## Opaque Stuff

• the usual policy drafting work; thank you Allan for ensuring we’re on top of this
• moving some operational deadlines forward (“preponing”) was discussed but this hasn’t been confirmed yet
• a bunch of tactical paperwork minutiae I’ll be very happy to see completed

## Safety

I published a post this week entitled On Safety . I won’t revisit it here in the Foundation Report but it is an important topic and I encourage you to go read it. Thank you to Allan Day for his thoughtful and patient editing.

## Pride

On a much happier note, we’ve begun celebrating Pride Month a little early! You may see some coloured flags on GNOME’s social media accounts and Jakub Steiner has produced some lovely Pride backgrounds. You can find the source in Design / wallpaper-assets / pride and you can get the high-res renders from the GNOME-48 branch of GNOME / gnome-backgrounds . Low-res previews below. Thanks to everyone who pitched in this year to help us celebrate Pride together.

## Designers

Speaking of The Designers, I got to attend their regular meeting this week. It was a pleasure to see just how committed everyone is to resolving the eternal tension of form, function, and performance. What might seem like a trivial decision on the surface (the performance of window drop-shadows, in this case) hides plenty of nuance, once you start digging. The need for performance isn’t arbitrary: a freie desktop needs to support older machines if we want to be the destination for those whose hardware had been abandoned by manufacturers and those who can’t afford to buy the fanciest gadget every 5 years. I enjoyed my time as a fly on the wall until Firefox crashed and wouldn’t restart.

Part of my meeting with the designers was selfish. The Foundation will need their help to revisit the audiences for our fundraising efforts. I’m actually looking forward to a little bit of pairing time with some of them, if they’ll let me.

## Fundraising

Rosanna and I sat down to drill through a mountain of spreadsheets and formulate a simplified picture of the Foundation’s finances — that “round to the nearest $100” napkin non-accounting that’s useful for visualization but not much else. I’m really grateful for the time Rosanna spent with me; it gave me a much better picture of where we stand, month on month, year on year.

We need these cartoony visuals so we can start painting a fundraising picture for ourselves. I’ve been told by many people “don’t make any promises!” And I am not promising anything in particular. At this stage, we’re just sweeping the floor and sketching out our strategy.

## End of 10

We’ve assembled a small Promo Team to coordinate with the End of 10 core team and the KDE folks. If you would like to be a part of this, shout at me or Sri. If you want to get involved more generally, jump into #endof10-en:kde.org .

I’ve already pitched to the local hacker community here in Halifax that we should put on a repair cafe some weekend. Step One? Find a cheap venue so none of us are paying out-of-pocket. We have a gorgeous public library here that hosts community events for free. Maybe your city does, too?

## GTD

We’ve made some great progress with the new Staff project wall and the Foundation-wide “Staff Ops” calendar. The new Foundation Handbook keeps plodding along, though I will admit it’s still a disorganized dumping ground for links I wish I had when I started. Baby steps.

## Nextcloud / OnlyOffice

Speaking of tooling, we have had repeated issues with data loss in OnlyOffice and it’s been decided to shut it down for now. If you are using Nextcloud for office files, your best option is to set up a mount in Nautilus (by adding ‘you@cloud.gnome.org/remote.php/dav’ to Online Accounts) and work on them locally.

If the lack of collaborative office tools is a big issue, we can revisit this. If you have collaboration requirements, please document them in the Multiplayer Office Files HedgeDoc. Thanks!

## Vaultwarden

We threw around a few suggestions for better group passwords across the Foundation. Somewhat unfortunately, we can’t lean on Nextcloud for this, as their “share” password feature doesn’t actually allow sharing groups of passwords yet.

For the time-being, it looks like Vaultwarden is our most likely candidate. Commercial Bitwarden was considered, but we can’t guarantee we wouldn’t rely on non-free features and passwords are too big a deal to find ourselves accidentally relying on proprietary software.

