Apply to the Fellowship for Maintainers

Last month, we introduced our plans for a fellowship for maintainers, a new initiative to address a critical challenge in the open source ecosystem: supporting the dedicated individuals who keep our digital infrastructure functioning. This new fellowship is a pilot program to explore directly investing in the people behind the code, by paying maintainers of critical open source components.

Starting today, we’re accepting applications for the fellowship. The deadline to apply is Sunday 20 October 2024.

At its core, the fellowship is for you — a maintainer of critical, open technologies — to have time to work on the crucial open source projects you’re responsible for and to get paid for impactful activities that often are overlooked or performed behind the scenes: project development, change reviews, community engagement, and dealing with security.

We’ve set up different contracting options for participating in the fellowship, taking into account the feedback we’ve received and the circumstances of the people doing maintainer work. Because maintainers’ situations and needs are so different, the fellowship pilot program includes not just full-time employment, but also accommodates freelancing with a wide range of contracted hours.

This is important in order to make participation in the fellowship possible for groups with less social or economic capital, and increase the diversity among the potential fellowship applicants. We’re especially aware that some maintainers’ personal or professional situations may make it difficult to find financial stability through common FOSS sponsorship or business models.

Each maintainer participating in the fellowship will have access to mentoring with Lorenzo Sciandra, one of our in-house technologists who was a core React Native maintainer for many years and the organizer of an open source maintainer community in London. With regular cohort calls, we’re also providing the opportunity for fellowship participants to learn from and support each other.

In the first year, we are separating our five available fellowship slots as follows:

One Employee

For the duration of the fellowship, this “maintainer-in-residence” will be employed up to full-time (32 to 40 hours per week) and join the Sovereign Tech Fund team. This offers the maintainer the personal and professional advantages of being part of team, as well as the financial support and security to continuing to work on critical FOSS infrastructure.

This position is only available for maintainers located in Germany, and applicants must already have work authorization. We are not able to offer relocation support.

Four Freelance Contractors

During the 12-month fellowship, up to four maintainers will be contracted on a freelance basis for a number of hours per week, ranging from 6 to 32 hours. This offers these maintainers the flexibility and autonomy of freelancing, and the opportunity to keep or build a diversified client base. It reflects feedback from open source maintainers, who have employers, clients, or contracts that they can’t or don’t want to stop working with.

These positions are available for maintainers located anywhere.

We have developed a few requirements for people applying to the fellowship for maintainers. Please only apply if you meet them:

• You must be a maintainer of — or contributor to — at least three FOSS projects. You must be the maintainer on at least one of these projects, which we define as having the permission to merge pull requests to the repositories of the project or trigger a release of the component.
• You are available for a 12-month engagement from (approximately) the end of 2024 to the end of 2025
• You are only submitting one application to the fellowship for maintainers of the Sovereign Tech Fund.

In addition to these requirements, we have additional criteria that we use to evaluate the FOSS projects you work on:

• The projects meet our criteria of prevalence, relevance, vulnerability, public interest and expertise.

Fellowship Criteria

For the freelance contractor option, these are additional requirements:

• You are not otherwise being paid for the same work during the duration of the fellowship
• You are not applying on behalf of an organization seeking funding for maintainers you employ. Please consider submitting a proposal for general funding instead.

For the employment option:

• You must reside within Germany.
• You have work authorization for employment in Germany and can legally sign a work contract.

As an employee, the position’s salary is aligned with Germany’s public sector wage agreement, TVöD-Bund. Depending on qualifications and experience, the salary could range from 63000€ to 78000€ per year for a full-time position including thirty days of vacation.

For the freelance contracting option, the application form asks for your fully-loaded hourly rate. We aim to pay competitive hourly rates.

We are accepting fellowship applications only through our application platform through 23:59 on Sunday, 20 October 2024

You should have the following information and documentation ready.

• A short statement on why you’re interested in the fellowship for maintainers, as a PDF, no more than 1–2 pages. If it helps, think of this like a cover letter.
• Short descriptions of the open source technologies you work on, your role in those communities, and the links to their public repositories.
• Additional details for the projects where you have a maintainer role, including the reasoning for its criticality, target user groups, current challenges, and governance structure.
• Your fully-loaded hourly rate (freelance option only)
• Your résumé or CV (curriculum vitae) as a PDF (employment option only)

Application Details

We will review the applications, conduct interviews, and notify selected maintainers in late November 2024. Our estimate is that at the earliest, maintainers may begin the fellowship before the end of 2024. The first pilot round of the fellowship for maintainers will run for 12 months, during which we’ll learn from the program as we go, refine it, and make improvements for future fellowships.

Fellowship for Maintainers

Fellowship FAQ

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), established in October 2022, is the first publicly-funded program of its kind, with the mission of developing models for how governments can secure critical digital infrastructure and invest in foundational, open software components in the public interest.

The fellowship for maintainers is one of multiple programs the STF has started to stabilize and strengthen the open technologies form the bedrock of digital infrastructure that is necessary for innovation, economic growth, and democratic participation.

Since its founding, the STF has invested in over 40 critical projects, such as Pendulum, Prossimo, logback, and the Yocto Project. It has commissioned over 15 million € of maintenance and improvements in technologies like libraries for programming languages, package managers, open implementations of communication protocols, tools for developers, digital encryption technologies, and more.

The STF supports open technologies with societal relevance, identifying software from which a broad public benefits or on which particularly vulnerable groups depend. Funding enables and secures the independent use of digital technologies by the state, organizations, and individuals, as well as their security, stability, and (technological) diversity.