Question to candidates: Succession and Resilience

Community Elections and Referendums
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A year ago, I was speaking a great deal about “network resilience” … I’d love to hear each candidate’s thoughts on this topic.

  • Finance: I know that signing authority, bank access, and other treasury functions are now distributed correctly. What further improvements can the Foundation make to ensure it avoids financial SPOFs in the future?
  • Fundraising: I left the Engagement Team quite a large whiteboard with intended approaches to marketing and corporate sponsorship. Is this still a part of the trajectory? If so, how can the Engagement Team attract a wider range of people to help out?
  • Succession: What are your thoughts on constructing a succession plan?
  • Age Gap: A year ago, many people I spoke to where concerned about the “old” vs “new” gap. I’m still concerned about this. The Design Team seems to have this in hand (old guys like Jakub and Allan, middle-aged folks like Tobias and Sam, and young folks like Jamie and kramo) … is that a template for other teams to onboard more young blood? Or should other parts of the project and Foundation take a different approach?
  • Red Hat: We’d lose a lot of great people if Red Hat ever went away. How do we fix that? Would a stronger Advisory Board help? How do we get Canonical more involved? There isn’t a single Canonical employee on the board.

Feel free to answer one, some, or all! It’s a little all over the map so feel free to cherry-pick a topic that’s close to your heart.

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For your first question, I want to clarify whether you’re speaking strictly about the risk of losing a person with key responsibilities, or also about the risk that someone holding too much power could be in a position to abuse it. Either way, what comes to mind is a financial oversight committee (body responsible for ensuring that finances are correctly maintained and well-organized (invoices paid, accountability properly documented, etc.)). This mirrors the structure I proposed for the CoC: members who sit outside the Board. It’s a very common pattern in many organizations, and I think it would serve us well here.

On fundraising, the central point of my candidacy is to capitalize on the growing concerns around digital sovereignty. Unfortunately, we’ve all been talking about this for decades, as TDF recently acknowledged, but we shouldn’t dismiss the opportunity just because the reasons driving it today aren’t the ones we fought for for years. I’m fully committed to communicating and marketing toward corporations and public administrations that are now realizing they’ve been treating our work as if it were both free as in freedom and free as in free drink, while the work itself continues to be done by volunteers and contributors who deserve real support.

Could you say a bit more about what you mean by succession? I want to make sure I understand the concern before responding.

On the age gap, I take your remark seriously, though I haven’t been personally confronted with this issue, so I’d rather not offer a poorly-informed opinion. The real challenge is onboarding them effectively: training newcommers to follow our requieements for quality, giving them access to responsibilities, maintainership, and a path into existing teams. This is something we could do quite concretely in i18n, for instance, given the restructuring we’ve recently gone through. What Design Team did could serve as a model, Alan propose me exactly this a couple of weeks ago.

On the Red Hat point, I don’t see the absence of Red Hat or Canonical on the Board as a structural problem for the Foundation itself. The Foundation’s mission is to raise funds and guarantee the future of the project. That mission doesn’t depend on whether directors happen to be affiliated with specific distributors. That said, I do think we should actively involve all major distributors, because they ship our work and have a strong interest in backing a project with a clear path forward, sound governance, and a sustainable foundation model. Engaged distributors are a form of resilience in themselves.

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First, thank you for this thoughtful response! I really appreciate the clarity of your thinking on all the points above.

I will say, there are two “moments” the Foundation can capture right now. The global concern around Digital Sovereignty is one … an unexpected, newfound excitement for the Free Desktop is the other. I hope the Foundation can make the best of these years. :heart:

Both! Though I should temper my concerns around abuse: I don’t believe the current board is abusing its power — quite the opposite. The past year has seen huge reforms in the right direction. Checks and balances to prevent abuse are mostly a concern for future boards, at this point. The membership deserves to know that the Foundation is trustworthy: not just now, but as far into the future as possible.

As of 2026, I’m more concerned about the risk of losing one person who carries a lot of weight, and how that risk might be mitigated.

