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.| Form and Function
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 … Continue reading Foundation Update, 2025-09-05| Form and Function
Steven Deobald has been in the post of GNOME Foundation Executive Director for the past four months, during which time he has made major contributions to both the Foundation and the wider GNOME project. Sadly, Steven will be leaving the Foundation this week. The Foundation Board is extremely grateful to Steven and wish him the...| Form and Function
This post is a response to what Tobias posted yesterday on his blog. I would really prefer not be writing it. There are many other things that I would prefer to be doing, and I do not enjoy engaging in public disagreements. I honestly find all of this very stressful and unpleasant, but here we … Continue reading On Elephants| Form and Function
I’m currently serving as a member of the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors, and am also a member of the Foundation’s Executive Committee. The last major GNOME Foundation update was back in October 2024, when we announced our budget for the current financial year, along with associated staffing changes. There have been some communications since then, particularly around events strategy and board membership changes, but it’s been a while since we provided a more complete general update.| Form and Function
One of the goals of the new GNOME project handbook is to provide effective guidelines for contributors. Most of the guidelines are based on recommendations that GNOME already had, which were then improved and updated. These improvements were based on input from others in the project, as well as by drawing on recommendations from elsewhere.| Form and Function
This is a bloggified version of the talk that I gave at GUADEC 2017. In converting it into print, it has been elaborated and refined.| Form and Function
I’m a firm believer in the importance of documentation for open source projects, particularly when it comes to onboarding new contributors. To attract and retain contributors, you need good docs. | Form and Function
The GNOME 46 development cycle started around October last year, and it has been a busy one for my GNOME user experience design work (as they all are). I wanted to share some details of what I’ve been working on, both to provide some insight into what I get up to day to day, and because some of the design work might be interesting to the wider community. This is by no means everything that I’ve been involved with, but rather covers the bigger chunks of work that I’ve spent time on.| Form and Function
At this year’s GUADEC, I made a proposal: that the GNOME project should migrate its documentation from wiki.gnome.org to other locations, and then disable its wiki. This blog post describes the proposal in more detail, in order to receive feedback from the wider community.| Form and Function
There has been a fantastic response to gnome-info-collect since Vojtěch announced it three weeks ago. To date we’ve had over 2,200 responses. That’s amazing! Thanks to everyone who has run the tool.| Form and Function
In recent weeks, I’ve been working on a major update to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). The motivations for this work were varied. The HIG is fairly out of date, both in relation to contemporary design practice, as well as GNOME platform capabilities, and so needed updating. But we also wanted to improve the quality of the design guidance that we offer, and do a much better job at integrating our design docs with the rest of the developer platform.| Form and Function
Last August, we ran a research exercise using a small tool called gnome-info-collect. The tool allowed GNOME users to anonymously send us non-sensitive data about how their systems were configured. The plan was to use that data to inform our design and development decisions. We got a fantastic response to our call for participation, with over 2,500 people uploading their data to the GNOME servers.| Form and Function