## Treasurer

We are still on the hunt for a solid Treasurer. The clock is ticking now, so if you know of anyone who might be appropriate, do reach out! I’m happy to speak to them over the weekend, if it will help, though they would need to have a conversation with Board members early next week, as it’s not me who decides who the Treasurer will be.

## Digital Wellbeing

We are looking at adding some additional development capacity to the Digital Wellbeing work to ensure it’s delivered on time. If you’re keen on a bit of Calm Computing and family-focused frontend work, please keep an eye out for the job posting and/or poke us in #foundation:gnome.org .

## UN Open Source Week

Looking to the future a bit, it’s UN Open Source Week in NYC, starting June 16th. I’m considering going if I can find a couch to crash on. If you’re planning to be in NYC that week, let me know!

See you next week!

When Signal introduced Stories , I didn't understand why. To me, Signal is all about giving as little information to as few people as possible but still being able to have a social life.

I didn't use any app that had stories. Only a few friends published Instagram stories, and many more followed public stories. I thought of stories as "broadcast content to as many people as possible," which is the opposite of what Signal is about for me.

It turns out I was wrong. Signal lets you curate who can see your stories. By default, all your contacts can see your stories, but you can also create smaller circles of people who will see them, or you can create stories from existing Signal groups.

Since I've realized that social media like Mastodon affect me more (negatively) than I thought , I've significantly reduced what I read and publish there. But I still want to share happy moments with friends. So, I gave Signal stories a go, and it has been more fun and useful than I thought.

When I publish a story on Signal, I know who will read it. It's not for the public, but it's for friends. I can publish more personal things, and people reply more genuinely. Friends ask where I am or how I'm doing at the moment. We listen to each other. And, to my great satisfaction, a few friends have started publishing stories since I started!

I also publish different things on Signal stories than on Mastodon. On Mastodon, I shared thoughts or, let's be honest, hot takes. On Signal, I share moments . I share what I do and experience, not necessarily what I think.

The UX is still a bit clunky, stories feel poorly integrated into Signal, and I don't understand why Signal broadcasts stories to your whole address book by default . But I enjoy having a place where I can share privately and spontaneously what I'm doing with a short list of people I trust and care about.

[!info] Signal is good tech, help them

If you've never tried Signal stories, I strongly encourage you to do so. If you use Signal and can afford it, consider supporting them financially ; they deserve it.

Keep up the good work, Signal. You're an excellent app and a great nonprofit, and I wish more organizations took inspiration from you.

• J. unwell in the night, feeling groggy. Sync with Dave, important partner call.
• Really excited to announce the merger of Collabora Productivity and allotropia! and really looking forward to properly welcoming and unifying the teams after COOL days
  
• Published the next strip around whether you focus on the process, or getting results:
  
• Call with Till & Thorsten, caught the end of our sales team call. Sync with Philippe. What a day!

As you may be aware, the entire GNOME community has been on the receiving end of a coordinated harassment campaign for the past year. All GNOME users and contributors with a public profile, and those active on Matrix, are being harassed.

I want to share my personal perspective on this, as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. There are some things that need to be said about these events, and I want to provide some reassurance for community members.

People At Risk

It is important for us to recognize that there are members of our community who are particularly at risk from the recent harassment campaign. Here, I am specifically referring to those people for whom this kind of harassment poses a genuine physical threat. The harassment frequently takes the form of anti-LGBTQIA+ (most frequently anti-trans), racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, and anti-muslim messages.

Individual targets of the harassment have included Staff members, Board members, Foundation members, and users. Our community includes people living under oppressive, authoritarian regimes. It includes people in war zones. It includes refugees. These people are all acutely at risk .

Please know that if you belong to one of these groups, you are always welcome in the GNOME community. We will do everything we can to ensure your safety in our community. We will not tolerate threats to your safety.

Psychological Harm

In addition to risk of physical harm, one component of this coordinated harassment campaign is the use of disturbing images, intending to cause psychological harm. The attackers’ very possession of these images is an international crime.

