Coming soon: the 2027 Gem Fellowship

2026-10-15

Last year I founded the Gem Fellowship with $100,000 in funding. Myself and the gem.coop team judged applications from 40+ projects and funded eight with awards between $2500 and $20,000. This year I’m providing $100,000 again but we want to do more! Would you and your company like to join me in supporting Ruby OSS maintainers? More details on sponsorship here.

Ruby open source tooling and its community are fundamental to Sidekiq and its success. I believe in committing both time and money to ensure that the Ruby ecosystem provides not only recognition to the people maintaining our common infrastructure every day but funding. Open source maintainers can’t pay their rent or mortgage with kind words.

In 2026 we funded eight maintainers with fellowship grants between $2500 and $20,000. This funded individual maintainers like Marco Roth of Herb, Jared White of Bridgetown, Jeanine Adkisson of Rouge and James Couball of ruby-git. With their Fellowship grant, these projects delivered significant improvements and new features for us all. Learn more at our 2026 Fellows page.

In 2027 our goal is to raise $150,000 more and fund at least 15 projects this year. The minimum to be named as a sponsor is $5,000 but we allow any increment of $5,000. If you want to make a big splash, $100,000 makes your company a headline partner. More details on how to sponsor can be found here. All funds go to maintainers, the Fellowship is operated at no cost by https://gem.coop and unpaid volunteers.

If you are a Ruby open source maintainer, applications for the 2027 Fellowship will open on December 1st. I will link the application form here when it is open.

If you believe in our open source community and the altruistic people that maintain the common libraries we all rely on, I hope you will join me in supporting them.