Poof! Shaman Holly Million, Gnome’s Executive Director Disappears on July 31

Professional shaman Holly Million, who became Gnome’s executive director in October, has evidently participated in a banishing ritual and will disappear from Gnome at the end of this month.

That was quick! Less than nine months after taking the reins as the Gnome Foundation’s executive director, Holly Million announced that she’s leaving the organization that’s behind one of the Linux operating system’s two most used desktop environments.

From the beginning there has been a bit of controversy about Million’s role at Gnome, mostly centering around her extracurricular activities as a self-ordained shaman-for-hire.

I was one of her detractors, which probably surprised people who know me well, because I’m a bit of a neopagan myself, and I spent many years covering the New Age beat for newspapers back in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. My problem was that I thought that her very public work as a non-denominational shaman, trading magick for shekels, might not play well as the face of a non-profit organization such as Gnome, which depends on donations from folks and organizations that might not understand the true, and somewhat benign, nature of modern paganism.

It appears that shamanism is Holly’s true calling, which she’ll be continuing to practice, even as she leaves her career at Gnome behind.

“I will be pursuing a PhD in Psychology and dedicating myself to my own private practice,” she said in a statement released today. I want to thank all the wonderful people I have had the pleasure of connecting with here at GNOME, including the staff, board, advisors, founders, and volunteers. You have created something of real value in the world, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.”

Sweet. So she got hired, put in 10 months or so, and will be moving on at the end of the month. Taking over as interim executive directer after she’s gone will be Richard Littauer.

The keyword for his new role at Gnome is probably “interim,” because he also doesn’t look like a good fit for the job.

He comes to the table with a day job as founder of Maintainer Mountaineer which builds command line interfaces for GitHub for open source projects. In addition, he works as a part time organizer for SustainOSS — good enough credentials for leading something like a software project, but not what you’d expect for running a project such as Gnome.

Million said that she’s “dedicated to working with Richard through a transition to ensure that everything I have been working on is handed off smoothly.” That transition ends on July 31.

For his part, Littauer is like Minnie Pearl of old, so proud to be here.

“I am happy to be able to serve Gnome and the open source community,” he said in a statement. “I am looking forward to doing what I can to continue the work laid down by Holly and the board, and look forward in particular to being at GUADEC.”

GUADEC, in case you don’t know, is the annual Gnome conference which will be held next week in Denver, Colorado — July 19-24.

Gnome’s Money Woes

I suspect that Million is being forced out. Gnome’s goodbye press release doesn’t say she “resigned,” or that she’s otherwise leaving voluntarily. It says she “will be departing from her role,” and that’s it. The reason she’s leaving is probably because she’s failed to demonstrate that she can bring cash through the door — which makes her the bad fit I mentioned earlier.

In late April, Gnome Foundation’s president Robert McQueen announced in a blog that the organization is living on borrowed time. Things are so bad, he said, that the foundation would have to create some new revenue streams before the board could consider approving any sort of meaningful budget.

“The Gnome Foundation has operated at a deficit for over three years, essentially running the foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago,” he wrote. “The foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We’ve now ‘hit the buffers’ of this reserves policy, meaning the board can’t approve any more deficit budgets – to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income.”

According to McQueen, one of the main reasons why Million was hired was because of fundraising abilities the foundation believed she possesses.

“One of the board’s top priorities in hiring Holly was therefore her experience in communications and fundraising, and building broader and more diverse support for our mission and work,” he said. “Her goals since joining … have been to set up better financial controls and reporting, develop a strategic plan, and start fundraising.”

About a month after McQueen’s blog, the foundation released the draft of a Five-Year Strategic Plan, which was pretty good as far as first drafts go, but like most first drafts, it needed some fleshing out.

Particularly lacking were ideas around cash flow and fundraising. In the plus column were ideas around increasing the commercial and economic value of Gnome and its products. But methods to reach donors, which is where the majority of Gnome’s income is going to originate, was kicked down the road. The report recognizes that the annual expense and revenue budget needs to be doubled, but fundraising ideas are along the lines of “seek funding for this,” “seek funding for that,” and “harness the power of the community through two or three crowdfunding campaigns each year for hard-to-fund meta activities to raise between $50K and $200K per initiative.”

Uh, could you be a little more clear on how to actually start that — that is, after opening a GoFundMe account? Remember, just because you put a “hard-to-fund” project on a crowdfunding platform doesn’t automagically make that project easy to fund.

Finding the Right Replacement

Neil McGovern, the person Million replaced as executive director, spent five years on the job before announcing that he was stepping down in 2022. At the time he quit, he could say this about his accomplishments:

“As a foundation, we’ve gone from a small team of three to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organization and much more beyond,” he said. “We’ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We’ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We’ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes.”

Actually, McGovern was being modest. What he failed to mention is that under his tenure, Gnome moved its development platform to GitLab and came out with 10 Gnome releases, as well as releasing GTK 4 as Gnome’s underlying framework. Oh, and that surplus of funds that’s been keeping Gnome afloat during the last many years, that was all raised while he was in charge.

In other words, it might be prudent for the powers that be at Gnome to be looking for someone that resembles McGovern to be taking the reins at the organization, and not for another Holly Million.

Meanwhile, and in all fairness, Gnome’s board does point out that Million doesn’t leave without accomplishments:

“On behalf of the whole Gnome community, the board of directors would like to give our utmost thanks to Holly for her achievements during the past 10 months, including drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with Gimp and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves.”