Hello world! We are Modal, a new collective born out of the local Berlin community around Linux infrastructure. We're involved in projects like GNOME, postmarketOS, p2panda, and systemd.
We organize the #BoilingTheOcean events, and work upstream on a number of difficult problems in emancipatory computing, including local-first networking, mainline Linux on phones, and platform security.
Our long-term goal: A free software platform that's competitive with the iPhone 🌈
Playing around with a feature for a new version of Planify: sync your tasks as calendar events. Basically, you configure a project with one of the calendar lists you already have set up in GNOME Calendar, and all your tasks that have a scheduled date will appear as events in your calendar. In theory, it works for Google Calendar, Nextcloud, etc. It will use the EDS database to make it work
I feel like my foss project management work revolves around pushing developers, volunteer or not; to go just a little bit further. Write that test, document that strange code, merge into the branch, get it backported, make sure it's consistant with the rest of the project.
It's the uninteresting stuff that moves a contribution from being "I got this working for me" to "I got this fixed for everyone"
This is probably an unpopular opinion but I would love if it were normalised for documentation in general to be published in a vendor neutral publishing format like epub.
It's great for learning something new in a network constrained environment like a plane and it's great to be able to access and parse the documentation on a completely different platform. e.g. reading documentation for #gnome on an iPhone or tablet.
Last weekend we had #BoilingTheOcean 7 in Berlin, the latest in our event series on long-term problems in emancipatory computing. This was the biggest edition yet with ~30 attendees! The energy and excitement were awesome, even more so than in previous editions.
Huge thanks to @101lab for hosting us, @ondrejkolin for handling shirts and drinks logistics, @jimmac for playing a show for us on Saturday, and everyone who joined for helping make the event a success ❤️
Pretty happy about the new symbolic workflow. While Matthias is still busy exploring the animation capabilities and some conventions need to be set for the advanced states, perhaps the parametric future isn't that far.
https://teams.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/Design/icon-development-kit/index.html
https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/ @jimmac @alice , some of this work will be neat to see on GNOME Mobile one day.
Have been meaning to learn how to use grease pencil :)
Congrats on your award by the way Alice, Libadwaita has played such a massive role in reducing the barrier for entry for developing applications targeting GNOME and I am glad that all your hard work and dedication has been recognised formally. Wishing you the best.
@ebassi gave an excellent talk on the past, present and future of governance of the GNOME Project at GUADEC that I would highly recommend.
@chergert wrote a blog in 2017 around onboarding newcomers with different domain specific knowledge that's worth a look as well.
Makes you wonder what a world without maintainers might actually look like in practice though, would the project rely more on codeowners file for merge requests?
Modal Collective
Alain
princess pancake 
Martin Owens 
Tobias Bernard
Jakub Steiner ⭐