These attacks have been stopped on Discourse, our forum tool. The GNOME moderation team is actively engaged with the Matrix moderation team to reduce (and ultimately eliminate) users’ exposure to these images on the Matrix protocol.

If you have received one of these images, your best course of action is to email abuse@matrix.org . Specific, actionable advice is provided in The GNOME Handbook’s Matrix: Staying Safe section.

My Personal Experience

I was quite surprised to witness — and then find myself on the receiving end of — this harassment campaign when I began my new role with the GNOME Foundation. Because I’m a relatively new community member, I want to discuss my experience in case it is helpful to anyone else.

The first time I was on the receiving end of one of these images, my response was to go to my partner and say, “I’m feeling sick and anxious. I really need a hug.” This was also my response to the first few harassment messages I received. I was advised by other staff members not to respond to the people sending these messages of harassment. I’m glad I took their advice. Engaging will not help.

I have tried on many occasions to have compassion for those instigating and carrying out the harassment. They are clearly misguided — and not well. I have spent many years cultivating compassion but I still find myself struggling with this. Often thinking of the attackers leaves me feeling angry instead of compassionate.

If I catch myself directing angry thoughts toward those people carrying out the harassment campaign, I instead try my best to direct compassion toward those who are suffering because of it: the community. It is easy to feel compassion for the victim and if I focus my attention on the people who continue to work tirelessly on GNOME in spite of these attacks, I always end up with a smile on my face.

If you are feeling angry or frustrated, perhaps this approach will help you, too.

Commitment

Not every safety violation is created equal. Trolling and flame wars require a stern conversation — and perhaps moderation. A Code of Conduct violation necessitates the involvement of the Code of Conduct Committee — and perhaps the Board. Crimes demand the engagement of lawyers and law enforcement.

Of the harassment campaign I have heard the following euphemisms:

• “The spam.”
• “They are bullies.”
• “These people trolling us.”
• “These people seem like jerks.”
• “An annoying technical issue with federated protocols.”

They are not simply “bullies”. Their actions do not constitute “trolling”. These are crimes.

It is my commitment to you as members of this community that the Foundation will pursue the most appropriate course of action whenever your safety is violated, to the degree it is violated. This is part of why the Foundation exists: an incorporated entity can engage other organizations in more significant ways than any one person can.

The Foundation stands with you.

Previously it was mentioned that Python and C++ do iteration quite differently. Python has "statefull" objects that have a .next() method that returns a new object or throws a StopIteration exception. Incidentally Rust does exactly the same thing, except that it uses an optional type rather than an exception. C++ does not work like this, instead it has a concept of a "start" and "end" of a sequence and the machinery keeps incrementing the start until it reaches the end.

At the end of last post it was said that it is difficult to integrate an object of the former type with C++'s native language facilities, at least without macros.

Now we'll look how to integrate an object of the former type with C++'s native language facilities without any macros.

In fact, it only took fewer than 30 lines of code to do. The caveat being that it is probably fairly easy to break it. But it works for me.

Here it is being used.

There is also a second, similar helper class that takes ownership of the object being iterated over.

Hi, we’ve started a new project: a Farsi-language podcast version of This Week in GNOME .

Each week, we read and summarise the latest TWIG post in Farsi, covering updates from GNOME Core , GNOME Circle apps , and other community-related news. Our goal is to help Persian-speaking users and contributors stay connected with the GNOME ecosystem.

The podcast is hosted by me (Revisto), along with Mirsobhan and Hadi . We release one short episode per week.

Since I also make music , I created a short theme for the podcast to give it more identity and consistency across episodes. It’s simple, but it adds a nice touch of production value that we hope makes the podcast feel more polished.

We’re also keeping a GitHub repository in which I’m uploading each of my episode scripts (in Farsi) in Markdown + audio files. The logo and banner assets have been uploaded in SVG as well for transparency.

