The GNOME Foundation has been operating at a loss for several years and has a dysfunctional relationship with its community. As the Foundation started hitting its reserves, it needed to change course. A five-year Strategic Plan is a useful aspirational document that hints at the priorities, but it’s not an operational plan.
To restore a symbiotic relationship with the project it was built for, the GNOME Foundation needs to get its finances under control, increase its executive transparency, and involve and support the community in its day-to-day operations. Here is a proposal to help the board members and Executive Director achieve those objectives with a Big Bounce. The Foundation must scale down, focus on high-impact initiatives, and grow back from a solid base.
Reaffirming the role of the Foundation
The Foundation was built to support the GNOME project. It needs to work symbiosis with the contributing community to help the project succeed from a social and technical perspective. Its role is to bridge the gap between the expertise we have in the community and the expertise we need to deliver projects that serve GNOME successfully.
To do so, the contributing community and the Foundation must work together to define priorities, come up with a project scope and budget to achieve those objectives, find sources of funding to make those initiatives sustainable, and finally, hire people to make the work happen. The hiring needs to happen in the open and favour volunteer contributors when their areas of expertise are relevant.
The GNOME Foundation is a complement to the project. Both must work together to support each other.
Bridging the gap
GNOME serves a social purpose through a series of technical achievements. But that purpose is loosely defined today. We must go beyond “we’re the good guys because it’s open source and looks pretty”.
The Foundation and community must gather to define pragmatic high-level priorities for the project together. This needs to be a dialogue, building on the community’s expertise to determine what is possible and on the Foundation’s expertise to determine what is fundable.
To do so, the Foundation needs to have an overview of the areas of interest of
- the people GNOME aims to serve, bearing in mind that “everyone” is not a realistic objective;
- the volunteers & partners contributing to GNOME, which includes non-technical contributions;
- and the grant-making philanthropies that could sustain our work.
Nobody in our community has the expertise required to conduct such an audit, and this is where the Foundation can shine. The Foundation can perform this audit with paid staff, which is a wise investment of its resources. This investigation must produce a document that will serve as the basis for defining priorities for the project with the community.
I’m all in for transparency, but the Foundation should restrict the audience of this document to board members, executives, and community representatives. It takes time and effort to put such an overview together, and making the document public would allow other organisations to compete with the Foundation on grants without bearing any of the costs, giving them an unfair advantage.
Once the priorities have been defined in the open, the Foundation must take the lead on grant writing, with regular input from the community, to develop a realistic scope and budget. We don’t have grant managers or writers in the community, so it makes sense for the Foundation to invest in such roles. The Foundation must factor the cost of grant managers and writers into the grant bid budgets.
After grants have been earned, the Foundation must contract with (or ideally, in the longer run, hire) project managers, designers and developers from the community to implement the projects.
The Foundation must build expertise that complements the community’s. Then, they must work together to implement the projects by hiring technical profiles from the community.
Rethinking conferences
Conferences are a large part of the Foundation’s expenses, but the partners with whom we work usually sponsor most of the travel and venue costs.
Travel and venue costs are not the only monetary costs of conferences, though. Coordinating the various activities leading to a successful conference can take one or several people.
The conferences also have a significant environmental cost. Flying to another continent to meet others should be an absolute last resort in the wake of the extreme climate crisis we’re facing. As such, it is not responsible for the GNOME Foundation to keep organising large-scale events like GUADEC.
GNOME gets some visibility by organising such conferences, but this is not how it receives the most coverage. Contracting with partners and delivering projects gets us a lot more positive press. It gives GNOME visibility both in the Linux ecosystem and in broader audiences.
Volunteers have also shown that the community can self-organise around local and even federated events with the Berlin Mini GUADEC initiative. Bonding is essential for the community’s cohesion, but keeping an inhabitable planet is even more critical.
The Foundation must stop organising GUADEC as a global event, rely on local communities to organise smaller gatherings, and focus its resources on project delivery.
Becoming a partner worth investing in
The community has been working on many non-technical initiatives that make the project more accessible.
Sophie Herold has done a stellar job auditing apps, building a platform, and automating the updates for apps.gnome.org. The community at large, and more particularly Allan Day, created the long-awaited GNOME handbook. Those two projects are instrumental in the onboarding of new members. They both require extensive knowledge of the power dynamics and customs within the community.
The Circle committee is another crucial, non-technical initiative. Its members are already mentoring self-motivated app developers, teaching them how to reach the high standards GNOME holds itself to. They provide guidance with UX, code quality, and, more generally, how to build a successful app for GNOME.
Felipe Borges has been overseeing GSoC and Outreachy, with the formidable support of mentors who give their time away to help newcomers have an impact on GNOME.
Those, among many other initiatives led by volunteers, show that the community is by far the main engine of the project. The Foundation must set up programmes, processes, and indicators to measure its success. It must focus on a few initiatives to maximise its impact and adapt its staffing accordingly.
In short, the Foundation must become a reliable and efficient partner to attract funding. The STF-funded Development Initiative has been a great pilot project from which to draw inspiration.
The Foundation can’t afford to navigate at sight anymore. It needs tools to measure its impact and become a partner worth investing in, one that turns money into social and technical advances.
In conclusion, the GNOME Foundation needs to scale down, refocus, produce tools to measure its impact, deliver successful projects in coordination with the community, and bounce back to a larger scale.
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