The topic of fundraising has come up with candidates a couple of times already. I’m curious what role the candidates feel the foundation should take when it comes to public procurement tenders. Should the foundation be tracking them or not. Should the foundation be making any public statements on them.
Adoption of the platform varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Some barriers to adoption that come to mind might be the health of the platform when it comes to localisation. I have mentioned this in passing on various occasions, if the platforms health for a particular language is poor then it effects it’s adoption in particular jurisdictions where that language is spoken.
Other barriers might be vendor lock-in (existing licences, legacy systems, user training ). This can lead to situations where an incumbent proprietary competitor utilise resellers to compete for billion euro public tenders.
I personally find this kind of tender to be repugnant as I feel that when you get to the MEAT of it, the entity that ends up most economically advantaged is the incumbent player.
For the record I am incredibly thankful for all the hard work everyone has put in to the project as of late, it hasn’t gone unnoticed.
I guess the crux of what I am trying to gage is what do people mean by fundraising when they say they want to focus on it? I guess this probably differs depending on where your based but its normal to see gala events hosted for national and local non-profit groups here. What kind of strategy do people envision when they talk about fundraising, active or passive?
You speak of the “platform’s” adoption, but to me that is somewhat a nebulous concept, simply due to the way that Linux evolved. So let’s start there. Is it just the platform that apps target to run on different distros and desktops: Flatpak, Flathub, and Portals? Is it a step further, the literal GNOME Platform (i.e. org.gnome.Platform) that all the “GNOME apps” use when distributed via Flathub? Or are we talking about everything, including the GNOME desktop and what’s below? I think these are all three valid definitions of a platform that we may want to drive adoption and fundraising for!
If our definition of platform includes “everything”, then we immediately run into an issue: the GNOME project don’t actually have an end-user OS product to offer at the moment. End-users get GNOME though downstream distributions. You speak of procurement tenders, but if there’s a government looking for an operating system to deploy to their fleet of desktop machines, what does the GNOME project have to offer them? Of course my answer to this question would be GNOME OS, once it’s ready anyway. Thus, I believe that GNOME OS will be a very useful tool for fundraising.
Looking for these kinds of fundraising opportunities is a lot of work, and writing up proposals is even more work. It takes specialized knowledge. Not to say that it’s not doable, we’ve had success with getting money from the STF for instance. But we’ve also had some pretty major failures. It takes a certain organizational capacity from the structure to be able to sustain this kind of work and take on more. As we learned with STF: if the org doesn’t actually have the requisite capacity things can get ugly. Certainly the GNOME Foundation, due to all of the work of the current leadership, has moved in the direction of being prepared for this kind of thing, but on the other hand we’re clearly still reeling from the fallout. Especially since, as a direct result, we’ve lost many of our community members that are actually experienced at organizing large grant work.
So I would say that the fundraising strategy would be to start smaller: focus on STF, which we know to have worked before and have some experience with. Meanwhile people in our greater network have explored / are exploring other funding avenues, including PrototypeFund, NLNet, EU Horizon. Perhaps if they find success, and we find success again with STF, we can bring their expertise to GNOME.
Starting from our current position, we have to build iteratively.
For instance, when defining our 2025-26 budget we were not in a position to commit to Fellowships due to financial constraints. The Fellowship came to life as a result of efforts to increase funds raised from donations (via Donate to GNOME and other platforms). We can now look for additional funding via donations or grants to further strengthen and extend the program to support more fellows — both seasoned contributors and newcomers.
As we build our organisational capacity, other forms of fundraising become viable — including bidding for, and running large projects (why not) to enable more programs, contributor support, conferences, and community initiatives, which in turn attract more funding and participation. This is the virtuous cycle I referred to in my candidacy announcement.
In fact, at FOSDEM this year I met with folks from the Sovereign Tech Agency, and spoke about our plans for the Fellowship program. The conversation was positive and I am hopeful that we can collaborate with them.
All of this takes diligence, effort, and time. In my view the Foundation exists to make this happen.
Thanks @oilipheist. Thinking about the high level “what do we mean by fundraising” first, the strategy we’ve been pursuing, which started with Steven’s work on donate.gnome.org, is a solid baseline of a recurring donor/supporter pool, with a mix of individual and corporate supporters. We’ve had some success on the individual side, enough to make things like the Fellowship program possible, and I think the Foundation telling GNOME’s story more clearly and widely can grow that further. A surprisingly common misconception is that GNOME is either a commercial product or already fully funded; correcting that and just getting in front of people with a story about what we do is some of the most valuable fundraising work we can do, and it’s primarily a comms job.
To go beyond the baseline, whether chasing grants (which take serious time to prepare, write and report on, as Adrian says) or building deeper relationships with companies, as supporters or as more engaged Advisory Board partners, we need dedicated grant-writing, comms and outreach capacity. Historically that “professional spokesperson” role has been the Executive Director, but the board has deliberately held off rushing to re-hire, because it’s genuinely hard to find one single person that combines the comms, community, strategy, management and operational skills the role demands. So we’ve been building it up gradually instead: adding a finance/operations director to take part of the load, next might be to look at sharpening up our direct fundraising and comms, and then if we do hire an ED maybe it’s not a full-time role, but we’re clear about exactly what we need them to add - active relationship-building, in other words, but with focused resources rather than over-promised.
On procurement: I don’t think it’s the Foundation’s job to bid for public tenders. We’re not a vendor and don’t offer the deployment, support, training and services those buyers are actually procuring. But there is a useful role we could: helping facilitate and coordinate a network of SMEs around the world who can bid GNOME OS (for example) into procurement opportunities. We’ve done something like this before: the old GNOME Mobile & Embedded initiative brought companies in that space together with co-branding and promotion for the whole stack. That’s the kind of ecosystem role that plays to our strengths and the Foundation could help to coordinate in future, but we’re not operating at that level of capacity right now.
I guess the crux of what I am trying to gage is what do people mean by fundraising when they say they want to focus on it? I guess this probably differs depending on where your based but its normal to see gala events hosted for national and local non-profit groups here. What kind of strategy do people envision when they talk about fundraising, active or passive?
So the various candidates care about fundraising in different ways. Some are interested in grants and focusing on STM as @adrianvovk has indicated.
My problem with doing grants is that it is not clear to me that we have a way to report on the work being done in a manner that is easily reported that shows the money invested is making progress. This is something that at a project level we need to look at not necessarily from the foundation level since grants and STMs are a quid pro quo relationship. They are giving you money for an outcome that they’ve either communicated on condition of the grant or you’ve convinced them that giving GNOME money will improve a situation that a govt or other entity cares about. That means you need to have those resources already ready to go. If you’re vying for a grant focused on accessibility then the maintainers of those systems are already in agreement. If you don’t have those in advance then you are setting yourself for a world of hurt if you’re name is on it.
I’m focused on fundraising at the community level because I find the problem interesting. I’ve spent 25 years advocating for GNOME and have a fairly good idea of what community feels and needs even though times are changing with AI and changes in geo-politics. We have an opportunity to push the digital sovereignty story and for that we need to do engagement and accompanying fundraising. But fundraising and engagement needs to be in platforms we do not have presence in. We need to show up in places where users are and tell our story.