This post is the latest in my series of GNOME Foundation updates. I’m writing these in my capacity as Foundation President, where I’m busy managing a lot of what’s happening at the organisation at the moment. Each of these posts is a report on what happened over a particular period, and this post covers the current week as well as the previous one (23rd February to 6th March).

Audit time

I’ve mentioned the GNOME Foundation’s audit on numerous occassions previously. This is being conducted as a matter of routine, but it is our first full formal audit, so we have been learning a lot about what’s involved.

This week has been the audit fieldwork itself, which has been quite intense and a lot of work for everyone involved. The audit team consists of 5 people, most of whom are accountants of different grades. Our own finance team has been meeting with them three times a day since Tuesday, answering questions, doing walkthroughs of our systems, and providing additional documents as requested.

A big part of the audit is cross-referencing and checking documentation, and we have been busy responding to requests for information throughout the week. On last count, we have provided 140 documents to the auditors this week alone, on 20 different themes, including statements, receipts, contracts, invoices, sponsorship agreements, finance reports, and so on.

We’re expecting the draft audit report in about three weeks. Initial signs are good!

GUADEC 2026

Planning activity for GUADEC 2026 has continued over the past two weeks. That includes organising catering, audio visual facilities, a photographer, and sponsorship work.

Registration for the event is now open. The Call for Papers is also open and will close on 13 March – just one week away! If you would like to present this year, please submit an abstract!

If you would like travel sponsorship for GUADEC, there are two deadlines to submit a request: 15th March (for those who need to book travel early, such as if they need a visa) and 24th May (for those with less time pressure).

LAS 2026

This year’s Linux App Summit is happening in Berlin, on the 16th and 17th May, and is shaping up to be a great event. As usual we are co-organizing the event with KDE, and the call for proposals has just opened. If you’d like to present, you have until 23rd March to submit a paper.

The Travel Committee will be accepting travel applications for LAS attendees this year, so if you’d like to attend and need travel assistance, please submit a request no later than 13th April.

Infrastructure

On the infrastracture side, GNOME’s single sign on service has been integrated with blogs.gnome.org, which is great for security, as well as meaning that you won’t need to remember an extra password for our WordPress instance. Many thanks to miniOrange for providing us with support for their OAuth plugin for WordPress, which has allowed this to happen!

That’s it for my update this week. In addition to the highlights that I’ve mentioned, there are quite a number of other activities happening at the Foundation right now, particularly around new programs, some of which we’re not quite ready to talk about, but hope to provide updates on soon.