
GNOME Foundation is tool to manage our legal issues like trademark. Just today, someone announced a GNOME discord server with likely no controls on how we would see that community run in discord - no accountability. Our control of our trademark means that we can stop communities that do not follow our values.
Fundraising to support developers whether through in-person hackfests, sponsoring LAS and GUADEC, and our developer funds is a great way to support our developers in their mission.
The GNOME Foundation in times past had to defend against patent trolls and those who would take away our GNOME identities. Without the legal work, we would have lost our trademark or lost its value. That is not hyperbole. Those things happened. GNOME Foundation is responsible for creating two legal precedents that support Free and Open Source software.
We are the arbitrators of disputes, maybe we haven’t been effective as we could be but we are the neutral party.
We are the legal representation to other communities.
As my wife has done many DEI trainings at GUADEC, this topic is well known to me. I would say that we aren’t really taking diversity as a mission. Once again, if you’re tracking numbers we can take goals. I’ve mention this once or twice in AGMs. If you want to improve your numbers, you need to track your numbers and take a goal to meet them.
One of the ways we can do this is doing the ambassadorship program that Aditya, Nwoke, and I have been working on. Aditya and Nwoke represent GNOME Nepal and GNOME Africa. These communities exist, but they exist in a vacuum. This is because these groups all use different social media channels and software. GNOME Africa uses telegram and Twitter/X for instance. We aren’t merging these groups together in a way that makes sense.
You’re welcome to join us - we are meeting once a week. We are organizing at Regions · GitLab - through these smaller teams we can build diversity. We could always use more people though. But we are actively trying to solve these problems.
Let’s expand on that, because the answers on that topic have been very mild, if not disappointing. Here is a situation (not hypothetical, it happened a couple of years ago). A team is planning attendance at events (not events like GUADEC or LAS where we are organizers, but “third party” events). For a specific event in the US, having a booth might be an issue because it’s probable that nobody local enough may be available on one of the days to take care of it. An established community member (from the US, same coast) offers to “fly down for a few hours and then go back”.
What is your take on that offer?
My take is clear. In these cases, our absence is necessary. The carbon we will emit in the atmosphere is too important regarding the importance of the event itself. The participation to these third party events should be evaluated in consideration with local people being able to attend without taking a plane, that’s sure, with public, low carbon transports.
In addition to that, I forgot to mention I would recommend, a vegetarian only dietary regime for GNOME organized events.
There was some previous discussion about this here (from 2019 onwards): Reduce the Foundation's environmental impact (#102) · Issues · Teams / Board · GitLab (linking here so it stays relevant).