Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Maintainers

The Sovereign Tech Agency is piloting a fellowship program to pay open source maintainers, aiming to address structural issues and support open digital infrastructure in the public interest.

Over the past two years, the Sovereign Tech Agency has successfully contracted over 60 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. While some contracts are with individual maintainers, most involve software development companies or foundations. Despite this success, a new and innovative program is needed to acknowledge the lived reality of how many maintainers work: stretched across multiple technologies, multi-faceted, and often behind the scenes.

Most maintainers are unpaid, working in their spare time, which both impacts projects’ stability and can lead to stress and burnout. The Tidelift Open Source Maintainer Study found that 59% of maintainers have quit or considered quitting, posing a risk to the digital infrastructure we all rely on. To even begin to mitigate this risk, it's crucial to understand the role of maintainers, who typically lead and oversee project development, review changes, manage community interactions, release updates, and fix security issues.

These leadership activities 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.

On this page:

• The Fellowship Program
• Designing the Fellowship for Maintainers
  • Employment
  • Freelance Contracting
  • Mentoring
• Requirements
• Criteria
• How to Apply
• Timeline and Outlook
• Maintainer Survey Findings

With this new fellowship program, we’re directly investing in the people behind the code by paying individual maintainers of critical open source components for their work. This covers a range of activities rather than specific deliverables, broadening the impact, since maintainers often contribute to and play key roles in multiple projects.

We’ve explored structuring the fellowship as freelance service contracts and employment agreements, taking into account the circumstances of the people doing the work. The fellowship will cover typical maintainer responsibilities like technical reviews, community management, release engineering, and security triage, but can also be tailored to specific technologies or communities.

We’re using an iterative approach and starting with a pilot program in 2024. This will help us to learn from the maintainers we support in this pilot phase, and to refine the program as we go.

As we’ve learned from both the survey and our conversations with maintainers and other core contributors to FOSS projects, their situations and needs are varied — and this needs to be reflected in the design of any initiative to strengthen the open source ecosystem. In the pilot program of the fellowship for maintainers, we will pay up to five maintainers. Depending on their situations, needs, and tailored to the technologies and communities, there are two options for potential fellowship participants.

Employment

For the duration of the fellowship, one “maintainer-in-residence” will be employed up to full-time (32-40 hours per week) as part of the Sovereign Tech Agency team. This option offers the maintainer the personal and professional advantages of being part of team, as well as the stability of being employed to continue working 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.

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.

Freelance Contracting

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.

This option is available for maintainers located anywhere.

Applicants for this option should be prepared with their fully-loaded hourly rate.

This type of flexible composition allows for the best diversification of approaches and enables us to support many technologies.

For example, 28% of respondents said their preferred weekly time commitment would be below 20 hours. From the comments submitted, there is a bigger group of maintainers who would not be able to leave their current employment or customers. For them, it still would make a significant difference to get compensated for their part-time open source maintenance work.

We’re limiting the fellowship to 12 months because we want to learn from and iterate on this first pilot. This is also based on the fact that the largest group (30%) selected 12 months as the ideal fellowship length, among the options we provided.

Mentoring

The survey also revealed a clear demand for additional kinds of support, from mentorship to trainings in open source software engineering. For the pilot of the fellowship, one of the Sovereign Tech Agency technologists, Lorenzo Sciandra, will work together with the maintainers in the role of a mentor. His many years as a core maintainer for React Native as well as his experience starting and growing a meet-up for open source maintainers in London mean that Lorenzo brings a breadth and depth to working with and mentoring maintainers.

As with many elements of the fellowship, we’ll be iterating and tailoring the process to the need of the participants. We expect the mentoring to include both individual monthly sessions, and group meetings for all maintainers to share their experiences and learn from each other.

These are the requirements and criteria for the fellowship for maintainers. Please only apply if you meet them:

Submission through our application system: Submissions must be completed through the online application portal. No supplemental materials should be sent via email or any other form of communication at this time.

Completeness: Applications must be completed in English. The questions must be answered to a degree that allows us to assess and evaluate the applications.

Public financing: Projects are not eligible to receive financing or work commissions from the Sovereign Tech Agency if other public entities are already making or have made grants or investments for the same proposed activities.

FOSS: All code and documentation to be supported must be licensed such that it may be freely reusable, changeable, and redistributable. OSI-approved or FSF Free/Libre licenses are acceptable for code. Creative-Commons-like licenses for documentation may not include non-commercial or “no derivative” clauses.

Maintainer: 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.

The projects you maintain or contribute to are technologies that meet the criteria of prevalence, relevance, vulnerability, public interest, and expertise (see below).

Availability: You are available for a 12-month engagement from (approximately) the end of 2024 to the end of 2025.

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

One Application: You are only submitting one application to the fellowship for maintainers of the Sovereign Tech Agency.

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 organization seeking funding for maintainers you employ. Please consider submitting a proposal to the Sovereign Tech Fund instead.

