The GNOME Foundation has selected the first recipients who will receive funding through its new Fellowship program , and is delighted to announce that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold will begin work as our first Fellows in July.

Sophie and Peter are both long-running GNOME contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the GNOME community. Sophie is known as developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org . Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.

Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the GNOME project. Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for GNOME, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern GNOME platform conventions.

Congratulations to Peter and Sophie – we’re genuinely excited to see what you’ll achieve as our first Fellows, and proud to be supporting your work.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted applications to the first round of the Fellowship. We received some genuinely excellent proposals, and would strongly encourage unsuccessful applicants to apply again in future rounds.

Peter and Sophie’s work is made possible by the generosity of GNOME’s supporters. If you’d like to help fund future rounds and support contributors like them, please consider donating .