In the yearly form 990, on the 1st page, 1st section (“Activities & Governance”), field no. 6 (“Total number of volunteers”), the value is set at 250 as a rough estimation (as of the Fiscal Year 2023 filing, made on 2024-08-12, visible on ProPublica).
However, that number, as written in the form, is pretty far from representing the practical reality even as an “estimate”, and the problem is that Wikipedia bases itself on that number in the metadata sidebar in the article about the GNOME Foundation, which drastically under-sells the size of our community to the general public.
The Foundation’s membership page currently lists 235 active foundation members and 85 emeritus, but that’s only a fraction of contributors (just like GUADEC attendance numbers are only a fraction of the number of enthusiast users and developers) and the practical reality, at least from a technical perspective, is that we are roughly a thousand contributors to the GNOME Project. It’s been that way for a very long time, as far as I’ve informally observed, and as @hansp’s wonderful analyses elegantly demonstrated:
I did not see a 2025 edition of that analysis, but I have the general “feel” that the GNOME Project / development community has been very active in 2023 and 2024.
Would it be possible for the forms to have an estimated number of volunteers closer to the actual number of volunteers contributing to GNOME?
The exact number of GNOME Foundation members is known.
The exact number of authors of git commits is also known (except that there are semi-anonymous accounts with made up names).
But git is not the whole story, there are other places where people contribute to GNOME, like helping people on Discourse, doing downstream packaging (so outside of gnome.org), doing a presentation at a conference advocating for the project (so sometimes even outside the internet, IRL).
For some items it’s possible to gather exact numbers, for others there can only be rough estimates.
I think we need to distinguish between those who are foundation members due to given membership and those who volunteer and are not members. I don’t know if the foundation is supposed to report those who are.
We can only go by who have applied and have been accepted as a foundation member.
It might be risky for the Foundation to bump the form number while being unable to properly/legally name everyone involved in case of an audit or something like that.
What I think we can do is do a better job incentivizing recurrent contributors to apply for Foundation membership. If you are a member and see a contributor doing relevant work, please, point them to Membership – The GNOME Foundation
Our community should be inclusive and shouldn’t gate-keep contributors by expecting extensive contributions to qualify for membership. There are various ways one can help GNOME, as mentioned above by Sébastien Wilmet.
Besides, the membership process already has a renew process, meaning that contributors that distance themselves from the project won’t be counted once their memberships expire.