It’s been another busy week for the GNOME Foundation. Here’s my attempt to summarise what’s been happening. As with my previous update, this update is for the whole organisation rather than just me personally. It’s also likely that I’ll have missed some things. Hopefully I’ve captured the highlights though!

GNOME.Asia 2025

GNOME.Asia 2025 is happening in Toyko, Japan, in December. I’m sure that this is going to be a fantastic event, and the call for papers has recently been extended to 1st October. If you have an idea for a talk and would like to participate, go submit a proposal!

Digital wellbeing

The Foundation has been funding development work on digital wellbeing features in GNOME for almost two years now. This work is funded by a grant that we received from Endless, which is now in its final stages. I spent some of this week reviewing the budget and discussing the timeline with Philip and Ignacy, who are currently working on the project.

There are a number of features which are currently in development which will hopefully be landed for GNOME 50, including session time limits for accounts that are managed with parental controls. We also have a modernized parental controls app which is also in the works.

For Future Summit

Kristi attended the For Future Summit in the United Arab Emirates last weekend, where she gave a talk about GNOME and had some exciting hallway conversations. There were some very interesting organisations at the event, who we are hoping to have follow-up conversations with soon.

Thank you to For Future Summit for funding Kristi’s attendance.

Flathub

We have a long-standing ambition to establish Flathub as an independent entity, so that it can do its own fundraising and spending. These plans have unfortunately suffered from delays. However, Rob has been working with Aleix from KDE on this recently, and they’ve made some positive progress this week, with lawyers being commissioned to provide some of the initial pieces that we need. I’m hopeful that this work can continue and we can finally get Flathub standing on its own feet.

Alongside this, Flathub infrastructure support continues to tick along. All of this Flathub support is being funded from our Endless grant, so many thanks to them for enabling it to happen.

Board regular meeting

The board had its first regular meeting of September this week (regular meetings are on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month). The Finance Committee have been working on the upcoming budget since the Board meeting, so this was a good opportunity for the Board to discuss the latest proposal.

This is the best budgeting process I’ve seen in my years on the board. Kudos to everyone who’s been involved.

GIMP support

The GIMP project’s grants program has been inching towards the finish line this week. It’s taken a while, but we’re almost there! It’ll be so exciting to see two developers being funded from their donation stream.

Routine paperwork

A fair chunk of the work done by the Foundation is not very exciting, but is important nonetheless. This week featured a few items of that type, relating to our trademarks and insurance. These got done.

Message ends

See you again next week. o/