Introducing the Fellowship for Maintainers

Open source infrastructure is the backbone of our digital world - and the work of the people who maintain it is essential to ensuring the security and availability of this global resource. They lead project development, review changes, manage community interactions, and tackle security issues.

Yet, most of this work happens behind the scenes, unpaid, and in maintainers’ spare time. In the long run, this isn’t sustainable, and in some cases leads to stress and burnout. The Tidelift Maintainer Study found that 59% of maintainers have quit or considered quitting, posing a risk to the digital infrastructure we all rely on.

Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. However, the activities of maintainers, who often work on multiple FOSS projects, are hard to quantify for funding applications, as the demands and challenges vary and can change quickly. This is where the fellowship for maintainers comes into play.

With this new fellowship program, we’re directly investing in the people behind the code by paying maintainers of critical open source components for their work.

While we are still ironing out the details, the survey for FOSS maintainers we conducted earlier this year gave us plenty of input that has helped to shape this pilot program. We received answers from 536 people, to whom we owe a big shout-out: Thanks to everyone taking the time earlier this year to help us collecting valuable insights.

The results informed the following cornerstones of the design of the fellowship program:

• Impactful Work: There is no doubt that there is a substantial demand for supporting maintainers and maintenance work directly. This will be the guiding principle of the fellowship and complement the offerings of our general fund.
• Diverse Engagement Options: We plan to offer a range of ways maintainers can be engaged, with varying time commitments to suit different needs and situations.
• Mentorship and Growth: There is a specific demand for mentoring maintainers. The fellowship will be accompanied by an offering from STF and/or partners that supports the needs of the fellowship participants.

We know there is plenty more we can learn from the maintainers as the program progresses. That’s why we’re using an iterative approach and starting with a pilot program now in 2024. This allows us to refine the program as we go, evaluate it, and develop it over time. A pilot program also means that we’ll start with a relatively small number of maintainers.

We're planning to start accepting fellowship applications by the end of Q3 2024, with selected maintainers beginning their fellowships in Q4.

If you are interested in more details, learn about our vision for the fellowship for maintainers. 

More about the fellowship

You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay tuned for more details when we announce how to apply and be part of this pilot program.

We believe that this initiative will be a crucial and timely contribution to a more robust and sustainable open source ecosystem, and we are looking forward to supporting maintainers in their critical work.