I’m primarily referring to the topic you’ve addressed under “age gap”: pathways for new contributors in both the project and the Foundation. But also succession for positions of authority:

  • Project leads/shepherds/maintainers — whatever roles emerge on the far side of the nascent RFC process
  • Foundation officer positions — mentoring a new generation of members who want to serve in governance positions

Hope that helps!

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Thank you for an important question that focuses on how the foundation is shaped going forward.

For the fundraising :

One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that fundraising becomes a sustainable, ongoing activity rather than something performed as end-of-year efforts or relying on a small number of individuals.

From my experience in the Foundation’s fundraising efforts, I believe there is still significant opportunity to improve how we communicate GNOME’s impact to potential sponsors. Companies are often interested not only in the technology itself but also in the ecosystem, the contributor base, and the social impact of open source communities.

I would like to see stronger collaboration between the board, fundraising & engagement ( which is one team with the latest developments) and local communities. Local communities are often creating valuable stories, events, and contributor journeys, but those stories do not always reach potential sponsors. Better storytelling can strengthen both outreach and sponsorship efforts.

Hence, my focus is on the local communities, outreach, and contributors’ pathway.

For the succession:

A succession plan is very important for the long-term health of the Foundation and the project.

Many GNOME initiatives rely heavily on a small number of experienced contributors. While their dedication is one of GNOME’s greatest strengths, it can also create risk if knowledge, relationships, or responsibilities become concentrated in too few people.

For me, succession planning is closely connected to contributor development. We should continuously identify and support future leaders, not only when a position becomes vacant. That means encouraging contributors to take ownership, documenting processes, sharing institutional knowledge, and creating opportunities for people to grow into leadership roles over time.

Local communities can play an important role here as well. They are often where contributors first gain experience organizing events, coordinating volunteers, mentoring newcomers, and making decisions. Those experiences can become stepping stones toward broader project and Foundation leadership.

This has been my own journey, and I take great motivation and learning from it.

For Age Gap :

It is a concern but also an opportunity.

I have learned a lot from being part of the foundation’s fundraising initiatives. Contributors from different generations collaborated, shared knowledge, and created a respectful and helpful space for each other. This environment naturally helped new contributors like me develop the knowledge and exposure, and has helped me in my current leadership abilities. Collaborating with @MariMaj @sri @lwildberg @theevilskeleton and my fellow contributors in the fundraising team was a great way to learn more about leadership, teamwork, and the foundation itself. The age gap and the experience that they bring with them ( different experiences from different backgrounds) were the real opportunity for the young and new contributors like me to learn from.

I do not think every team must follow the same model, because different teams have different cultures and needs. However, the underlying principle is valuable: experienced contributors and newer contributors should not exist in separate groups. They should be working together.

One challenge I frequently observe when engaging students and new contributors is that they are excited to participate but often struggle to find a path toward deeper involvement. We need more intentional mentorship, onboarding, and opportunities for meaningful responsibility.

My focus on local communities and contributor roadmaps is partly aimed at addressing this challenge. If we create stronger pathways into GNOME and invest in mentorship, we can gradually build a healthier pipeline of contributors who eventually become maintainers, organizers, and Foundation leaders.

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5

Thanks for the pick’n’mix of interesting questions Steven. Picking up a few topics:

Finance: the audit really helps here, because it puts an external eye on both our policies and how we actually execute them. Deepa has also instituted a periodic review of financial operations by the Treasurer. Even with a finance/operations director on board, our plan is to keep working with an external bookkeeper, so continuity doesn’t rest on any single internal person.

Fundraising: yes, that general direction is still alive I think. Pro-active comms and marketing is really a key prerequisite for fundraising, and we’ve been discussing whether a part-time comms person would help, both to boost our marketing and to act as a coordinator who can steer community volunteers into a more cohesive strategy and bring more people in.

