I got funding from my employer to attend the GNOME conference, and one of the requirements is that I write a “conference report” mail with a summary of what I got out of it.

I’m going to share that email here, with a bit of extra context. If you’re reading my blog — you’re either quite involved in GNOME, or maybe you know me personally and don’t have much of a clue why I go on about gnomes all the time. This email was written for an audience which is largely software engineers, many with an interest in open source and many using GNOME to do their work, but relatively few who are actively developing desktop software or participating as volunteers in big open source projects.

I’m just back from the GNOME project’s annual meetup. This year it was in A Coruña (near my adopted home town Santiago), where the University has a functioning Linux user group ( GPUL ) and 5 members did an amazing job as the local organizing team.

The conference is open to GNOME users and anyone interested in open computer interfaces, but it tends towards *intra-project* communication since its the one time that everyone in GNOME gets into a single place.

Given that, the talk I’m going to recommend is part 2 of the GNOME Foundation AGM:
https://www.youtube.com/live/Q4O7dhreLDU?si=eGxbIIq3TkVtuty1&t=6739

If you’ve been in the software world more than 5 minutes you’ll know that high quality code doesn’t go on trees, and if you’ve been involved in any kind of community-led initiative you’ll know that volunteers do not just appear out of nowhere either. GNOME provides a nice interface to use your computer, but also an independent legal entity that is funded and managed by its members, with membership open to anyone who participates actively in the project, and a Board of Directors elected democratically from the membership.

This part of the AGM was mainly presented by Allan Day, he is primarily a UI designer working at Red Hat but has also dedicated a lot of energy to the non-profit Foundation during a series of quite turbulent years, and for the last year was acting as President of the foundation.

Some highlights from the presentation if you don’t want to watch the whole thing:

• There are now nearly 1,000 recurring monthly donations from individuals via the “Friends of GNOME” program.
• This allows running a year-long “Fellowship” initiative which will fund the work of two long-time volunteer contributors .
• The Foundation has successfully cut expenses in the last 2 years, including reducing the number of paid staff, and balanced its budget in the short term.
• Many of the people currently running the Foundation are overworked and dealing with burnout.
• There needs to be an active effort to maintain and increase the number of monthly donors for the project to survive.

This kind of management work might seem dry, but its really an essential part of any project with more than a handful of members, and I think Allan’s intuitions as a designer meant that the presentation was a lot more informative and accessible to outsiders than your average AGM.

Of course, GUADEC is also a good place to find a subset of the Freedesktop SDK community. I did a lightning talk about my mission to allow swapping out the shell & utilities in Freedesktop SDK:
<https://www.youtube.com/live/Q4O7dhreLDU?si=DFHAFHJxnG8j7SLh&t=26403> . And we landed this branch in time for FDSDK 26.08, which is good news for those of us building operating systems with FDSDK and BuildStream.

There is plenty more to watch in the videos if you’re interested in open source desktop and mobile software… including some talks by Abderrahim and some workshops run by Javier, but I’ll leave them to highlight what happened in those

Thanks as always to Codethink for sponsoring us to attend.