I've been an official Member of the GNOME Foundation for the past 15 years.
I am also a corporate member/sponsor of the FACIL non-profit organization (defending FLOSS and users' digital rights in Québec).
I was previously president of the GNOME Foundation, among other things.

With over 20 years of involvement in the Free Software community and open-source software development model, I have a particular affinity with this branch of the IT industry. My experience in the field, combined with my background in business, makes me one of the very few publicly available bona fide free/open-source marketing & business management consultants on the planet who can claim expertise in the field with a straight face.

If you're looking for someone with a deep understanding of how the FLOSS community works, thinks and feels, and who can help your business integrate with it the proper way, you may be interested in my independent Open Source business consulting services; if you are looking for business development and marketing leadership specificially, you may be interested in my Open Source marketing firm's services.

Direct contributions

Every year, my contributions require tens of thousands of interactions with developers, designers, community members, business prospects, and the general public. The summaries below are an attempt to present some of the publicly-visible work I do to help the community, but it's basically just the tip* of the iceberg.

Design

See my interaction design page if you are curious. That said, in recent years I have been doing much more project management & product engineering management work than traditional hands-on IxD & UX design work.

Project Management & Engineering

Open Hub profile for Jean-François Fortin Tam

For an overview of my code contributions to established projects, see the summary on OpenHub (or the full graph of code contributions over the years). You can also look at GNOME GitLab profile and my GitHub profile (you'll have to click through the various years of the graph).

Here is some software I wrote and/or managed:

Quality assurance

“Jeff is the best software issue reporter I have ever interacted with. See a masterclass with these issues reported to @virtualmin” (source)

Marc Laporte,
CEO of EvoluData / Tiki contributor for 21+ years

My continued involvement in Free and Open Source software has made me file thousands of bug reports on various pieces of software that I have used and loved. My bug reports are scattered over the web; here is a summary of how many I have reported and where:

Note: the summary statistics in the list above are updated manually, every now and then (last updated: summer of 2025).

For many GNOME projects, I am heavily involved in bug triaging and project management to facilitate the developers' lives.

As part of my QA standardization efforts for the GStreamer project, I created and maintained Pitivi's automated user interface integration test suite for some years. Here is a video showing how it worked, sped up 5x:

Strategic software performance optimization leadership

Besides the time-saving effects of my QA contributions for developers, my involvement in establishing best practices has also shaped measurable outcomes for operating system performance at large. I created the "1. Performance" label globally in GNOME, applied it to hundreds of issues and merge requests, and encouraged maintainers to use it, so that we can track and manage performance issues at scale.

As part of my initiative, I also analyzed and reported over a hundred performance issues myself in GNOME and elsewhere, as I had developed a very specific kind of expertise over the years.

Screenshot of performance profile with marks view Screenshot of performance profile with flame graph

As a result, every subsequent GNOME release has been incrementally faster afterwards. Two years after I began this initiative, GNOME already had impressive numbers to show for it: a thousand performance issues resolved, with over 500 performance-tagged MRs merged (actual numbers may be higher, as not every project uses labels for merge requests).

My social media posts related to performance garnered great enthusiasm from fellow contributors and users, who recognized that performance matters not only for reducing waste (by extending the lifecycle of older computer hardware) and increasing productivity through a fluid user experience and more capable software, but also to bring significant power savings to users of modern chipsets, whether on laptop computers or smartphones and tablets. This increases adoption of GNOME applications and their underlying technologies, which directly serves the GNOME project's strategic objectives, as well as the broader Free & Open Source software industry's adoption throughout society.

*: Besides my individual hands-on assistance to multiple FLOSS projects in the day to day, many of the things I do happen behind the scenes (especially in my work as a fractional CMO), such as establishing strategic partnerships and cultivating healthy relationships, building communities, or defining an organization's attendance and sponsorship budgets for a conference. Those types of contributions are too numerous and fast-paced to list on this page, which I'm trying to keep as easy to maintain as possible.

Latest blog posts on Free/Open-Source software

Read more of these in the FLOSS category syndication feed icon of my blog.

It is also possible to subscribe to my blog's newsletter or follow me on Mastodon. Mastodon button

Need more info?

If you happen to be looking for my services and would like external validation, feel free to contact me to ask for additional references regarding any particular project. In addition to the testimonials I gathered so far, there are dozens of esteemed contributors out there, whether independent or working for renowned brands in the industry, who swear by my name.