Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year [1]a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management.

GNOME Design Team member Philipp Sauberzweig has been named a Sovereign Tech Agency fellow and for the next two years will be paid to help developers with design feedback and reviews, mock-up creation, and other GNOME design related efforts.

Philipp wrote a [2]blog post this week outlining his new fellowship and the activities around GNOME design and community growth.

"During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding. The following activities may change over the course of the two-year fellowship, as I will adapt them to the needs of the community."

It will be interesting to see the fruits of this work with Sauberzweig now being able to invest more time working on GNOME design thanks to the wonderful Sovereign Tech Agency.

Separately, [3]This Week in GNOME outlined some other recent GNOME development happenings including more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, Papers 51 Beta now being able to add visual signatures to PDF documents, and [4]the new GNOME Boxes app now in beta form.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sovereign-Tech-Fellowship-2026

[2] https://blogs.gnome.org/psauberz/2026/08/06/sovereign-tech-fellowship-for-gnome-design-community-management/

[3] https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2026/08/twig-261/

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Boxes-2026