Candidates for the GNOME Foundation 2024 Elections

Below you find the list of candidates running for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors in 2024. We encourage everyone to check the candidates' full candidacy statements, and follow related discussions on Discourse.

When deciding who to vote for, please consider the various tasks under the responsibility of the Board of Directors. This overview might be helpful. The board makes a number of important decisions and performs many tasks which require time, effort and the ability to work and communicate with others. The Board of Directors will represent GNOME to companies and the world. It is a good idea to strive for a well-balanced Board consisting of people with various backgrounds, skills, and perspectives.

Additional elections details can be found on the GNOME Foundation Web Site.

Candidates for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors

1. Allan Day
   Full statement
   Affiliation: Red Hat
   

   I’ve been contributing to GNOME for 15+ years, primarily as a member of the GNOME design team. In my time I’ve worked on various other aspects of the project, including the Engagement Team, writing the release notes, project documentation, and more. I was previously a member of the board between 2015 and 2021. When I was last on the board, I wrote the official GNOME software policy and helped to come up with GNOME Circle. I also played a major role in setting up the new board committee structure and meeting arrangements, and I was involved in creating GNOME’s first code of conduct. The main reason I’m running for the board is that I want to make sure that the GNOME community is effectively represented on the board. Having a strong community presence in the Foundation is important, and I think that it’s a role I could be effective in. Having been on the board for a long time and then having had a break gives me some useful insight here. If I’m elected, there are two other things that I’d prioritise. The first is long-term sustainability. Given the Foundation’s financial situation this has to be a priority. My previous experience on the board taught me the importance of being unflinching when it comes to critical issues like this. I’d work to make sure that the Foundation doesn’t lose its focus. My second interest is in improving GNOME’s governance and leadership structures. Right now there are a number of issues. The board is our highest authority and the only elected body, but it is primarily concerned with the non-profit Foundation and not so much the wider project. Then there are issues around transparency and the role of Foundation staff. I think that these issues require organisational solutions, and that is something I’d be really keen to work on and resolve.

2. Julian Sparber
   Full statement
   Affiliation: GNOME Foundation (STF Contractor)
   

   I’ve been a contributor for about 8 years, working on a wide variety of things across the project. This includes core apps such as Settings and Contacts and platform components like Libadwaita, but also Circle and third party apps like Fractal or design tools. Most recently I’ve been working on GNOME Shell as part of the STF project. The reason why I’m running now is because I, like many other community members, feel that the foundation is currently too disconnected from its members, and not attentive to the community’s needs. Having more contributors on the board would help with this, and I believe I’d be well suited due to having worked across much of the stack and having good relationships with many core module maintainers and third party app developers. I also believe that the foundation needs to be more proactive with grants, and my experience working on Fractal via grants from NLnet is relevant here. If I’m elected I plan to focus on two issues:

   • Get contributors paid: One of the biggest issues we’re facing in terms of attracting and retaining contributors is that there are very few jobs in GNOME/GTK desktop development, especially doing direct upstream work. Most people end up either doing consulting on GNOME-adjacent technologies, working at a downstream distribution company (often largely on downstream stuff), working on low-level Linux stuff for servers, or take jobs doing something else because they can’t find a way to get paid for GNOME work. This means we often end up training developers for years, only to lose them when they finish university, start a family, or can’t find the time for volunteering anymore for other reasons. I don’t think there is a silver bullet here, but we need to do more of everything:
   • Large grants: The STF grant has shown that sizeable public investment in open infrastructure are a reality now. We need to follow up on this and do much more of it.
   • Individual grants: There are lots of small grant programs out there, which we’re currently mostly not making use of (e.g. NLNet, Prototype Fund). While each individual grant is small, they are large enough to fund one developer for a few months, which is often enough to push a long-running project over the line. The foundation should keep track of new grants, advertise applying for them in our community, and help individual contributors to apply for them.
   • Corporate funding for feature work: We’re currently not offering companies an easy way to fund development on specific features they’re interested in.
   • Crowdfunding: The same goes for individual users as well - The Blender Development Fund is a great example of how this can be done well. Flathub payments: While one-time payments are unproven as a way to fund free software (and increasingly even proprietary software), I think there is a big opportunity in memberships (e.g. Github Sponsors, Patreon). However, I think this is a long-term project. It’s very unclear how much money this could raise at scale, and whether it’d be enough per-app to allow individual app developers to live off of it.
   • Bridge the gap between community and foundation The foundation has been very disconnected from its members for years, which has been a cause of inefficiency and conflicts. I want to help bridge this gap and re-establish trust, primarily by making sure the foundation becomes attentive to the community’s needs again, supports their initiatives rather than working in isolation, and most importantly doesn’t get in the way of community initiatives. To this end I want to institute a policy of hiring new staff from the foundation membership wherever possible. This would ensure that the foundation can benefit from these people’s experience and relationships in the community. I believe that it’ll take time for the foundation to regain the membership’s trust, but ensuring all new hires are from the community (in addition to more community representation on the board) would be a great first step.

