Looking towards 2024

As we recently announced, STF is here to stay — and becoming an independent subsidiary of SPRIND (Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation). STF will continue to be financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. This will enable us to become even more robust and responsive to the needs of the open source ecosystem and the communities that work on critical software infrastructure. In our first year, we broke new ground on how best to identify, evaluate, and work with FOSS technologies and the communities that contribute to and maintain them.

As we make plans for 2024, we intend to expand the scope and range of our investments and build out the types of support the Sovereign Tech Fund offers. The lessons we’ve learned from the technologies we support continue to shape our understanding of the needs, not only of the projects, but also the people behind the code — the maintainers, contributors, and supporters.

We’re continuing these conversations with these people behind the code to develop new strategies and mechanisms for how we can make open source work more accessible, more secure, and fundamentally more sustainable. Based on these lessons and conversations, we will refine and expand our repertoire of funding instruments to build a solid foundation for the next phase of the Sovereign Tech Fund’s existence as an organization.

During this initial transitional period, we are not accepting submissions for support through our application platform. We appreciate your patience during this time and look forward to new applications in the second quarter of 2024.

Existing accounts and submissions on our platform will still be accessible although the form for new applications on our platform https://apply.sovereigntechfund.de is temporarily closed. Previously submitted applications and applications in progress are also available during this time, if they have not been removed in accordance with our data retention practices.

Many partnerships with communities and engagements are already in progress, and will continue through this temporary break from new applications. The work we’ve commissioned and are supporting is ongoing, and many agreements are in place through 2024.

We’ll continue to share updates about critical technologies we’re investing in and highlighting the critical, but often unseen work in open source infrastructure.

In the meantime, you can subscribe to our newsletter and follow STF on Mastodon, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Bluesky for updates about our work and future opportunities to receive support with STF.