Open Source

Quarterly Fellowships

Clojurists Together takes applications from open source developers for funding to work on open source projects. While the projects typically span 3 months, they can run one to twelve months. The number of award cycles and projects funded as well as the amount paid can vary depending on the availability of funding.

We conduct regular surveys of the Clojure community prior to scheduling a funding round to inform developers' submissions. Then we announce a call for proposals along with the survey results, funding levels, and the schedule for submission, review and award. The Clojurists Together committee evaluates the proposals, makes their selection, and then funds projects with a fellowship. You can apply at any time for the next funding cycle, and you can make multiple applications for different projects. We also re-enter submissions that were not awarded funding into two subsequent cycles - giving your proposal additional opportunities for consideration.

Once selected for a fellowship, you have two months to start it.

Apply for funding

Funding amounts

We currently have two levels of quarterly fellowships:

Annual Funding

Application Requirements

Questions

These questions are to get an understanding of your project and plans for the funding. We would expect most applications would be filled out in five minutes or less. We don’t want you spending hours crafting the perfect application; you have enough work to do already.

N.B. Receiving other funding does not disqualify you from receiving Clojurists Together funding. However you cannot accept multiple streams of money for the same commits, i.e. you cannot double bill the work you do in your day job on your OSS project as also going towards the work that you do in your Clojurists Together funding.

Example Application

What project are you applying for?

REPLicator - github.com/roy-batty/replicator

Who is applying? How are you related to the project?

Roy Batty, project creator

What are you wanting to achieve with this funding?

REPLicator can currently share REPLs between different terminals on a single computer. I would like to extend REPLicator to allow people to share REPLs across the internet with other developers. This is a common feature request from users.

Why is this project important to the Clojure community?

REPLicator has been around for several years and is used by many developers. The most recent release has had 5,000 downloads on Clojars in the last six months.

Do you receive any other funding to work on this project?

No.

Clojurists Together Work Expectations

A common question we get from people looking to apply is “How many hours do you expect me to work, and how much output do you expect?”. Our answer is:

We don’t have a set number of hours required to put into the project. Based on current sponsorship rates of USD 3,000/mo, something like 15 hours/month would be a bit light, but we also don’t expect you to do 80 hours/month either, so somewhere in between.

However the raw number of hours is not so important as the results that you’re able to achieve in them. The most important thing to keep in mind is whether you think that in the time that you would be able to work on the project, you can achieve meaningful results.

One of the things Clojurists Together was designed to support is the work that isn’t fun to do. These are things like tracking down hard to reproduce bugs, maintenance to follow upstream dependencies, reviewing large pull-requests, thinking about/tackling large thorny problems, and the other slog work which is important but not fun. If you’ve got a project with work like that that you’ve been putting off, we want to fund you to work on it. Of course we also want to fund projects to implement new features, but please don’t think that just because your work isn’t exciting that you shouldn’t apply.

Considerations

The Clojurists Together committee evaluates projects based on the following criteria:

Selecting Projects

  1. In every funding cycle, we look at the funds that we have available, and decide how many projects we will be able to fund for that cycle.
  2. Each committee member reviews the projects and weighs them against the criteria above.
  3. Each committee member ranks the projects in order of preference
  4. The winning projects are selected by Multi-Winner Ranked Choice Voting

We will then publish a list of all the projects that applied, along with the voting results. The voting results redact all but the top 5 projects.

Project Reports

Successful projects receiving $9k are required to submit three project reports during their fellowship. Experimental projects receiving $1k/$2k are required to submit two project reports. This is used to show backers the impact that their money is having. These don’t need to be long or detailed (although writing additional blog posts about your work is encouraged), for example, a list of GitHub issues and a brief comment for each would be sufficient.

Getting paid

If your project is selected, we will create a contract based on your proposal This contract will include the amount to be paid, and the work intended to be done. We can fund maintainers anywhere in the world, barring exceptional circumstances like US sanctions. You will need to check with your accountant, but this contract is probably going to be similar to a freelancing contract, i.e. you will need to pay taxes on it.

We pay out $9k fellowships in three installments, 1/3 on signature, 1/3 at the midway of the project, and 1/3 on completion of the project. Smaller fellowships may be paid over one or two installments depending on the project - but typically at the start and finish of the project. Payment is contingent on receiving project reports.

Timeline

An example timeline for quarterly fellowships: Q2 (March, April, May) $9K Fellowship