Program Details

GNOME depends on contributors who squeeze in work between commercial priorities, jobs, life, and everything else. Critical components and infrastructure are often neglected because no one has time to maintain them. The GNOME Foundation Fellowship program is our response: direct funding for contributors to do the work that wouldn’t get done otherwise.

The Fellowship program supports individuals rather than specific deliverables. Each Fellow receives financial support for a fixed period, to enable them to work on GNOME without distraction. Fellows can work full or part-time.

The available compensation for Fellows is $70,000 to $100,000 per year, with the final compensation level to be determined based on experience level and location.

Fellowship Round One

Initial funding is available to support one person full-time (or two people part-time). Fellows will receive funding to work on GNOME for 12 months, starting around May 2026.

Round one focuses on sustainability: improving tooling, build systems, test infrastructure, automation, documentation, developer productivity, and ongoing maintainability. We are not funding feature development: the goal is for each fellowship to leave the project in a more efficient and sustainable state.