A bit later than expected, but they're finally here: the GNOME Foundation annual report for 2007 and the GNOME Foundation budget for 2008.

I won't write too much about the annual report since Lucas, Federico and others already blogged about them. It's really nice to have such a document that summarizes many of the things that happened last year. Congratulations to Lucas for leading this effort and to everybody who contributed some text, photos, design and proofreading time! For the 2008 report, I guess we'll probably try to start the work a bit earlier so that it can be released earlier too (December/January).

Also, at the end of last year, I started working on a budget for 2008. Not that I'm good at this kind of job, but I was treasurer at this time. Dave helped me write a first version, and it got reworked a few times until mid-January. So, it's released two months too late, according to me, but I can only blame myself for not pushing harder and for not finding more time :-) What's in this budget? Well, here are some highlights, related to things that are important to me:

• we've allocated money for hackfests. The GTK+ hackfest is going strong, with lots of action happening right now in Berlin, and so I'm even more convinced now that we need to do more small hackfests on specific topics. More news to come on this topic, hopefully.
• there's quite some money allocated for some local groups and events. It's been hard to prepare the budget there since it's hard for local groups to know how much money they'll need during the whole year. Still good, though: I think we'll be spending more money on this than any year before, which is good.
• we're planning to support the Latin America tour that Diego proposed last year. It's still in the planning stages, but it should get more attention in the next few months :-)
• there's the sysadmin job in there. Right now, we're trying to not go crazy and we're thinking of starting small, with a part-time job. It's still a work in progress, but I really hope we'll make it happen.

Of course, there are other interesting things in this budget, but I'll let you have a look at it!