Sovereign Tech Fellowship Wed, Dec. 3, 2025

The Sovereign Tech Fellowship: Who Will Maintain Our Digital Future?

Our entire world runs on open source infrastructure — an invisible foundation enabling everything from public services to industrial innovation. Behind that foundation are maintainers: the experts who fix, adapt, and improve the technologies we rely on every day.

Yet their work is often unpaid and unseen. Our 2024 survey of over 500 open source maintainers revealed that:

• One in three receives no pay at all for their work.
• Another 30% earn too little to make a living from it.

The Sovereign Tech Fellowship takes a new approach to this challenge. Throughout 2025, it has directly paid six maintainers of essential open source projects — exploring how fellowships can become a forward-looking model for supporting digital infrastructure in the public interest.

On 3 December 2025 in Berlin, we would like to invite you to meet the inaugural Fellows and learn from the pilot year of the Fellowship program.

We’ll also host a panel to discuss how public investment in key individuals can secure the foundations of our digital future with

• Hannah Bergmann, Work4Germany, DigitalService Germany
• Philipp Schulte, International Digital Policy Fellowship, German Ministry for Digitalization and Government Modernisation
• Lisa Gutermuth, Mozilla Fellows, Mozilla Foundation
• Representative from the TUM Think Tank’s Fellowship of Practice

The event will take place in English and refreshments will be served.