GNOME Project Strategy in 2022

Robert McQueen, CEO of the GNOME Foundation, unveiled new initiatives aimed at attracting new users and developers to the GNOME platform. It is noted that in the past, the GNOME Foundation focused on increasing the relevance of GNOME and technologies such as GTK, as well as accepting donations from companies and individuals close to the free and open source ecosystem. New initiatives are aimed at attracting people from the outside world, getting to know the project from third parties, and looking for new opportunities to attract investment in the GNOME project.

Suggested initiatives:

• Attracting newcomers to participate in the project. In addition to enthusiast-driven training and onboarding programs such as GSoC, Outreachy, and student engagement, it is planned to find sponsors to fund full-time employment of staff involved in training newcomers and writing introductory guides and examples.
• Building a sustainable distribution ecosystem for Linux applications, taking into account the interests of various participants and projects. The initiative is primarily about raising funding to maintain the Flathub universal application catalog, incentivizing application developers by arranging donations or selling applications, and engaging commercial vendors on the Flathub Project Advisory Board to work with representatives from GNOME, KDE, and other open source projects to develop the catalog. .
• Development of GNOME data-centric applications that would allow users to use the latest technologies widely used in popular applications, while maintaining a high level of privacy and providing the ability to work even in complete network isolation, protecting user data from surveillance, censorship and filtration.