We are excited to announce that CNCF will be adding a Maintainer category to the Dan Kohn Scholarship fund for active CNCF project maintainers who are not being assisted or sponsored by a company or organization and are unable to attend for financial reasons.
The first offering of this new scholarship category is available for CloudNativeSecurityCon North America 2023 in Seattle, WA. The application is open now and closes on December 18, 2022. The maintainer category will also be added to the Dan Kohn Scholarship application for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 when it launches with registration in December, along with future large CNCF events.
The scholarship for maintainers joins two other in-person, full scholarship categories: Diversity and Need-Based. These scholarships provide complimentary registration and travel funding reimbursement for actual travel expenses. Scholarships are awarded based on a combination of need and impact.
Maintainers are the backbone of open source projects, who maintain code, documentation, and policy, and ultimately make the decisions about the direction of CNCF projects. There are currently over 1,000 CNCF project maintainers who perform these core functions and for the majority, do so as an additional role to their own full-time jobs.
This scholarship is another important step in helping support CNCF’s invaluable project maintainers and growing this integral community. Finally, a special thank you to Paris Pittman for the original idea of highlighting maintainer-focused scholarships.