3. Julian Hofer
   Full statement
   Affiliation: prefix.dev GmbH
   

   For the past five years, I have contributed to GNOME as a volunteer. During that time, I became a co-maintainer of Podcasts 2, Workbench and apps.gnome.org. Additionally, I write and maintain the book GUI Development with Rust and GTK 4. For the past four years, I worked for the NGO Deltares 3 with the motto “dare to share”. That also means that all software Deltares produces is open source. Here, I encountered the usual problems of open source organisations: Convincing stakeholders to prefer open source software, to fund the development, and finally, to fund maintenance and not only new features. I expect that many of the insights I gained there can be transferred to GNOME. Starting from July, I will be working at prefix.dev 6 on open source software utilizing the conda ecosystem. There are two major reasons that motivate me to run for the Board:

   • Fixing governance issues, and particularly the dysfunctional relationship between the Foundation and the rest of the community.
   • The Foundation lacks transparency. It is difficult to navigate how decisions are made, how they benefit GNOME, and why they were made in the first place.
   • The Foundation’s executive organs work isolated from the community. Interactions between the staff and the community are very limited. We need to work as one and not against each other.
   • Supporting the Foundation on the way to sustainability, which requires bold changes. This means scaling the team up or down depending on the opportunities the Foundation finds, how realistic they are, and how they fit into our budget. Therefore, I want to help the Foundation to set realistic goals to get back on track.

4. Robert McQueen
   Full statement
   Affiliation: Endless OS Foundation
   

   I started as a desktop free software hacker in my teens and have been part of the GNOME community since 2005. I helped to found Flathub in 2018 and have served on the GNOME board since that year, and as the President since 2019. My professional experience started as CTO and co-founder of open source consultancy Collabora, aligning business and community needs to solve problems across the open source ecosystem. I joined Endless in 2015, working on making empowering technology and digital skills accessible worldwide. I became the CEO of Endless in 2020, leading our transition to a nonprofit foundation. I bring this varied commercial, legal, licensing, financial, management, strategic and nonprofit experience to the GNOME board. My four priority areas for the Foundation are:

   • Clear Objectives - The Foundation has lacked clear top-level objectives for several years, leading to misalignment and frustration. The staff have worked hard on their understanding of priorities, either under the direction of the previous ED or during the period with no ED and even less clarity, but there have sometimes been different needs in the community not well represented or understood. The solution is a clear and open discussion with the community about the Foundation’s goals and resouce allocation. This has been a focus of the board since last year. I have supported the Executive Director in developing a strategic plan which has just been published for community consultation. It includes:
   • The Development Initiative to directly invest in core GNOME desktop, apps, platform and tools, building and expanding upon the strong foundation established by the STF project.
   • The Pathways Initiative to bring structure and support to outreach, internships and bringing newcomers into the community, building awareness and representation in diverse and under-represented communities. By empowering local communities and hosting decentralised events, we can increase inclusivity and reduce the climate impact of the Foundation’s conferences.
   Once well-aligned and understood, the strategy can be used by the board to set clear goals and metrics for the Executive Director to ensure that the initiatives are being delivered accountably and efficiently.
   • Financial Sustainability - To be able to deliver objectives sustainably, the Foundation must find the financial support to match its ambitions. With a clear articulation of its strategy and goals, the Foundation can build a funding case around its different initiatives. These different initiatives appeal to different types of potential funding sources. I’ve served on the Financial committee throughout my time on the board, and there have been significant improvements to financial processes since Holly joined. She improved the internal visibility and reporting: we now need to provide more detailed and timely reports to the membership as well.
   • Community Representation - A healthy board needs a balance of nonprofit skills and understanding of the GNOME project. We need board members with strong ties to the GNOME community, corporate finance and governance expertise, and OSS, nonprofit, advocacy and fundraising experience. No single individual can be expected to cover all of these topics, which is why I am pleased to support additional seats on the board, to create a highly-engaged and capable board with insight and experience across all of these aspects. Even with this, there are topics that rise to the board level which belong more to the project than the Foundation, so I support the creation of a steering group that can focus on project questions without also needing to take responsibility for the essential “nonprofit stuff”. This will help keep engagement high and burnout low: the Foundation can rely on this group to help direct funding on investments and support into the project, and the community can rely on this group to unify behind decisions about project definition and direction.
   • Flathub - I’d really like to “finish the swing” on establishing the legal and governance processes required to support payments on Flathub. In combination with the Pathways initiative, this provides more economic opportunities from learning and developing for the Linux desktop. We have draft terms and conditions and developer agreements which will allow us to start handling payments with the right legal protections in place - and Flathub LLC legal entity has been formed but not yet set up with its governance body. My plan is to develop a roadmap for the remaining tasks - some of which are legal/financial/governance, and some are product/feature development - and do some targeted fundraising for Flathub specifically to get us up and running.

