We’re currently putting together a Sovereign Tech Fund application for next year, both collecting ideas for projects and investigating what we’ll be able to staff. We’ve already got a list of focus areas and ideas that fit, and we’re in the process of having meetings with various teams of maintainers across the project. However, we also want to open this up to the wider community.
Our focus areas are:
Security across the stack: encryption, TPM, desktop keyrings, systemd-homed, code signing, etc.
Accessibility, e.g. improved settings for Orca, better debug tooling for app developers, etc.
QA and developer tooling: GNOME platform debugging tools, profilers, analyzers for memory, rendering, accessibility, IPC, and so on. Also, projects that enable development on immutable systems.
Platform features in GNOME, Freedesktop, Flatpak, portals, and related projects. For instance: xdg-intents, various Flatpak portal improvements, session save/restore, notifications, doze/wakeup/power management, search, text-to-speech, autofill, etc.
Hardware support, e.g. reducing power usage, performance work, better touch support in GTK, improving multi-monitor, etc.
Maintenance work for any of the above, especially critical components that are undermaintained
If you have any ideas in these areas, and/or would be available to work on them on a contract basis, please contact us (stf@gnome.org), or leave a comment below.
I’d like to see if we could fund designing applications visually in GNOME Builder. This will drive more applications being written in GTK4/Adwaita.
Better GTK4 experience in Windows and MacOS. Possible port to Android. GTK4 isn’t seen as an ubiquitous solution on multiple platforms and we want to drive presence everywhere. Windows/WSL should be a platform for adwaita apps that can be downloaded from the windows app store. Especially when in these ecosystems people are willing to fund and pay for them. We bring our values to these other platforms.
Yelp seems to fit this description. Would it fit under the accessibility focus area? I’m not personally available but wanted to put it out there for anyone who may be!
Generally GNOME is lacking decent Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech capabilities, easily integrated into apps. I think, that could be an area of interest re. accessibility.
Then there’s quite something to do with documents/PDFs in terms of accessibility as well (actually Papers is actually blocked on moving to core by that).
I also wonder, how the emailing experience is on GNOME in terms of accessibility?
Idea: writing more technical documentation, for example an introductory book on how to use the GLib/GTK development platform. So more a job for a technical writer rather than pure development.
Any chance to fund a app design tool into Builder? Being able to visually design apps would make making apps much easier.
more GNOME OS work of course
Onboarding video for internships that helps them understand the skills that they take away with. GNOME alumni are everywhere and thriving.
I’d like to also see some work in doing some engineering to help foster email client frontends and calendaring. We used to have some plans around that.