GNOME Annual Report 2020

Community
#1

Annual Report 2020 is out now! :confetti_ball: :tada:

2020 was a difficult year for everybody. As with everyone else, the events of the foundation were directly affected by the pandemic. It was a year of change as we adapted to the new environment.
We are excited to share some of our best moments, achievements, and great online events that happened throughout the year in our annual report

Highlights include:

  • COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CHALLENGE — where we started our inaugural challenge to create new and better ways to engage new contributors. Phase One concluded in July and we received entries from a wide range of established applications and programs as well as start-up efforts.

  • TWO GNOME RELEASE, Orbis (3.38) and Gresik (3.36) — Many improvements landed such as new login and lock screens, a new Welcome tour, and drag-and-drop support in the application grid. The 3.38 release was also the first release for which we have provided our own installer images for debugging and testing purposes.

  • FIVE EVENTS AND FIVE HACKFEST — All our events this year were online due to Covid-19.

  • EIGHTEEN INTERNS — GNOME hosted fourteen students who successfully finished the Google Summer of Code, and two who successfully completed Outreachy internships. We also participated in Google Season of Docs with two technical writers who successfully finished the program.

  • PATENT SETTLEMENT — After 18 months of legal discussion with a patent assertion entity, a settlement was reached on On May 21Ëąá”— 2020. We were pleased with the terms of the settlement.

For more information and details please see the Annual Report
2020 wouldn’t have been this awesome without you!
Cheers and looking forward to the coming years.

7 Likes
#2

The final Challenge winner will be announced in April, 2021.

Hehe, timey wimey I see :slight_smile:

We have 836 total users and 1051 total rooms.

Is this a typo? General 1050 has members and 1:1 members:rooms seems 
odd

Additionally, I assume these numbers include DMs as the directory only seems to have a few dozen public rooms - would be interesting to know the split here (and how many of those DMs are with Rocket.Cat
)

[Given other sections speak of things that have already happened I wonder when this data was collected?]

The total number of messages that have been sent through the system are 138041.

Given the reported number of rooms (and the existence of bots, though GitLab Notifications seem to have broken since I last looked) this seems quite low (or is that only counting public rooms?) Must admit I’m a tad unclear on the difference between ‘messages sent through the system’ and ‘messages in channels’

Total uploads have been 1543.

Heh, I think ≅ 6% of them are Clocks 3.36 designs/prototypes

Foreign currencies are converted to USD.

I know the GNOME Foundation is a USian 501(c)(3) but I do wonder how appropriate “foreign” is when we are very much a global community. Just an idle thought.

Nitpicks:

Gstreamer

18tÊ°-19á”—Ê°

#3

The numbers here are from October 2019-2020. It doesn’t include the activities from 2021 or the numbers from year 2021.
When we have collected the data, that’s what the numbers were.

#4

Huh? I think I’m having a blond moment - The report talks of totals, which I took as “the complete state at point X”, is it actually a delta over those 12 months?

Can’t remember when chat.gnome.org came online but I guess the number of users in Oct 2019 would have been small suggesting that, assuming current members of general is an accurate count, we’ve almost doubled in the not-quite year since Oct 2020 - nice

I still wonder about the room count though, do we really have hundreds of rooms with 1.25 people in them?

Or is a room just a (user, channel) pair? i.e. the average user is in 1.25 channels (with around 200 channels existing) rather than the average channel having 1.25 people

Probably isn’t helping that I’m a little unclear on Rocket terminology

#5

Would it be possible to split the “Donations” incomes into more detailed income categories? I mean, splitting into e.g. “Friends of GNOME donations”, and separate income items for each grant/pledge (I’m thinking about things like Anonymous Donor Pledges $1M Donation Over Two Years – The GNOME Foundation, GNOME Foundation receives $400,000 from Handshake.org – The GNOME Foundation). That would allow understanding more closely where the income comes from (especially seeing what part FoG donations represent).

I know that’s not something that has been done in last year’s annual report, but I find the report less useful if it isn’t precise.

2 Likes
#6

While we’re at nitpicks, on page 9 it should also be GStreamer with a capital S. On the other two pages it’s correct :slight_smile:

1 Like
#7

OK, last change to reply in the 14 days period


I assume the PDF document is again created by Caroline Henriksen with the FOSS Scribus software? Looks nice indeed.

Now a few questions. I can not really understand the Income listing on page 11. Donations is obvious, but what is Administrative Fees, Advisory Board, Conferences, Events, Internships, Interest? Conferences and Events seems to generate costs, not income? And the other terms – sorry I am not a lawyers, but I guess this PDF is not only for lawyers?

The Expenses seems to be more obvious, but for the Employees part some more details would be nice. I think one of the employees was (and still is I hope?) Mr. Bassi for GTK development. You may have your reasons to not name the other employees, but the total number of full time and part time employees and their concrete working areas would be interested too.

Best regards, Stefan Salewski

#8

but the total number of full time and part time employees and their concrete working areas would be interested too.

That part is available at Our Team – The GNOME Foundation (under Foundation Staff). You can’t see there whether it’s full time or part time there though, but you can at least know who’s being employed and what’s their job.

1 Like
#9

Interesting, I never found that page before.

Mostly persons whos names I have never seen before. And the one who did so much GTK work and answer 90% of our forum questions is not listed? Well the other one is not listed as well, but I think he is an employee of Red Hat company.

#10

Emmanuele is no longer employed by the Foundation (since recently), that’s why he’s no longer on that page.

#11

That is really sad. But good to know, so I really should stop bothering him with my stupid questions in this forum.

1 Like
#12

:heart: is for sad, you should still feel free to ask questions

still wonders about those Rocket stats