Candidates for the GNOME Foundation 2025 Elections

Below you find the list of candidates running for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors in 2025. 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. Cassidy James Blaede
    Full statement
    Affiliation: Endless
    I’ve been involved in GNOME design since 2015, and was a contributor to the wider FreeDesktop ecosystem before that via elementary OS since around 2010. I am employed by Endless, where I am the community architect/experience lead. I am particularly proud of my work in early design, communication, and advocacy around both the FreeDesktop color scheme (i.e. dark style) and accent color preferences, both of which are now widely supported across FreeDesktop OSes and the app ecosystem. At elementary I coordinated volunteer projects, lead the user experience design, launched and managed OEM partnerships, and largely maintained our communication by writing and editing regular update announcements and other blog posts. Over the past year I helped organize GUADEC 2024 in Denver, and continue to contribute to the GNOME design team and Flathub documentation and curation. I was appointed to the GNOME Foundation board in March to fill a vacancy, and I am excited to earn your vote to continue my work on the board. If elected, I will continue my focus on:
    • Clearer and more frequent communication from the GNOME Foundation, including by helping write and edit blog posts and announcements
    • Exploring and supporting fundraising opportunities including with users, OEMs, and downstream projects
    • Ensuring Flathub continues to be recognized as the premier Linux app store, especially as it moves to enable financially supporting the developers of FOSS apps
    • More widely communicating the impact, influence, and importance of GNOME and Flathub to raise awareness beyond the existing contributor community
    • Helping ensure that the Foundation reflects the interests of the contributor community
    I feel like the GNOME Foundation is at an important transformation point, and I look forward to helping steer things in the right direction for an effective, sustainable organization in support of the GNOME community. Regardless of whether I am elected, I will continue to contribute to design and communication as much as I’m able.

  2. Maria Majadas
    Full statement
    Affiliation: ATG for European Space Agency
    My first community involvement was helping out in arranging events with Hispalinux, a Free Software association in Spain, around the year 2000, which led me to the GNOME community as part of GNOME Hispano. From 2004 to 2008 more or less I was part of the Spanish Translation team. Since then I continued to be part of the community, attending events and helping whenever I was able to. Like many people in this community, I am not a developer but I contribute in other ways. This does not come off without a heavy impostor syndrome as it is sometimes hard to find your place when you don’t code. I want to help make people see that you can contribute to this community in many different ways. But although I am not a developer, I recognize the strength of code. One of the things that I was most interested in Free Software is the freedom that it provides us. Freedom to modify, distribute but also the freedom to be sure that we are safe using our computers. This is something that I feel we have lost as a component in our conversations while talking about Free Software and it is something that right now has to come back more than ever. Free Software is by nature inclusive. It does empower people across the entire globe with access to information they might not have been able to. I joined because of the ethics but I stayed because wonderful people helped me feel included and feeling that I could help other people to feel included themselves, with my translations and the events I helped organize. And it does only make sense that the Free Software communities are in the vanguard of social equity and diversity. We have come a long way since I started attending events and, with a handful of exceptions, diversity was nowhere to be found. Now we have an amazing group of contributors from diverse backgrounds and an amazing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiative, yet I feel we still have work to do to push forward in terms of representation. I think a diverse community must be led by a Board of Directors that attain themselves to the highest standards in following the bylaws and transparency, just as I think unity in the community is paramount. An united community does not mean we all think the same, but it means we all row in the same direction, making compromises with each other when needed. That is how GNOME ended up with 25+ strong years of history.

  3. Arun Raghavan
    Full statement
    Affiliation: Asymptotic Inc.
    After over a decade of really wanting to do this, I would finally like to put myself forward as candidate for the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors. By way of history, I have been a user and advocate of free software for over 25 years, and have been in the GNOME community for about 20 of those years. In the past (~2003-2010), I also helped organise F/OSS and GNOME-specific events in India (primarily during the Linux Bangalore and FOSS.in days). My first code contributions were to Beagle in 2007 as part of the Google Summer of Code, after which I was part of the Gentoo GNOME team for several years. For the last 15 years, I have been a developer and maintainer of GStreamer, PulseAudio, and more recently PipeWire. This has also been the basis for most of my professional life. I currently run my own open source consulting firm where I work with different kinds of organisations that use and contribute to the projects that I am part of upstream. In this role, I am also often working with folks who are new to the community, and provide mentorship and guidance as they find their way in. Over this period, I have mostly observed the structure of the GNOME community and its relationship with the Foundation from the outside. Now, I would like to take a more active part in helping the Foundation set itself to be a solid platform for serving the community well into the future. To this end, the immediate priorities for the board as I see it are:
    • Financial stability: Sustainably financing the commons is imo one of the large, unsolved problems of our times, and our problems on this front are well known. It is critical that the Foundation finds itself on more solid ground if we want to be able to accomplish our goals.
    • Communication: Transparency is always a hot topic in these manifestos, but I think the starting point must be communication. The This Week in GNOME effort and our new Executive Director’s weekly posts are good demonstrations of its importance in keeping our community vital and feeling connected.
    I’m keeping that list short, because the rest of it is on-going work. I have been delighted to see a steady inflow of fresh faces in the community, and I would love for the Foundation to help the community continue building this momentum. The part the Foundation can play in this is having events and outreach to build an inclusive, global community, as well as raising funding for all the work that needs to be done – I would like to help it do that.

