Meet the Sovereign Tech Fellows

Last year, we announced the Sovereign Tech Agency’s plans for a fellowship for maintainers, a new program to address a critical challenge in the open source ecosystem: supporting the dedicated individuals who keep our digital infrastructure functioning. This was after conducting a survey of free and open source software (FOSS) maintainers in the spring. The survey responses helped us understand the circumstances of and specific challenges faced by the core contributors to important technologies relied on everywhere, from business applications to personal devices to public sector operations.

In September 2024, we opened the applications for the pilot program of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship, and are grateful to have received around 100 submissions from open source maintainers around the world. After an extensive review process of the many highly qualified candidates, and interviewing and coordinating with individual applicants, we’re excited to announce the six maintainers who are the first cohort of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship!

The fellowship is a 12-month pilot program to invest directly in the people behind the code, by paying maintainers of critical open source components for crucial and impactful work that often are overlooked. From project development and change reviews to community engagement and dealing with security issues, much of this type of activity happens behind the scenes, and cannot be so easily quantified as milestones or confined to a single project.

Through this program, the Sovereign Tech Agency is exploring fellowships as a mechanism to address structural challenges within the open source ecosystem. Beyond the Sovereign Tech Fund’s broader focus on investing in specific technologies, the Sovereign Tech Fellowship offers a way to support individual maintainers of critical technologies in performing important and essential work. Some maintainers need stable employment, while others benefit from long-term freelance engagements. Many key contributors have personal or professional circumstances that make achieving financial stability through traditional FOSS sponsorship or business models particularly challenging. Core contributors to essential technologies are struggling to continue doing the work that underpins the long-term security and viability of both the technologies themselves and the institutions and businesses dependent on them.

The Sovereign Tech Fellowship offers a unique opportunity to open source maintainers dedicated to advancing open digital infrastructure for the public good.

Without further ado, meet the six maintainers for the first Sovereign Tech Fellowship! Over the coming months, we’ll publish more detailed blog posts sharing more about these maintainers, the technologies they work on, and their journeys through free and open source software.

Jan is a software engineer based in Nuremberg, Germany. He actively works on software supply chain-related international standards and maintains a variety of libraries and tools in this field. You can find Jan online on GitHub and LinkedIn, and if you’re interested in his FOSS work, check out these repositories:

• CycloneDX Python library
• CycloneDX SBOM generator for npm
• CycloneDX PHP Composer Plugin

Sarah is based in Dresden, Germany. Originally trained in operating systems development, when she discovered the OpenStreetMap project, she switched focus to geospatial software with a special interest in search. She is currently maintainer for Nominatim, Photon, osm2pgsql and pyosmium but she has contributed to many other projects of the core OpenStreetMap software as well.

• https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim
• https://github.com/komoot/photon
• https://github.com/osm2pgsql-dev/osm2pgsql

Hugo is a software engineer based in Helsinki, Finland. He's a Python core developer, the release manager for Python 3.14 and the next version, a PEP editor, member of the Python Security Response Team, and co-organiser of Helsinki Python. He maintains more than 20 PyPI packages, such as Pillow, termcolor, humanize, and PrettyTable, which are downloaded 190 million times per month. You can find Hugo at hugovk.dev and on GitHub, Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

• https://github.com/python/cpython
• https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow
• https://github.com/python-humanize/humanize

Matthias is a PhD candidate in neurosciences based in Heidelberg, Germany. Despite his background in molecular biosciences, he has been involved with the open source community for a very long time, working on both the GNOME and KDE “Linux desktop” environments and the lower-level infrastructure that make them work, as well as on the Debian operating system. He is the current maintainer of Freedesktop.org, a platform dedicated to facilitating collaboration on specifications that make the modern Linux desktop work and allow software developers to target the “Linux desktop” as a platform easier. He also maintains AppStream and PackageKit, which form the basis of modern software management on Linux. Matthias also helps maintain more than 50 Debian packages, in addition to maintaining a few smaller developer tools and projects for the neuroscientific community. You can find Matthias on GitHub, Mastodon, Bluesky or on his blog.

• https://specifications.freedesktop.org
• https://github.com/ximion/appstream
• https://github.com/PackageKit/PackageKit

Stefan is based in Münster, Germany and has liked coding since the 80s. He prefers to work on things around HTTP and TLS. He is member of the Apache httpd and curl project teams and maintains Apache’s HTTP/2, Let’s Encrypt (ACME), and Rust-based TLS modules also as standalone projects.

• https://httpd.apache.org/
• https://curl.se/
• https://github.com/icing/mod_md

Denis Ovsienko is an IT engineer based in the United Kingdom. His professional interests include free and open source software, computer networks, and data centers. He is one of the maintainers of tcpdump (a cross-platform network packet analyzer) and libpcap (a cross-platform library for network packet capture). This fellowship helps Denis to allocate regular working hours to the upkeep of the projects, including testing, bug fixing, release engineering, documentation and assorted sysadmin and webmaster duties, including the website at www.tcpdump.org.

• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/libpcap
• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump
• https://github.com/the-tcpdump-group/tcpdump-htdocs