5. Manuel Genovés
   Full statement
   Affiliation: Economy Faculty at the University of Valencia
   

   I currently work for the Economy Faculty at the University of Valencia and I’ve been a GNOME contributor for 7+ years. My primary contributions are around the Apostrophe Markdown app, which I’ve been the maintainer of since 2017, and Libadwaita’s animation framework. I’m running for the board this year with four main goals:

   • Increase community involvement in the foundation: The foundation has suffered from a lack of involvement by members for years, both on the board and in support structures such as committees (e.g. travel, CoC, Circle, and so on). By running for the board I want to send a signal to others to get involved, but as part of my work on the board I also want to make these support structures more attractive to members and actively try to get other people to help with this important work.
   • Fix foundation finances: I want to make sure the foundation comes back to stable financial footing. This will necessarily require big changes, but in doing this I want us to learn from the mistakes of the past. The foundation’s current course of trying to cover most support functions with staff is not sustainable financially, but it’s also had the additional negative effect of alienating the foundation from its members. Many of us stopped expecting anything from the foundation, because it has been non-functional in supporting the actual members for so long. Cutting our expenses and getting community members more involved in support structures works to fix both issues at the same time.
   • Find ways for the foundation to help solve important app platform issues: The GNOME developer platform is great in many ways, and has seen very important improvements over the last years that have made it a very attractive platform to develop for, but some of the core modules (e.g. GTK) suffer from a severe lack of maintainer person power. As app developers this often means that parts of the platform are way behind others, which can leave our apps in a problematic limbo for years. For example, Apostrophe could not be ported to GTK4 for 2+ years because it required WebKitGTK and spell checking. Both of these are still not fully fixed at the platform level, by the way. We have seen that in practice corporate support for these modules is not sufficient, which is why I think the foundation should fundraise specifically for the goal of contracting or employing developers from the community to fix critical platform issues like these. There’s also a gap between the platform stack developers and its users, that is, GNOME app devs. This kind of gaps lead to frustration on both parts, frustration that could be alleviated if the foundation was to enable spaces where this could be addressed. While GUADEC aims to fill that role, it can be argued that it has not been enough. Other foundations have addressed this issue, which is not unique to GNOME, in creative ways. I’d like for ours to at least explore what can be done in that regard.
   • Introduce new/better conflict resolution processes: Over the past years, it feels like we have had more internal conflicts than we used to, and generally a more divided project. And no project is worth the mental health of the people who are keeping it alive. I believe this is in part because we lack good structures and processes for conflict resolution outside the CoC committee, which is not the correct venue for this. I would like to establish a new committee or other structure that can be brought in to mediate conflicts, and guidelines or some kind of formal process for handling disagreements, both technical and social.

