Nine months ago, I had to field quite a few angry comments from folks who told me they intended to drop their GNOME Foundation memberships in the wake of confusing and opaque board behaviour. I say to you now what I told each of them back in September:

Stay and fight.

The GNOME Foundation saw a much needed — and long overdue — changing of the guard back in August of 2025. In the past 12 months, the Foundation has finally made the improvements it should have been making over the past decade:

• 2025-05-09 – GNOME’s infra team had its first management review — it was spotless.
• 2025-05-16 – Foundation Reports begin in earnest as a first small step toward a transparent GNOME Foundation. We begin the hunt for a new Treasurer.
• 2025-05-23 – We started a Foundation Handbook to match handbook.gnome.org . (This has since migrated to a wiki.) We started moving all the Foundation’s documents into a central location. Project management began at the Foundation for the first time ever.
• 2025-05-28 – The Foundation publicly acknowledged that attacks on our Matrix servers, using illegal images, constitute crimes.
• 2025-06-06 – Both donate.gnome.org and (later) fellowship.gnome.org are pitched and accepted by the board. We brought on Deepa Venkatraman as Treasurer. Bart Piotrowski set up vault.gnome.org for passwords.
• 2025-06-14 – Andrea Veri completed the transition to donated AWS resources for GNOME infra.
• 2025-06-20 – donate.gnome.org is released, thanks to the hard work of Bart, Sam Hewitt, and Jakub Steiner.
• 2025-06-26 – The “Donate Less” campaign begins, in anticipation of the outbound program that would become fellowship.gnome.org.
• 2025-07-05 – The concept of fellowship.gnome.org goes public. Work on the corresponding donate.gnome.org shell notification starts. We tightened fiscal controls. We added redundancy to all our financial, legal, and operational processes. We interviewed a pipeline of candidates and selected Ignacy Kuchciński to complete the work under the Digital Wellbeing grant.
• 2025-07-12 – We invited postmarketOS to the Advisory Board.
• 2025-07-21 – We started stabilizing the GNOME Foundation’s finances for the long term by redefining the Board Reserve and taking a hard look at balancing year-on-year (annual recurring) revenue and expenses. We added the first-ever redundant signatories on bank accounts.
• 2025-08-08 – We created a shared online space for Advisory Board members to collaborate.
• 2025-09-05 – First corporate sponsor.
• 2025-09-12 – Deepa’s budget process is “the best the Foundation has ever had,” according to multiple directors.
• 2025-10-10 – Digital Wellbeing is delivered. The Foundation gets a much-needed credit card policy.
• 2025-10-24 – A new Finance Advisor arrives. (An important role at a 501c3.)
• 2025-11-28 – The budget is balanced. More importantly, the budget report contains the commitment to balancing recurring expenses and recurring revenue, continuously.
• 2025-12-19 – Deepa joins as a full director and remains Treasurer.
• 2026-01-09 – A new automated accounts payable and accounts receivable system is installed.
• 2026-03-20 – Financial reporting moves from quarterly to monthly.
• 2026-04-17 – The Fellowship Program begins! Users’ donations come full-circle: a percentage of every donation now goes directly to developers.
• 2026-05-15 – Finances are on-target. The Foundation opens a position for Finance Director.
• 2026-05-29 – Four old finance platforms are retired as the finances of the Foundation are automated and simplified. The Foundation introduces a Concern Escalation Policy: if members feel that directors or staff are abusing their positions with policy violations, illegal activity, discrimination, or conflicted behaviour, they’re provided the reassurance that they can blow the whistle without risk of retaliation.

That’s a lot for one little nonprofit. But this is the beginning of GNOME Foundation 2.0, not the end. The work must continue and there is still plenty to be done.

If you let your membership expire in recent years, get it back. If you are thinking of leaving, don’t. And if you are thinking of running for board elections, run.

The GNOME Foundation is the healthiest it’s ever been. It’s reducing costs and focusing on its actual mission: GNOME. The excellence demanded of GNOME hackers is now demanded of the Foundation, too. You can be a part of continuing that trajectory.

There has never been a more meaningful time to join the GNOME Foundation board .