As the President of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, I’m really pleased to see the number and breadth of candidates we have for this year’s election. Thank you to everyone who has submitted their candidacy and volunteered their time to support the Foundation. Allan has recently blogged about how the board has been evolving, and I wanted to follow that post by talking about where the GNOME Foundation is in terms of its strategy. This may be helpful as people consider which candidates might bring the best skills to shape the Foundation’s next steps.

Around three years ago, the Foundation received a number of generous donations, and Rosanna (Director of Operations) gave a presentation at GUADEC about her and Neil’s (Executive Director, essentially the CEO of the Foundation) plans to use these funds to transform the Foundation. We would grow our activities, increasing the pace of events, outreach, development and infrastructure that supported the GNOME project and the wider desktop ecosystem – and, crucially, would grow our funding to match this increased level of activity.

I think it’s fair to say that half of this has been a great success – we’ve got a larger staff team than GNOME has ever had before. We’ve widened the GNOME software ecosystem to include related apps and projects under the GNOME Circle banner, we’ve helped get GTK 4 out of the door, run a wider-reaching program in the Community Engagement Challenge, and consistently supported better infrastructure for both GNOME and the Linux app community in Flathub.

Aside from another grant from Endless (note: my employer), our fundraising hasn’t caught up with this pace of activities. As a result, the Board recently approved a budget for this financial year which will spend more funds from our reserves than we expect to raise in income. Due to our reserves policy, this is essentially the last time we can do this: over the next 6-12 months we need to either raise more money, or start spending less.

For clarity – the Foundation is fit and well from a financial perspective – we have a very healthy bank balance, and a very conservative “12 month run rate” reserve policy to handle fluctuations in income. If we do have to slow down some of our activities, we will return to a “steady state” where our regular individual donations and corporate contributions can support a smaller staff team that supports the events and infrastructure we’ve come to rely on.

However, this isn’t what the Board wants to do – the previous and current boards were unanimous in their support of the idea that we should be ambitious: try to do more in the world and bring the benefits of GNOME to more people. We want to take our message of trusted, affordable and accessible computing to the wider world.

Typically, a lot of the activities of the Foundation have been very inwards-facing – supporting and engaging with either the existing GNOME or Open Source communities. This is a very restricted audience in terms of fundraising – many corporate actors in our community already support GNOME hugely in terms of both financial and in-kind contributions, and many OSS users are already supporters either through volunteer contributions or donating to those nonprofits that they feel are most relevant and important to them.

To raise funds from new sources, the Foundation needs to take the message and ideals of GNOME and Open Source software to new, wider audiences that we can help. We’ve been developing themes such as affordability, privacy/trust and education as promising areas for new programs that broaden our impact. The goal is to find projects and funding that allow us to both invest in the GNOME community and find new ways for FOSS to benefit people who aren’t already in our community.

Bringing it back to the election, I’d like to make clear that I see this – reaching the outside world, and finding funding to support that – as the main priority and responsibility of the Board for the next term. GNOME Foundation elections are a slightly unusual process that “filters” our board nominees by being existing Foundation members, which means that candidates already work inside our community when they stand for election. If you’re a candidate and are already active in the community – THANK YOU – you’re doing great work, keep doing it! That said, you don’t need to be a Director to achieve things within our community or gain the support of the Foundation: being a community leader is already a fantastic and important role.

The Foundation really needs support from the Board to make a success of the next 12-18 months. We need to understand our financial situation and the trade-offs we have to make, and help to define the strategy with the Executive Director so that we can launch some new programs that will broaden our impact – and funding – for the future. As people cast their votes, I’d like people to think about what kind of skills – building partnerships, commercial background, familiarity with finances, experience in nonprofit / impact spaces, etc – will help the Board make the Foundation as successful as it can be during the next term.