6. Regina Nkenchor
   Full statement
   Affiliation: IKEA IT AB
   

   With over a decade of experience in the technology industry I have had the opportunity to interact with a diverse spectrum of stakeholders. I am currently a software engineer at IKEA, where I also advocate for open source as an OSPO Ambassador. In addition, I am the founder of the non-profit OpenKids Africa, which provides technology lessons to children in rural African schools. I am also a maintainer of the GNOME Africa project, a community of GNOME contributors in Africa. My background includes non-profit work, developer relations, marketing and advocacy, program management, and OSPO. My goal as a GNOME Foundation member for over five years has been to raise awareness and diversity within the GNOME project, while also encouraging cross-community interaction and making the GNOME project more attractive to funders from a diversity standpoint. During this board term, one of our primary goals was to create a strategic direction for the GNOME project that caters to the diverse needs of the foundation. I worked with the board and the Executive Director to develop this strategic direction, which is currently under review by the community. This strategic plan will enable the board to set clear goals and metrics for the Executive Director, ensuring that initiatives are delivered accountably and efficiently. My priorities for the foundation are:

   • Diversity and Internship Community: My goal is to support the internship community in creating cross-community programs that promote diversity in the GNOME project, leverage GSOC and outreachy initiatives, and encourage contributions from underrepresented groups. In support of the internship community, I will promote the GNOME Pathways Initiative (“Pathways”), an education program that recruits, mentors, educates, engages, and elevates as leaders new creators from all parts of the world, building on the previous work of our Engagement Committee and mentoring efforts. I will support the less expensive and decentralized GNOME event and conference to help develop a more diverse and inclusive GNOME event while also reducing carbon emissions from frequent travel.
   • GNOME Awareness Initiative: In my last term, I have been committed to the GNOME Awareness Initiative, with the aim to bring exposure of the GNOME project to the African open source ecosystem. Last year, I spoke to over 2k members on the GNOME project, organized booths, and helped onboarding new contributors. In this term, I will continue on these efforts and work on projects like scalable onboarding, which will enable us to improve our onboarding system, especially for new contributors. This would also assist in promoting the GNOME pathways programs and increasing funder visibility for the project.
   • Governance and Sustainability: Strengthening our governance structure is crucial for the long-term sustainability of the GNOME project. I aim to work on redesigning our governance practices to enhance transparency, accountability, and effective decision-making. It’s imperative that the board continually review these processes to ensure they remain in line with the dynamic needs of the community.
   • Fundraising Efforts: For fundraising efforts and increasing funding for the GNOME project, I will support from the perspective of marketing and advocacy, and assist in grant making and applications. By leveraging my marketing expertise, I will support marketing campaigns that highlight the impact of GNOME to diverse groups and engage our community through effective outreach. I am glad the STF project has opened a way for expanding the areas that require funding within the GNOME project, and I will continue to support the expanded work for the project through the development initiative.

7. Sammy Fung
   Full statement
   Affiliation: N/A
   

   I’m announcing my candidacy for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors election. I am an incumbent director to run for the board again. If I am elected again, I will continue to oversee the expansion of the board of directors to increase transparency and sustainability and the current fundraising status which is the key solution to improve the Foundation’s Finances. I am a Hongkonger and an open source advocate who has participated and contributed to regional and global open source communities for more than 20 years, established some open source conferences, and connected to some other contributors and volunteers in Asia and the world. I have been a GNOME user since 2000, I became a GNOME Foundation member after I organised GNOME Asia Summit 2012 in HK, then I served at GNOME.Asia committee and now lead the committee. I was elected as a board member in 2022. I was an entrepreneur of technology companies and a director of a non-profit charity organisation in HK. I studied technology, business, and accounting in college which trained me to oversee both business management and technology development in companies and non-profit organisation.

   • Expanding the board of directors to increase transparency and sustainability: I served on the board for 2 years, and it was a critical and long transition period for the foundation’s leadership and strategy. At the governance committee, I strongly support expanding the board to 9 seats and adding non-voting officer seats which can build a healthier non-profit foundation with a better board roster rotation, and committee members can also join the board meeting to work closely together. I would like more foundation members (and some non-members with fundraising experiences) to join the board as elected directors and non-voting officers. In this transition period, the foundation spent a long period (more than 1 year) recruiting a new Executive Director, thanks to the hard work of the ED hiring committee and she is now on board for 6 months. Recently I feel that we are in an important moment of the foundation, I should continue to help this transition, so I desire to extend my service on the board for another 2 years, which provides some consistency and stability in the leadership.
   • Fundraising is the key solution to improve the Foundation’s Finance: For the finance part of the foundation, the board followed the previous role definition/scope of all committees and officers (board & staff team), and the finance committee oversees the annual budget, each annual budgets are submitted to the board meeting and gets approved at the board meeting. During my term (2022-2024), I believe that the expenses of each Cost Centre should remain unchanged (if possible) until a new ED is hired. Then we should discuss with the Executive Director and the board to get an agreement on the new budget, and ED also an important role in executing the fundraising. In the last 2 years, I believe that the financial situation is not that bad but the income is significantly decreased for several years. I think the key problem of the foundation’s financial situation is the lack of new fundraising because we didn’t have an ED for more than a year. If I am re-elected for the next term, I will continue to oversee this.