You can listen to the podcast on:

• • Spotify
  • Castbox
  • Podcast Index
  • Telegram: @gnome_fa
  • Or via RSS feed

Let us know what you think, and feel free to share it with Farsi-speaking friends or communities interested in GNOME.

Welcome to the third instalment of the Foundation Report! Instalment? Installment? English is dumb. Okay, here goes!

## Opaque Stuff

• 3rd party consultation on safety issue continues
• researching some software choices for process automation
• asking individuals about their goals – no name-dropping because I’m not sure everyone would be comfortable
• international finance is the worst but the problem is fixed now

## Meeting People

I’m meeting fewer people and getting more grunt work accomplished but I still met plenty of lovely folks this week. I also met some people after last week’s report: Jef Spaleta is the Fedora Project’s new Lead. He and I agreed all new business deals will be done in the curling rink instead of the golf course. Matthias Clausen gave me a bit of a history lesson and also convinced me I need to talk to more old-timers: the sense of perspective decades of involvement brings is valuable.

I met Tobias and chatted about how the Foundation can increase support to contributors. Rosanna introduced me to our bookkeeper and her advisor so I could get an intro to our bookkeeping process and a walk-through of our last CPA review. Maria and I had a lovely chat about her 20+ years as a GNOME user/contributor and the value of logistics, communications, and admin folks in a very tech-heavy organization… I found myself nodding along with so much she had to say.

I got a chance to meet Aaditya from GNOME Nepal! What he and his team are doing there is after my own heart: getting GNOME, Linux, and other freie software into the hands of aspiring hackers and students. He’s essentially already running the style of repair cafe that the endof10.org campaign will teach people to run and I sincerely hope he’ll have time to help with End Of 10 (but he’s a busy guy!) as I think he has so much to offer. I was shocked to learn that GNOME Nepal is only one year old. They’ve already accomplished so much.

Rosanna and I met the CommitChange team, who help us with gnome.org/donate . They have some neat stuff going on and they explained where they can help us with tweaks to their software and API, analytics, and campaign management. We’re hoping to do something with CommitChange very soon but I won’t say what until it’s baked because it’s not my baby.

Last, we met a couple great folks who are interested in helping out in the Treasurer role at the Foundation. If you know anyone who’s a spreadsheet powerhouse, the Tufte of Reporting, or obsessed with carefully-balanced budgets, please encourage them to email me or Rob!

## Ideas, Docs, Walls, Files

I’ve started to corral my scatterbrained ideas into some homes. They’re still spread out between paper notebooks, Markdown files, voicenotes, and my extremely frazzled family members. I’ll probably stop telling them about all the cool people I’m meeting and all the ideas I have by … GUADEC? Maybe.

We’ve started an internal “Foundation Handbook” to match handbook.gnome.org . This is only visible to Staff and Board members, as it contains a great deal of PII and other private information. It has a loooong way to go, but the goal is for it to provide the same beautiful, central documentation location (for banking, staff tools, ops, and so on) that the Project Handbook does. Public information about the Foundation won’t go in here, of course, as it still belongs on foundation.html . If you join the Board, you’re welcome to help us keep it clean and organized so we easily know where everything is and so it’s easy to onboard future Boards, EDs, and other Staff. (No, I’m not planning to leave anytime soon.)

We’ve rebooted the Staff project wall. We don’t keep track of Ops tasks in here (since they’re recurring) but, rather, anything Executive: Follow up with so-and-so, document XYZ process, make a one-time social media post for an organizational partner, etc. We’re also making heavier use of the Board wall, bit by bit.

Nextcloud! We’re… trying to use it. Collecting all our files into Nextcloud will take some time, but we’ve started to push toward using it with some boring old policy junk. We just have to keep up the gardening and it will become a thing of beauty, eventually.

