2026 Board Candidate: Robert McQueen - Elections and Referendums - GNOME Discourse

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2026 Board Candidate: Robert McQueen

Community

Elections and Referendums

elections2026

ramcq

(Robert McQueen)

June 5, 2026, 4:47pm

Dear members,

Affiliation: Endless Access LLC

I’d like to submit my candidacy as a director for the 2026 GNOME Foundation board elections.

For those who are unfamiliar with me, I’ve been in the Free and Open Source Software community in some way or another for around 25 years, across Debian, freedesktop.org, GStreamer, GNOME. I founded the open-source consultancy Collabora in 2005 and ran it as the CTO and co-founder for 10 years, and joined Endless in 2015, as an engineering VP in our Endless OS team (based on GNOME) and later leading our transition to a nonprofit focused on digital equity, becoming the CEO of Endless Access in 2020.

While I’ve worked my career in Open Source, at my heart of hearts I am a believer in Free Software, and the transformative power of having control of and agency over the devices in your hands and on your desks, and the technology that ultimately shapes lives. It’s what started me on my journey 25 years ago, brought me to where I am today, and keeps me here.

I’ve served on the GNOME board since 2018, as President from 2019 to 2025, and since then have served as Vice President and supported Allan’s tireless and diligent work as President & acting Executive Director as part of the Executive Committee. (The Executive Committee meets weekly and handles more day-to-day issues, allowing the full board to meet less often and spend more time on higher-level governance topics like policies, budgets, strategy, etc.)

If I had to summarise my reason for standing, it would be: improve the signal to noise ratio. The core idea of the Foundation must be to raise money and spend it on GNOME and promoting GNOME’s interests, building community and donor trust, investing in the community, and telling a clear story so we can go around and do it again. Everything else is a means to an end, in service of that but not the end goal itself.

Some examples of where I’ve done that in the past are co-founding Flathub, and working with Allan in his prior board term to define and launch GNOME Circle. I’ve been glad to help promote GNOME and our work to the Endless Foundation. (Endless Foundation funds Endless Access, but isn’t my employer.) I wasn’t involved in the first donations, but Endless has been one of GNOME’s biggest donors for many years. Since joining the board, I’ve explained inside Endless what GNOME can do with funding, and helped secure meaningful support for GTK4, GNOME Software, GLib, the design work that brought us GNOME 40, all of the operating costs of Flathub, Digital Wellbeing / Parental Controls, Outreachy, and a good deal of ongoing general operating support for the Foundation. There have been misses too - not least explaining to the community why some of these things were chosen over others - which is a balancing act between what’s useful for GNOME and what’s been interesting for Endless to fund. More recently, I proposed inviting Postmarket OS to the advisory board, and was the main champion on the Board for the Fellowship program - refining the ideas, writing the proposal, FAQ and announcements, and presenting it for voting - though it was the hard work of others that raised the funds, balanced the books and brought it to life.

The past few years have been really tough for the Foundation, and I’ve been in the middle of some of those situations, trying to find the least worst path forward. There are inherent tensions in preserving the financial and legal interests of the organisation, doing the right thing for members, employees and contractors, and being as clear and transparent on difficult topics as the community would like us to be. As I said at last year’s AGM, I’ve gotten it wrong on more than one occasion and not communicated quickly or transparently enough at some of these challenging moments, and I’m sorry for how that impacted and hurt members of our community.

For me personally, focus means letting go of some things. Since around 2022, Endless Access has been prioritising initiatives outside of GNOME and Endless OS, so I have less working time to dedicate here than I previously did - which makes choosing where to spend it all the more important. Should I be re-elected, I will likely not stand for an officer position, nor serve on the finance committee, where Deepa, Allan and Arun have stepped up and have it well covered. I’m confident I can find time to provide useful context, continuity and advice where the Board finds it valuable.

Where I do have time to dedicate to GNOME, I want to put it into Flathub - finally moving ahead with the legal and governance steps that will...