   In the current status of the foundation, I hope we should trust our leaders on GNOME projects, staff team, committees, and current & new board members - all of their contributions are important to the GNOME community and the foundation. We should prioritize the issues and handle them one by one. And I am happy working with them again and supporting them.

8. Pablo Correa Gomez
   Full statement
   Affiliation: N/A
   

   I am Pablo Correa Gomez (pabloyoyoista in GNOME’s gitlab), a GNOME developer, enthusiast, and member of the GNOME Foundation. I am currently the maintainer of Papers[1], the Document Viewer app currently in Incubator to replace Evince. I am also a member of postmarketOS Core Team, a distribution aiming to bring Linux (GNOME in my case!) to mobile phones and other devices, with more than 500 phones booting. I have been involved in FOSS maintenance during approximately the last 2 years, with my time as a user going back to more than 8 years. In the past I have been involved in governance, volunteering, and accounting in small user associations and non-profits. So I am accustomed to the world of a Board of Directors, and I have experience in treasury. I have also received basic training on accounting and legal during my bachelor studies. As part of my current responsibilities in the postmarketOS Core Team I have been involved in setting good governance practices to let the project grow organically, cultivate healthy relationships with other projects, and do project planning and management on some of our priorities. In addition, I believe I have a strong focus on collaboration focus and the ability to help reach consensus and positive agreements, which was proven the way Papers was forked from Evince 5. I hope this would be an appreciated skill in the view of a big and varied Board of Directors. Regarding my motivations. I am applying for the Board of Directors with the goal to become part of the Finance Committee, and help in economic-related areas of the foundation regarding:

   • Transparency and correctness: I would like to improve the transparency and accountability of funds raised and spent by the GNOME Foundation. I recently wrote a detailed blog post 7 regarding my concerns about the economic situation of the foundation. I believe a big amount of those concerns could be easily solved by providing more detailed reports and making more information publicly available. This should include more status on the foundation assets, as well as detailed information onto which people, entities or assets does the GNOME Foundation pay money to. I also believe that better tracking and presentation of economic affairs is needed. This would avoid the embarrassing situation where Annual Reports present expenses for previous years that do not match tax declarations (when those have been filled, finished, and reconciled), among others. I hope that the fact I was able to analyze the data, organize it and write that blog post is prove of my ability to deliver. I can also bring my experience from having completely transparent economics at postmarketOS[2].
   • Use of Funds: I would like to potentially improve the usage of funds withing the GNOME Foundation, and how they are communicated. It might well be that funds are being spent efficiently and effectively, but that a lack of transparency does not let us see that. Unfortunately, there are some indications that funds have not be spent with great efficiency in the past. During 2021 and 2022 fiscal exercises the GNOME Foundation spent close to 1 Million USD in reserves. While it makes sense to rather spend the money than leave it in a bank account, to my knowledge such deficit was not knowingly spent on specific plans with the goal of going back to normal spending. I believe that a clear example is that the previous executive director left during that period. And that the Foundation has hit the reserve[3] soon after hiring a new one. I would like to make sure that financial plans established by the Foundation in the future are realistic and aimed in a great majority to advance its foundational goals. I also would like to establish a clear communication policy, so that Foundation members are always informed of economic decisions and the rationales behind them. I believe my previous experience in accounting and managing organizations with reduced budgets can be greatly benefitial for this task.

   In addition to these goals, I deeply appreciate the GNOME Foundation’s commitment towards diversity with programs like Outreachy, and would like to continue supporting such efforts. I also believe that the current GNOME Foundation team has a strong focus in fundraising, both through its executive directory, and relevant members of the board. I can however still bring my experience through the work we have done at postmarketOS in managing and organizing grant applications.

