We are thrilled to announce the first part of a new program at Tweag: the Tweag Open Source Fellowship. Open Source Fellows get financial support and mentorship from Tweag I/O to bring their own ideas into practice for the benefit of the open source community.

The Fellowship is open for all to apply, regardless of age or career stage — or any other discerning characteristic. It is also independent of community: you, the Fellow, could come from the Python, Javascript, or functional programming community, for example. You could also be a physicist, a biologist, a statistician, someone who loves graphics, or someone who does something that we have never heard about. The only restriction is that your project is related to creating software, and that we can help with our own expertise. What counts is that you have a plan which we can realize together within limited time.

The contribution needn’t just be code: we’re also open to supporting research, tutorials, documentation, design specifications, etc. We also provide mentorship during the Fellowship, which can take place at any 12-week-long mutually convenient time during the year. Fellowships will be selected in a competitive review twice a year, with a first deadline coming up on March 30th. Further details — and how to apply — can be found here.

This Fellowship naturally evolved out of an experience that we made again and again at Tweag: Great ideas come from passionate individuals — independent of their professional position or financial backing. We want to listen, and accelerate such ideas into something that is useable and openly available.

Stay tuned for the second part.