Idea for Sovereign Tech Fund application

[derberg]

This discussion is a result of my travels to various open source conferences that I summarized in this article.

Story

Sovereign Tech Fund

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is a German Government initiative. It is a fund that helps open source financially. They do some reorg so new applications need to wait until Q2.

It is not that shitty fund that many others offer, just for new projects, but for maintenance too, big time! It is official now that STF now financially support three experienced developers to work full time on Log4j library as maintainers - that is something! and clearly demonstrates the trustworthiness of people behind the STF and their vision.

Cyber Resilience Act

Well, European Union like any other public organization, not always does things in a good way and forget to consult all people involved.

Let me for the sake of this discussion simplify a bit and say: it is all about security, but we are not yet 100% sure its final shape and how it will affect us. You can read more about CRA here.

Security at AsyncAPI

We do not have a real reliable security process -> #32

Not much to add 🤷🏼

And it is not only about security that is just one of the chapter defined by OpenSSF -> asyncapi/.github#38

CI/CD infrastructure

Our automation based on GitHub Actions infrastructure lacks regular ownership. Only maintainers are me and @KhudaDad414 and we have many other duties - so approach now is: just fire-fighting and hoping for the best.

CI/CD is one of great assets that people get when hosting projects under AsyncAPI org - we must do everything possible to keep it that way.

Idea

To address issues I described above, we need an owner (or owners) of CI/CD. We need owner that will drive different standardisation initiatives. We need an owner that will know where we are, so once we will know how to prepare for CRA - these owners will know what and where needs to change.

Thus I think we should collaborate on an application that we will put on Sovereign Tech Fund to get above concerns handled:

• First we need to understand what is exactly needed and describe it well
• We need to identify who could do the job for us and how much money it will require
• Hire and see amazing results in next 12-24 months

Thoughts?

[Shurtu-gal]

Love the idea of standardizing CI/CD pipelines as it is being used extensively by all projects right now. 🚀

[derberg]

STF is yet on hold, so we just applied for funding to https://www.opentech.fund/
🤞🏼

[derberg]

another idea that do not exclude this idea is that we could ask STF to fund work of some senior frontend to handle https://github.com/asyncapi/asyncapi-react properly with full time focus 🤔

It would just have to be well described - scope like

• design system
• componentization
• themes and customizations
• probably API triggering?

[fmvilas]

Please! Happy to share my ideas for the AsyncAPI Documentation UI kit.

[kennethaasan]

Yes, that would be awesome. I think asyncapi-react is one of the more important AsyncAPI projects that we have, and needs all the love it can get. All AsyncAPI users will likely use it one way or another.

[derberg]

STF is not yet, started, they are delaying things

I'll keep you posted

[derberg]

Great news, according to https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/news/newsletter-june-2024 we finally can apply for funding. Starting from 17.06 they accept applications. We just need to define one and identify people that would like to be hired for it.