## Fundraising

We’ve talked a little about fundraising with the Board (I’m still relatively new) but as the smaller fires are each extinguished, fundraising is taking up more headspace. This is a major concern for me. Perhaps the major concern. The conversation with CommitChange yesterday was one small step toward this. We’ve also started some “market research.” (I’m not sure what else to call it.) When it comes to individuals and organizations that have never donated to GNOME before, I want to know:

• Do they understand how important GNOME is, as infrastructure?
• Where do we find them to ask them to donate? (If not within GNOME itself.)
• Do they want anything for their donation? Or do we just need to reach them?

## End of 10

Joseph from endof10.org and KDE Eco fame has been in touch continuously. Sri posted a call for a GNOME endof10.org Promo Team on the Engagement blog. It’s going to be here before you know it! If you want to get involved, ping us in #engagement:gnome.org or #endof10-en:kde.org .

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go watch Joseph’s Linux App Summit talk ! It’s great and he does a fantastic job of explaining the importance of this effort.

## “Wow, yay, transparency”

I’m very grateful to everyone who has thanked me for these little Foundation Reports. I’m glad I’m not just screaming into the void with these and that a few people are getting value out of them. However, I do have one request.

On occasion (though rarely), these compliments have come paired with (or couched in) a complaint about previous EDs, other folks on staff, or the Board. I would encourage folks who are framing things this way to stop, as it’s a very unhelpful way to communicate. We need to remember that everyone works differently. I’m a loudmouth, so I’m loud. Most people on staff and on the Board are not. Instead, they have their nose to the grindstone. I think most of them struggle to find the time to talk about their work at the end of the workweek. Most of them work late into the night. Most of them work weekends. It’s been a long year (or…five?) for the Foundation and most of them are very tired.

Because I am loud, I will do my best to be loud for them. Week after week, I’ll talk more about what “we” are doing — please understand that “we” is mostly them . If I tell you about work that’s happening at the Foundation, that work didn’t magically start when I joined in May. It’s been happening for years and I’m just doing my best to make it a little more visible.

Instead of thanking me for my ridiculous infoblog, please redirect your thanks to someone on staff. Thank someone on the Board for their tireless service. Thank a contributor whose work comes pouring in, year after year. Send a box of chocolates in a DM. Drop them a little thank-you email. Give them a high-five at GUADEC. (Virtual or otherwise.)

And if you’re feeling very energetic, run for the Board so you can help out.

Thanks to the work of Christian Gmeiner , support for annotating time regions using Sysprof marks has landed in Mesa.

That means you’ll be able to open captures with Sysprof and see the data along other useful information including callgraphs and flamegraphs.

I do think there is a lot more we can do around better visualizations in Sysprof. If that is something you’re interested in working on please stop by #gnome-hackers on Libera.chat or drop me an email and I can find things for you to work on.

See the merge request here .

I'm happy to share that 3 major IPU6 camera related kernel changes from linux-next have been backported to Fedora and have been available for about a week now the Fedora kernel-6.14.6-300.fc42 (or later) package:

1. Support for the OV02C10 camera sensor , this should e.g. enable the camera to work out of the box on all Dell XPS 9x40 models.
2. Support for the OV02E10 camera sensor , this should e.g. enable the camera to work out of the box on Dell Precision 5690 laptops. When combined with item 3. below and the USBIO drivers from rpmfusion this should also e.g. enable the camera on other laptop models like e.g. the Dell Latitude 7450.
3. Support for the special handshake GPIO used to turn on the sensor and allow sensor i2c-access on various new laptop models using the Lattice MIPI aggregator FPGA / USBIO chip.

If you want to give this a test using the libcamera-softwareISP FOSS stack, run the following commands:

sudo rm -f /etc/modprobe.d/ipu6-driver-select.conf
sudo dnf update 'kernel*'
sudo dnf install libcamera-qcam
reboot
qcam

Note the colors being washed out and/or the image possibly being a bit over or under exposed is expected behavior ATM, this is due to the software ISP needing more work to improve the image quality. If your camera still does not work after these changes and you've not filed a bug for this camera already please file a bug following these instructions .

See my previous blogpost on how to also test Intel's proprietary stack from rpmfusion if you also have that installed.

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