Back in March [1]the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program . The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced.

The GNOME Foundation shared that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold are the first GNOME Fellows and will formally begin their work in July. These existing longtime GNOME contributors will spend the next year on:

"Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the GNOME project. Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for GNOME, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern GNOME platform conventions."

More details on the GNOME Fellowship work via the [2]GNOME Foundation Blog .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Fellowship-Program

[2] https://blogs.gnome.org/foundation/2026/06/11/announcing-our-first-fellows/