Succession and the age gap: IMO, the expanded board and staggered terms have done their job over the past few years, bringing more perspectives and generations of GNOME people into the room, and this year’s slate of candidates seems to follow that pattern. When we appointed officers last year, we also started pairing newer directors with existing office-holders so they can shadow the role, which makes future hand-overs less disruptive. I think the Design Team’s mix is a good template for teams more broadly: onboard newer and younger contributors deliberately and look for opportunities for mentorship alongside experienced ones.

Red Hat: Honestly, GNOME as a project would be substantially weakened if any large corporate backer withdrew its team, and that risk can’t be fully eliminated. The best mitigation is to remain a genuinely effective collaborator, so companies keep finding value in staying engaged. A stronger Advisory Board would help, and we could do more with it. Building our own funded contributor base, through Fellowships and grants, also reduces reliance on any single employer’s headcount. The route to more Canonical (or any other commercial) involvement is facilitating collaboration, joint work, engagement in the Advisory Board, and ultimately encouraging folks to join as members and stand. Longer term, growing GNOME’s addressable market opens new commercial opportunities and a more diverse ecosystem. It’s an interesting moment, with Linux desktop share rising, gaming on Linux stronger than ever, and real lack of faith in the direction of the main incumbent platform - there have been some really promising bits like multiple lead OEMs including fully-supported Linux devices, the Steam Deck is super cool too (it certainly boosted Flathub a lot!) but I’ve not yet seen a commercial move that opens big new doors for us. Endless has been plugging away at it for quite a while in different ways too.

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Sorry for my late response on this one. I’ve had some medical issues that I had to take care of which has given me little time to be online.

Fundraising: I left the Engagement Team quite a large whiteboard with intended approaches to marketing and corporate sponsorship. Is this still a part of the trajectory? If so, how can the Engagement Team attract a wider range of people to help out?

The engagement and fundraising team (which are now merged), the active members of the team have a fairly wide range of skills but as far as I can see not many have direct skills in fundraising from a corporate or marketing perspective.

While there was a white board, it wasn’t shared with the rest of the team so I cannot comment on the whiteboard or its intended approaches.

I think it’s too soon to work on attracting a wider range of people to help out. You still need to build a fundraising machine first and understand what is required to make that machine successful. This is why we have a short term contractor helping us here to establish that. Once you’ve figured out the blueprint of a successful campaign then you can teach others and help there.

Part of why I’m running is simply to help build that fundraising engine and work more closely. It’s much easier to leverage both my seniority and experience while having a close relationship with the board as a director and help build that blueprint.

One thing unprecedented is that we’re moving from roles that an ED would do to an all volunteer force which has challenges in consistency and messaging. In years past, the ED was the primary point of contact with advisory board members or help direct fundraising campaigns or make sure that GNOME is visible on the world’s stage and in the open source community.

I learned fundraising through metrics. You show the value of the work you’re doing through numbers and tell stories about that. If you have the numbers, then building the story is easier with a larger number of volunteers and it becomes a creative exercise where you don’t have to exactly know how to know the mechanics of fundraising, you just need to know what connects with various types of audiences on multiple platforms.

Growing the team means attracting story tellers, but first we have to feed them stories to do it.

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I’m of the frame of mind that we trust sooner and give younger people more responsibility as quickly as possible. We don’t trust very easy in this group and that’s kind of sad. The engagement team has quite a few younger members and just a few senior members like cassidy, myself, and maria. Of the three, Maria is the most active and big kudos to her for managing the team and balancing work. It’s something to go to work and then come back and then have the enough space to work on GNOME engagement.

To improve the ability for people to participate faster, automation is key. For instance, there is a bot in socials that will boost content and we can now provide a path to give newer people ever escalating levels of trust approve and boost content to boost. Today anybody can ask to boost something on mastodon by asking the bot to boost and then one of the team members can approve them with a clear paper trail. Over time, we’ll start adding more bots to do specific things like post to all social media and so on. This way we can discuss and post and teach people how to do the engagement while also a path of increasing trust.

Hopefully, we can mature this further by adding othe