9. Jonas Dreßler
   Full statement
   Affiliation: 101LAB, GNOME Foundation (STF contractor)
   

   I’m a long-time contributor to GNOME Shell and mutter, with a focus on input and hardware enablement. I’ve also started GNOME Shell Mobile as an experiment to make Shell work on phones, initially as part of a Prototype Fund grant and since then as a volunteer. As part of my work on the mobile shell I’m working closely with people from other communities, e.g. postmarketOS and the wider Linux kernel community. In addition to development, I’m also part of the local Berlin community, helping to organize events and collaborations with partner communities. My main goal running for the board would be to improve the frayed relationship between the community of GNOME contributors and the GNOME Foundation. I think it’s crucial for the board to include actual community members, and I believe that as a community we have a responsibility to also take care of the legal structures that are needed to support our project. Over the last years there has been a lack of interest from most community members to take part in the board or even to interact with the Foundation, and I want to do my part to change this! With more community people on the board I believe that communications would be much-improved, and the Foundation’s priorities could be realigned to support the project’s needs.

   • Stabilize finances and refocus funding on community: As has been recently written about by Pablo, the Foundation apparently has not done a good job managing its resources in recent years, spending huge amounts in an attempt to grow into what could be called a “professional” NGO. I believe that to become sustainable we need to change course and refocus on the project, the community, and actual improvements to the product that we have. I do think that we desperately need new sources of funding, but these should be centered around work to improve GNOME. In particular I’d advocate for a heavier focus on grants and crowdfunding, with a clear guarantee that the majority of the money will be spent on things that will make GNOME better for our users.
   • Decentralize GUADEC: Bringing all our contributors to the same place once a year is not sustainable (both financially and environmentally), and it’s becoming increasingly cynical in the context of the climate crisis if we want to do things differently from the software industry (which is now leaving behind all their climate goals for some short-term profits from the AI hype). At the same time I think we’ve seen that just having conferences in different parts of the world every once in a while does not magically attract lots of contributors from those regions. If we want our community to truly be global and inclusive we need to build up local communities, and empower them to organize their own local events, instead of organizing events in a “top-down” fashion. Our local community in Berlin has been a good example for this in recent years, and I’m convinced that something similar is possible elsewhere. Long-term we should have lots of local GUADECs, ideally in places that are easily (and affordably) accessible for all our contributors, without the need for long-distance travel.
   • Foster local communities: I’ve been part of building up the local community in Berlin, which has grown a lot over the past years. We now have over 20 people regularly joining (and co-organizing) local events, active collaborations with other local communities (e.g. postmarketOS, KDE or p2panda), and our release parties and hackfests attract people from all over Germany.

   I think the Foundation could do more to support efforts like this, e.g. by helping new local communities to organize first events or creating connections to other projects with a local presence. I’d love to help make this happen as a wider initiative.

10. Karen Sandler
    Full statement
    Affiliation: Software Freedom Conservancy, Columbia Law School (Lecturer-In-Law), also on the board of the Spritely Institute and a non-uploading Debian Developer
    

    Here’s the tl;dr of my application:

    • I am a former ED of GNOME Foundation and an ongoing contributor, so I know a lot of what goes into running the org, and I know many of the community members very well
    • I've got over a decade of experience running free software nonprofits
    • I've had significant experience applying for and managing grants
    • I have a lot of experience with governance issues
    • I love GNOME and care deeply about software freedom!

    I’m proud to be a contributor to GNOME since around 2007, I think, starting with pro bono legal help to the project, then expanding to marketing and other strategic work. I was Executive Director of the GF from 2011 to 2014, when I became Executive Director of Software Freedom Conservancy, which I previously helped found in 2006 (I remained a volunteer for SFC while working for GF, and a volunteer or GF while working for SFC). I served as a Director of GF for a while but even after that I continued to contribute as a volunteer until the present day. Most of my contributions have been legal and strategic, but I also have helped with marketing and I served on all of the ED search committees since my departure. I also had the honor of being the “voice of GNOME” in the release videos for a while. (One of my favorite things was someone criticizing one of the videos, saying that GNOME should have picked a voice that sounded less polished and an obvious voice actor, like it was an Apple ad! This was after my stint as ED and lots of other advocacy and it just made me laugh.) I feel a bit silly mentioning it, but I do have a technical background, having been a coder and earning an engineering degree before I went to law school, since I know that matters to some people. I’ve run audits and have financial legal experience as well. I love GNOME, and am an avid (and vocal!) user. I want to be up front that I am very busy. So I can make time for the board meetings on top of my current legal and strategic contributions, but not for a lot more hands on work. I do have significant experience running non-profits now, and significant experience applying for and managing grant funding (in my work with SFC, we’ve had millions of dollars in grant funding). I also co-run Outreachy and have experience with diversity initiatives. I have a good amount of experience with Codes of Conduct, too. I feel strongly that GF should stay close to GNOME’s interests, that we should stay true to our public good mission and free software principles, and that we should do so with as much transparency as possible. And, in case you don’t know anything about me, I’m super passionate about software freedom due in part to the fact that I have an implanted medical device with proprietary software in it that has opened my eyes to how critical it is that we as a public have control over our critical software. Using that metaphor has been particularly useful to advocate for free software, and I have given many talks about it. I see software freedom, and copyleft in particular, to be a Right to Repair issue.

