Announcing Summer of Bugs

Ever wanted to take a day off to fix an annoying bug or finally ship a feature? Clojurists Together Foundation wants to make that happen.

Now that Clojurists Together Foundation is operational, we have more flexibility in how we fund open source work. One recurring community request was for smaller grants: people who feel there’s good work to be done and that they’re in an ideal position to do it, but there just isn’t an entire quarter’s worth to do. With Summer of Bugs, we’re introducing funding for important work that takes place on a scale of days, not months.

Applications are open to anyone who can plausibly demonstrate their ability to do the proposed work. Previously, we’ve only funded project maintainers. Maintainers are of course still welcome to apply, but we’re expanding the application process to include contributors and expert users.

While we’re calling this “Summer of Bugs”, these mini-projects are not limited to just fixing issues. If there’s an important feature to roll out, that’s fine too. Plenty of projects would really benefit most from someone spending a day or two tending to the issue tracker, so that other contributors can be more effective. Perhaps existing features aren’t living up to their potential because they’re undocumented. Surprise us! We’d love to support all of these projects.

While at a later stage we want to explore funding more experimental work in the Clojure community, we’re trying to change only one variable at a time. Therefore, we expect these mini-grants to mostly be targeted at the same sort of core open source infrastructure we’ve funded in the past.

Our initial approach to this is that people can request a micro-grant ($500) or a mini-grant ($1,000). We’re hoping to allocate a budget of $7,500, though that is somewhat dependent on available funds. The committee will vote on the submissions, rank them based on impact, and pick the top N until we reach our budget based on overall impact on the Clojure community. We will continue to gauge impact based on information from member surveys as well as third party datasets such as the annual State of Clojure survey: please continue to fill those out as it helps guarantee the quality of our decision making.

You can apply for these grants now and we’ll be announcing the results at the end of May. When thinking about projects to apply for, take a look at our recent survey results as these are the kinds of projects our members are most interested in funding.