For the employment option:

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

The Sovereign Tech Agency invests in open digital base technologies that are vital to the development of other software or enable digital networking. We invest in projects that benefit and strengthen the open source ecosystem. Examples include libraries for programming languages, package managers, open implementations of communication protocols, administration tools for developers, digital encryption technologies, and more. We do not finance the development of prototypes. Our currently funded projects show the range and type of technologies that characterize open digital base technologies.

We are currently not looking for user-facing applications, such as messaging apps or file storage services. If this changes, we will announce it here.

These are the criteria we use to review all projects that fulfill the basic requirements:

Prevalence

A technology is prevalent when it is widely used for or within other technologies.

Example Guiding Questions:

• How widely adopted is the technology within the open source ecosystem?
• Are there any notable projects or organizations that rely on this technology, indicating its prevalence?

Relevance

A technology is relevant if it is significant for one or more important societal sectors, e.g., education, health care, energy sector, industry.

Example Guiding Questions:

• In which societal sectors is the technology currently being utilized, and to what extent?
• Can the applicant outline specific use cases in important sectors such as education, health care, energy, journalism, or industry?

Vulnerability

A technology is vulnerable if important work – to keep the quality of the project or to enhance it – is not (sufficiently) funded by other actors or cannot be completed for other structural reasons.

Example Guiding Questions:

• What specific areas of the project are currently underfunded or face structural challenges?
• Are there alternative funding sources, and if not, what risks does the lack of funding pose to the project's sustainability?

Public Interest

There are benefits for society or critical sectors of society (e.g., education, health care, energy, industry) by funding the technology.

Example Guiding Questions:

• How does the project benefit society or critical sectors?
• Are there specific societal challenges that the project aims to address, and how significant are the potential positive impacts?

Expertise

The applicant demonstrate that they have the necessary knowledge, insight, and technological skills to fulfil the role as a maintainer. They are a recognized part of the community around the technology.

Example Guiding Questions:

• Does the applicant demonstrate a deep understanding of the technology and its ecosystem?
• What relevant experience and skills does the applicant or the contributor possess?

Lastly, the evaluation is guided by our strategy and mission. That is, from start to finish, we look at how the project fits into the Sovereign Tech Agency’s mission and contributes to the goal of sustainably strengthening the open source ecosystem in the public interest.

We are accepting fellowship applications submitted through our application platform by 23:59 on Sunday 20 October 2024.

You will need to create an account to submit an application.

Please note that you will only receive a submission confirmation from us if you agreed to receive emails or SMS from us when you registered. If you change this in the settings after your registration, it will only affect future messages from us, such as acceptances or rejections.

1. To apply, go to apply.sovereigntechfund.de
2. Then, choose which fellowship option you’re interested in: employment or freelance.

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 link 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 résumé or CV (curriculum vitae) as a PDF (only for the employment option)
• Your fully-loaded hourly rate (only for the freelance option)

Download a preview of the fellowship application forms here:

1. Employment (PDF)
2. Freelance (PDF)

Apply for the fellowship

The application phase will run from 12 September through 23:59 on 20 October 2024, with the goal of notifying selected maintainers in late November 2024. They can then begin the fellowship by the end of 2024 or early 2025. The fellowship will last for 12 months and run throughout 2025, and we will evaluate it on an ongoing basis. Based on these evaluations, our experiences running the fellowship, and feedback from participants, we’ll determine how to expand and grow the program for a stronger and healthier open source ecosystem.

In particular, we’re aware that the different fellowship options — necessary to accommodate maintainers’ particular situations — will need to be evaluated differently. With the support of an external evaluator and researcher, we’ll be able to better understand the impact and success of the different approaches.

We look forward to sharing the results and hope they’ll inform future endeavors in this area.

To inform the design of the pilot, we conducted a survey of maintainers with a series of questions to understand the situations and preferences of the respondents. This survey was answered by 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 initial findings from that survey and how they’re informing the pilot can be summarized as follows:

1. There is no doubt that there is a substantial demand for direct support of maintainers and maintenance work.
   61% of the participants are interested in the program, another 33% are not sure yet. A significant majority of respondents (75%) want to change something in the way they get compensated (either they don’t get paid at all currently, but want to, or they get paid but want to increase the amount of paid maintainer work).
2. The specific situations of and demands on maintainers are diverse.
   To account for this, the fellowship pilot ideally should accommodate the broad range of situations and needs by offering different types of work agreements, numbers of hours, and lengths of engagement. This is especially important in order to make participation possible for maintainers who don’t have the financial security; professional or social capital; or personal flexibility to participate in a more standardized program. This will help increase the diversity among the maintainers: in fact, 20% of the participants identified as part of a marginalized group.
3. Mentoring and coaching need to be part of the program from the beginning.
   Maintainers also want support to become mentors and coaches themselves for up-and-coming maintainers. The pilot ideally will be accompanied by an offering from the Sovereign Tech Agency and/or partners that support this desire for coaching and development.

We’re looking forward to sharing more findings from the maintainer survey as we continue to evaluate and analyze the results.

We have collected the answers to frequently asked questions on the page linked below. For example:

• How do you define a “maintainer”?
• Can package maintainers apply?

Sovereign Tech Fellowship FAQ page