11. Federico Mena Quintero
    Full statement
    Affiliation: SUSE
    

    I am one of the founders of GNOME, and a previous board member for various periods — the most recent one being two terms during 2018-2020. In that period, I was part of the team that finished writing our Code of Conduct and then set it in place. My current bid centers on two points, project governance and mental health of the community.

    • Project governance: Our project has always had a rather informal technical governance: by default, decisions get made by, and coordinated amongst, module maintainers. This worked well when the project was small and tractable, and everyone knew each other. Nowadays, the project is big and hard to understand as a whole, and people tend to only have a few close acquaintances. This is not bad; it just means that GNOME has grown. Here is a list of problems that are all related:
    • The release team is overworked, and the scope of its work has drifted from its original stated purpose. While they do the necessary work of coordinating GNOME releases, they are often responsible-by-default for fixing last-minute issues in under-maintained modules.
    • We have a hard time coordinating decisions that touch several modules. The context of past decisions is scattered among GitLab, our minds, and Matrix channels, which makes it difficult for newer contributors to access.
    • There are different forces which sometimes clash with each other: “normal” development and its need to evolve things, downstreams with competing priorities, a design team which wants to present a coherent user experience without micromanaging, marginalized populations whose needs are often forgotten or put as a lower priority. Every one of these actors has a voice that needs to be heard, but the lack of diversity in who makes the final decisions affects us all.
    • Maintainers have a hard time balancing the requests of newcomers, their own development concerns, and a unified vision for GNOME.
    • The maintenance load, or the amount of time that one has to dedicate to keep a module running, varies widely among modules. Some modules are difficult to maintain, but this burden could be eased with improvements to their tooling.
    • Talent development. We do not have a mentoring structure to get people from newcomers to regular contributors to maintainers. Is being a maintainer even the last step in one’s evolution, or can we imagine other paths for leadership positions?
    Other organizations have clearly-defined governance models. Two well-known examples:
    • the PEP process for Python
    • the RFC process for Rust
    • (many others, Django, Jupyter, etc.)
    The whole governance for those projects is defined through those kinds of documents, which can then be updated when the project wants to make changes to their governance. GNOME should do something like this, and we should have a conversation on how to attain it. We are not a programming language community, so our governance model may need to be different from those. During my term on the Board, I would work with community members in establishing an initial governance process, and if we arrive at something like a technical steering committee (or whatever you want to call it), in making the Board appoint it as official. This committee needs to be diverse from the start. Women. Blind and disabled people. People who use non-Latin languages. Let’s make other voices heard, too, instead of having all decision-makers be of a homogeneous demographic.
    • Mental health of the community: While the governance process and organization seems like formalizing whatever it is we do in GNOME, we need to grapple with the effects of our current way of working:
    • People are overworked.
    • There is tension between contributors.
    • Some people just cannot commit the same amount of time to the project as others.
    • Some people get left behind when the project changes its ways; sometimes that’s okay, and sometimes it isn’t.

    How can we better take care of each other? How can we assure newcomers that they are entering an environment that cares about their well-being? Can the Foundation dedicate resources to this?

Additional Elections-related Information

Note, that according to the Bylaws Article VIII Section 2d the Board cannot have more than two members affiliated with one same company. If more than 2 people from one company are elected, only the top 2 candidates will join the Board. You will be able to vote for up to 4 candidates of your choice, with no restrictions in terms of affiliation. You cannot vote more than once for the same candidate.

If you have any futher question, please consult the Rules for this election or write to GitLab.