It’s the end of the working week, the weekend is calling, and it’s time for another weekly GNOME Foundation update. As always, there’s plenty going on at the GNOME Foundation, and this post just covers the highlights that are easy to share. Let’s get started.

Board meeting

The Board of Directors had a regular meeting on Tuesday this week (the meeting was regular in the sense that it is regularly scheduled for the 2nd Tuesday of the month).

We were extremely pleased to approve the addition of two new members to the Circle Committee : welcome to Alireza and Ignacy, who will be helping out with the fantastic Circle initiative !

For those who don’t know, the Circle Committee is the team that is responsible for reviewing app submissions, as well as doing regular maintenance on the list of member apps. It’s valuable work.

The main item on the agenda for this week’s Board meeting was the 2025-26 budget, which we finalized and approved. Our financial year runs from October to September, so the budget approval was slightly late, but a delay this small doesn’t have any practical consequence for our operations. We’ll provide a separate post on the budget itself, to provide more details on our plans and financial position.

GIMP grants

Some news which I can share now, even though it isn’t technically from this week: last week the Foundation finished the long process of awarding the GIMP project’s first two development grants. I’m really excited for the GIMP project now that we have reached this milestone, and I’m sure that the grants will give their development efforts a major boost.

More specifics about the grants are coming in a dedicated announcement, so I won’t go into too many details now. However, I will say that a fair amount of work was required on the Foundation side to implement the grants in a compliant manner, including the creation and roll out of a new conflict of interest policy. The nice thing about this is that, with the necessary frameworks in place, it will be relatively easy to award additional grants in the future.

Fundraising Committee

The new Fundraising Committee had its first meeting this week, and I hear that its members have started working through a list of tasks, which is great news. I’m very appreciative of this effort, and especial thanks has to go to Maria Majadas who has pushed it forward.

The committee isn’t an official committee just yet – this is something that the Board will hopefully look at during its next meeting.

Message ends

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next week.