We’re hiring! Join the GNOME Foundation team and help us build a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust.
Executive Director
The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit focused on making personal computing accessible and trustworthy for everyone. We sit at the center of the GNOME project, a global community-driven software project, building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem, giving users control over their software and data.
We are seeking an Executive Director who is an experienced nonprofit professional with a passion for technology and a proven track record in fundraising and program delivery. You have a passion for using your strategic skills to make a difference within the technology space and will embody our values of collaborative development of Free and Open Source software or the wider Open Culture space. You will have strategic and execution responsibilities, identifying and building partnerships and relationships for strategic gain.
You will be a prominent public face of the project and represent the GNOME Foundation to the press, partners, advisory board, sponsors, and the community. You will work closely with the Foundation’s members, contributors, volunteers, and the wider GNOME, Free and Open Source software community to promote and market the Foundation, building public awareness and helping people learn about and benefit from GNOME’s offerings.
You will lead with empathy and have exceptional communication and persuasion skills, and be comfortable speaking to any audience, including executives, political leaders, and the GNOME and the wider Free and Open Source Software communities. English proficiency is required.
The Foundation staff is a distributed team from around the globe, working with a global community of contributors, volunteers, corporate stakeholders, and donors who support the Foundation and GNOME projects. We offer flexible working hours and locations as a matter of course. We are a small and friendly team with a passion for our unique role within the GNOME community and everything we do to support and grow the impact of our mission.
Required Skills and Experience
- 5+ years experience in nonprofit or organizational management, establishing and overseeing programs to achieve the desired mission impact
- An effective communicator, proficient with creating effective public and targeted campaigns, and capable of delivering presentations about the work, mission, and values of the GNOME Foundation and community
- Strong experience developing, establishing, and managing partner relationships with stakeholders, including for-profit and nonprofit entities, both for fundraising and programmatic collaboration
- Experience growing the revenue of small organizations, growing relationships with philanthropists, grant programs, and corporate donors, aiming to grow revenues to drive impact and sustainability of the GNOME Foundation
- Staff management experience including leading hiring, onboarding, and providing day-to-day direction
- Experience managing volunteers, coordinating and motivating contributors with open and transparent processes
- Tech-savvy and works well with engineers, designers, and other disciplines
- Excellent strategic thinking skills – the ability to define, challenge, interpret, and align objectives into long and short-term programs that deliver high impact
- Highly organized and efficient facilitator, able to manage progress on multiple projects simultaneously
- Experience working with remote-first or distributed teams (e.g. a company that has operated in multiple locations, or ideally a globally distributed and remote workforce)
- Ability to select impactful conferences and events and willingness to travel domestically in the US and internationally to represent the GNOME Foundation
Preferred Skills and Experience
- Experience in working in the U.S. nonprofit sector and maintaining compliance as a public charity
- Extensive use of Free and Open Source Software
- Prior experience and familiarity working with Open Source and/or Open Culture projects and organizations (e.g. EFF, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, OSM, etc.)
- Existing knowledge and relationships with other nonprofit organizations, foundations, and grantmaking organizations within the U.S. and overseas
- Ability to develop and manage program evaluations and surveys to measure and demonstrate the impact of programs
- Prior experience partnering with marketing specialists to build and run successful campaigns to reach target users directly and build supporting materials for effective partnership engagements.
Compensation
- Base salary $120k-$150k, depending on experience
- 30 days PTO (including Federal holidays)
- Unlimited sick days
- Comprehensive healthcare coverage for US applicants
- 401(k) retirement savings for US applicants with a basic safe harbor match
How To Apply
Please apply via e-mail with a cover letter and a resume to careers+executive-director@gnome.org by June 2, 2023.
About the GNOME Foundation
The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit organization that believes in a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. We do this by building a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. The GNOME community is an influential social and technical contributor to the Free Software and Open Source software stack that continues to leave its mark on every piece of hardware that runs Linux across all technical market segments.
The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce an open source and freely-accessible desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for Linux operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise, and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices. The Foundation is a member-directed, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides financial, organizational, and legal support to the GNOME project, as well as pursuing impact-driven programs to drive our vision and mission.
We are developing impact and outreach programs in the following three areas:
- Growing a diverse and skilled contributor base. We’d like to seek external funding to support and scale up the existing initiatives run by the community to welcome diverse newcomers into GNOME and grow our contributor base. The Open Source development and collaboration skills that candidates develop during these internship and apprenticeship schemes are valuable to employers. The GNOME community has an excellent reputation in this space we can promote, we can use it to raise funds from employers’ CSR / DE&I funds, properly compensate mentors, and create materials to support newcomers in the future.
- Diverse and sustainable Linux app ecosystem. We are adding donations and payments to the Flathub app store to improve financial sustainability and remove barriers to participating in our community. We believe the existence of this is critically important for individual developers and contributors to unlock earning potential from our ecosystem. A healthy app ecosystem also improves the usefulness of the Linux desktop for our users. We believe that we can build a case for commercial vendors in the space to join an advisory board alongside GNOME, KDE, etc to input into the governance and contribute to the costs of growing Flathub.
- Local-first / decentralized applications for GNOME. There are many different threats to free access to computing and information in today’s world. The GNOME desktop and apps need to give users convenient and reliable access to technology that works similarly to the tools they already use every day but keeps them and their data safe from surveillance, censorship, filtering, or just being completely cut off from the Internet. We believe that we can seek both philanthropic and grant funding for this work. It will make GNOME a more appealing and comprehensive offering for the many people who want to protect their privacy.
The GNOME Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer
GNOME provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.