Fellowship for Maintainers FAQ

We can't provide individual assessments prior to application. Please review our criteria and use the attached guiding questions to evaluate your project's suitability. If you're still unsure, we encourage you to apply.

The freelance option is available for maintainers anywhere. The employment option is limited to applicants who reside and are authorized to work in Germany.

Please submit your application in English only.

If your question isn’t addressed in our blog post, the fellowship program page, or within this collection of frequently asked questions, you can contact us using the email address fellowship@sovereigntechfund.de.

A maintainer is someone with permission to merge pull requests or trigger releases for an open source project's repositories.

A contributor regularly commits changes to an open source project's repository.

An open source project has one or more public repositories and is licensed for free reuse, modification, and redistribution. We accept OSI-approved or FSF Free/Libre licenses for code. Documentation licenses should not include non-commercial or "no derivative" clauses.

Yes, if the impact of the package repository is significant (for example, high volume or critical packages). For these cases, we will consider the package repository the open source project.

No, we're currently only considering widely-used technologies. Please refer to our criteria for more details.

For the pilot program of the fellowship, we're focusing on digital infrastructure – open source components that are dependencies of user-facing applications, not the applications themselves.

German is not required for the fellowship. You should have a strong command of written and spoken English and can communicate complex or technical topics clearly.

No, this pilot targets individual maintainers paid directly by our program, not through other entities.

We require 32-40 hours per week for the employee option of the fellowship. Applications for less than 32 hours will not be considered.

No, freelance work is limited to 32 hours per week due to legal and budgetary constraints.

Freelance Contractor:

• Service contract with a statement of work
• Monthly invoicing based on a timesheet
• Not part of the STF team
• Unpaid vacation and sick days
• Can be located anywhere

Employment:

• Full STF team member for 12 months
• Work includes maintainer duties and team collaboration
• Participation in team meetings and program development (depending on experience and preferences)
• Reside in Germany

Yes, within Germany. If you’re located in Berlin or planning to move there, there will be the invitation to work from our nice office in Berlin-Mitte.

We'll conduct monthly one-on-one meetings to ensure maintainers in the fellowship have the resources needed for maximum impact. Contracts will outline specific activities tailored to each project, including:

• Technical review of proposed changes
• Community communication and moderation
• Release creation and publication
• Security vulnerability triage and fixes
• Documentation work

For freelance contractors, we'll review and approve every monthly invoice for work performed in accordance with the outlined activities.