As a board, we have been working on several initiatives to make the Foundation a better asset for the GNOME Project. We’re working on a number of threads in parallel, so I wanted to explain the “big picture” a bit more to try and connect together things like the new ED search and the bylaw changes.

We’re all here to see free and open source software succeed and thrive, so that people can be be truly empowered with agency over their technology, rather than being passive consumers. We want to bring GNOME to as many people as possible so that they have computing devices that they can inspect, trust, share and learn from.

In previous years we’ve tried to boost the relevance of GNOME (or technologies such as GTK) or solicit donations from businesses and individuals with existing engagement in FOSS ideology and technology. The problem with this approach is that we’re mostly addressing people and organisations who are already supporting or contributing FOSS in some way. To truly scale our impact, we need to look to the outside world, build better awareness of GNOME outside of our current user base, and find opportunities to secure funding to invest back into the GNOME project.

The Foundation supports the GNOME project with infrastructure, arranging conferences, sponsoring hackfests and travel, design work, legal support, managing sponsorships, advisory board, being the fiscal sponsor of GNOME, GTK, Flathub… and we will keep doing all of these things. What we’re talking about here are additional ways for the Foundation to support the GNOME project – we want to go beyond these activities, and invest into GNOME to grow its adoption amongst people who need it. This has a cost, and that means in parallel with these initiatives, we need to find partners to fund this work.

Neil has previously talked about themes such as education, advocacy, privacy, but we’ve not previously translated these into clear specific initiatives that we would establish in addition to the Foundation’s existing work. This is all a work in progress and we welcome any feedback from the community about refining these ideas, but here are the current strategic initiatives the board is working on. We’ve been thinking about growing our community by encouraging and retaining diverse contributors, and addressing evolving computing needs which aren’t currently well served on the desktop.

Initiative 1. Welcoming newcomers. The community is already spending a lot of time welcoming newcomers and teaching them the best practices. Those activities are as time consuming as they are important, but currently a handful of individuals are running initiatives such as GSoC, Outreachy and outreach to Universities. These activities help bring diverse individuals and perspectives into the community, and helps them develop skills and experience of collaborating to create Open Source projects. We want to make those efforts more sustainable by finding sponsors for these activities. With funding, we can hire people to dedicate their time to operating these programs, including paid mentors and creating materials to support newcomers in future, such as developer documentation, examples and tutorials. This is the initiative that needs to be refined the most before we can turn it into something real.

Initiative 2: Diverse and sustainable Linux app ecosystem. I spoke at the Linux App Summit about the work that GNOME and Endless has been supporting in Flathub, but this is an example of something which has a great overlap between commercial, technical and mission-based advantages. The key goal here is to improve the financial sustainability of participating in our community, which in turn has an impact on the diversity of who we can expect to afford to enter and remain in our community. We believe the existence of this is critically important for individual developers and contributors to unlock earning potential from our ecosystem, through donations or app sales. In turn, a healthy app ecosystem also improves the usefulness of the Linux desktop as a whole for potential users. We believe that we can build a case for commercial vendors in the space to join an advisory board alongside with GNOME, KDE, etc to input into the governance and contribute to the costs of growing Flathub.

Initiative 3: Local-first applications for the GNOME desktop. This is what Thib has been starting to discuss on Discourse, in this thread. There are many different threats to free access to computing and information in today’s world. The GNOME desktop and apps need to give users convenient and reliable access to technology which works similarly to the tools they already use everyday, but keeps them and their data safe from surveillance, censorship, filtering or just being completely cut off from the Internet. We believe that we can seek both philanthropic and grant funding for this work. It will make GNOME a more appealing and comprehensive offering for the many people who want to protect their privacy.

The idea is that these initiatives all sit on the boundary between the GNOME community and the outside world. If the Foundation can grow and deliver these kinds of projects, we are reaching to new people, new contributors and new funding. These contributions and investments back into GNOME represent a true “win-win” for the newcomers and our existing community.

(Originally posted to GNOME Discourse, please feel free to join the discussion there.)