  4. Aaditya Singh
    Full statement
    Affiliation: Shangrila Pvt. Ltd.
    I am Aaditya, Community Lead of GNOME Nepal, representing Open Source and GNOME from the Himalayan country of Nepal. I am a normal person who loves contributing to FOSS, particularly GNOME. Most of my contributions have been non-technical. I led the local team for GNOME Asia Summit 2023, Kathmandu, Nepal. This was followed by my involvement as a global organizer for the GNOME Asia Summit 2024, Bengaluru, India. GNOME Nepal is now a community of more than 300+ members on its platform. The community was started last year in April when I got the permission from the foundation to have a local chapter in Nepal. The journey from a single person to a significant community that has now won the bid to organize UbuCon Asia 2025 has taught me a lot about how we can grow GNOME awareness and its applications within the local community and people of the countries that are yet to adopt open source. GNOME Nepal has till now provided instruction and training sessions to 1000+ individuals, in just a duration of 1 year. Started own projects to encourage newcomers into the open source contributions, both technical and non-technical, which can later be instrumental in the global projects. Increased the representation of the Nepali speakers from 1 to 5+ in the recent GNOME Asia summit. GNOME Nepal itself became a cornerstone for the revival of Ubuntu Nepal, which was inactive for a decade. I believe that I have the leadership and teamwork capability that is valuable for the position for which I am giving my candidacy. If elected, my focus will be to :
    • Maintain better communication and support to the local GNOME communities and groups from all over the globe, like GNOME Germany, GNOME Africa, GNOME Nepal, etc., and their contributors.
    • Encourage newcomers from countries with less open source adoption to join and contribute to the Foundation’s project.
    • Facilitate the formation and sustainability of the Local GNOME Chapters around the globe. This will increase GNOME Foundation and its project’s awareness right from the grassroots level.
    • Bring in more non-technical contributors to contribute to the areas like Design, promotion, and event management for the Foundation.
    • Offer comprehensive support for events such as GUADEC, GNOME Asia Summit, and GNOME LATAM by facilitating contributor engagement, securing sponsorships, and assisting with event management and operational logistics.
    So, my focus will be more on facilitating the formation of GNOME’s local communities and user groups all over the globe, contributing to the already formed communities’ sustainability, encouraging and bringing in newcomers and contributors, and helping the Foundation’s Conferences and events.

  5. Lorenz Wildberg
    Full statement
    Affiliation: Development-Political Volunteer in Cambodia with Bread for the World
    Most people will know me for my involvement in the Vala project and the GNOME Berlin community. Also, I have been GSoC mentor in 2024 and 2025. You can find me in the fediverse at lw64@chaos.social and in many GNOME matrix channels as lw64:gnome.org (please no DM requests if I don’t know you). First I want to tell a story, a story that many in our community share. It is mostly my story too: In this example, a highschooler starts using linux and is interested in the idea behind open source. They picked GNOME as the project to contribute to, because of its philosophy. Though usually they start with software through other projects. First a bug fix, soon a first app work in progress, eventually published on flathub. Maybe also non-code contributions. But everything only in their free time. Sadly, this is where the story stops for many people. The next steps get harder and harder:
    • Become GNOME Foundation member
    • start contributing in the lower parts of the stack
    • join teams and take over responsibilities
    • go to conferences
    The fact that many people don’t take these steps is a big problem. GNOME is a community project. That means that to keep it running, constantly new contributors need to be recruited, to fill the gaps opened by leaving community members. And since we want the project to grow to achieve greater results, the community also needs to grow. New apps are nice, but also very important are the core platform, the operating system, the runtime for the apps. They need to be maintained and adapted to new technologies with time. Right now, it is well known how underresourced they are. Also, we need more cooperation with other open source projects, to build solutions more quickly and easily, without doing everything on our own. It is an unbelievable achievement that we have so much code that is partly still the same from more than 30 years ago, but we need to make sure we can continue for the next 30 years as well. In other words: GNOME needs to improve at recruiting more newcomers and supporting them better. To change this, I want to have a better representation of the interests of those:
    • who are “newcomers” or treated like it
    • without foundation membership yet
    • without a paid position to work on GNOME
    • who just contribute and not maintain yet
    • who cannot fund long travel
    • who are not in any team or couldn’t acquire any responsibility yet
    • who have a lot of motivation, but are being held back
    • who have backgrounds in other projects and only contribute to GNOME in part of their time
    • yet without recognition, reputation, power
    When I am on the board, I will do exactly that. At the moment they are barely represented. And I believe it is in the interest of the whole GNOME project to listen to these people more. I have this background. I told my story. I have only been contributing to GNOME for 4 years, and I am very happy I was able to take all the steps until here, but I want to empower others to do the same. One other topic I will try to focus on is the distrust of the community towards the GNOME foundation. This is my point of view:
    • I see the foundation as part of the community. Board directors are elected from the community, by the community. They do not have any other privileges. Everyone from the community should be able to join efforts led by the foundation.
    • We need more transparency and accountability.
    • Better and more communication towards contributors, as well as the larger community
    • The community should be more encouraged to organize efforts by themselves (including local events, fundraising, …). Of course, when it is useful or necessary, the foundation should still provide support.
    • Improved moderation & CoC enforcement, and also better care over community health and internal conflict resolutions
    • A proper resolution and communication for the community on the Sonny Piers CoC process
    Additionally:
    • I am very concerned about the GNOME Foundation’s dependency on the USA.
    • I believe we need more GNOME OS on real hardware (preinstalled)! (also fundraising opportunity)
    • More local communities and events!
    • I love watching GNOME streamers, we need more!

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.