Steven’s weekly Foundation updates were fantastic and, since I’m filling in the ED role as President, I want to keep them going. I’m still mulling over the frequency and scheduling of the posts, but for now I’ll stick to weekly on Fridays.

I’m trying to make this an update for the entire organisation, rather than for me personally, so a lot of this update is about others’ activities, rather than my own. Inevitably I can’t report on everything and will miss some items, so apologies to anyone if I don’t manage to cover your contributions. We can always squeeze omissions into a future update, so let me know if I missed anything.

As many of you know, Steven departed his role as ED last week . Everyone on the board knows that this was a shock to many people, and that it has had an impact on the GNOME community. I think that, for now, there’s not a huge amount that I can say about that topic. However, what I will say is that its significance has not been lost on those of us who are working on the Foundation, and that we are committed to making good on our ambitions for the Foundation and for the GNOME Project more generally. With that said, here’s what we’ve been up to this week.

Transition

Transitioning the Foundation leadership has been a major focus for this week, due to Steven’s departure and new officers being appointed. Handing over all the accounts is quite a big task which has involved paperwork and calls, and this work will carry on for a while longer yet.

I’d like to thank Steven for being exceptionally helpful during this process. Everyone on the Exec Committee is very appreciative.

I’ve been handing the chair role over to Maria, which involved me dumping a lot of procedural information on her in a fairly uncontrolled manner. Sorry Maria!

I’ve also started to participate in the management of our paid team members. Thanks to everyone for being accommodating during this process.

There have also been a lot of messages and conversations with partners. I am trying to get around to everyone, but am still midway through the process. If there’s anyone out there who would like to say hi, please don’t be shy! My door is always open and I’d love to hear from anyone who has a relationship with the GNOME Foundation and would like to connect.

Budget season

The GNOME Foundation annual budget runs from October to September, so we are currently busy working on the budget that will come into effect in October this year. Deepa, our new treasurer, did an amazing job and provided the board with a draft budget ahead of time, and we had our first meeting to discuss it this week. There will be more meetings over September and we’ll provide a report on the new budget once it has been finalised.

Sponsorships

We got our first corporate sponsor through the new donations platform this week, which feels like a great milestone. Many thanks to Symless for your support! Our corporate supporter packages are a great way for businesses of all sizes to help sustain GNOME and the wider ecosystem, and these sponsorships a huge difference. If anyone reading this post thinks that their employer might be interested in a corporate sponsorship package, please do encourage them to sign up. And we’re always happy to talk to potential donors.

Framework

One particular highlight from this week was a call between GNOME developers and members of the Framework team. This was something that Steven had set in motion (again, thanks Steven!) and was incredibly exciting from my perspective. Partnerships between hardware vendors and upstream open source projects have so much potential, both in terms of delivering better products, but also improving the efficiency of development and testing. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

Outreachy

The Exec Committee approved funding for a single Outreachy intern for the December 2025 cohort. This funding is coming from an Endless grant , so thanks to Endless for your support. Outreachy is a fantastic program so we’re happy we can continue to fund GNOME’s participation.

Audit

The GNOME Foundation is due to be audited next calendar year. This is a standard process, but we’ve never been audited before, so it’s going to be a new experience for us. This week I signed the paperwork to secure an auditor, who came highly recommended to us. This was an important step in making sure that the audit happens according to schedule.

All the usual

Other Foundation programs continue to run this week. Flathub is being worked on, events are being planned, and we continue to have development activities happening that we’re supporting. There’s already a lot to mention in this post, so I won’t go into specifics right now, but all this work is important and valued. Thanks to everyone who is doing this work. Keep it up!

Message ends

That’s it from me. See you next week. o/