How do we fund technology in a sustainable way? While financing infrastructure and its maintenance is extremely important (no questions asked), in this talk we want to explore why a diverse funding landscape that also allows for supporting people and groups with new ideas, that have been under the radar before, can only be incredibly valuable to the field of open source.

How can we use existing funding structures, bend and twist them to meet the real needs of communities? How can we make them more useful to projects and people who are not typically the recipients of their money? We want to talk about how to build support infrastructure that allows us to fund in ways that bring more diversity, more joy in experimenting, more novel ideas and more inclusivity to our communities - and we want to talk about how to do this in a sustainable way.

With the Prototype Fund we have funded almost 400 projects by and for the civil society in the past eight years. This has taught us a thing or two about the different wants and needs of grantees, about what they value in funders and the importance of flexibility when funding inividuals and their innovative ideas.

This talk is a call to government institutions, funders and other organisations with the power to distribute money to join forces, break down the barriers that might come with their traditional funding models and create a vibrant network of small, diverse and lightweight funds that meet the needs of different communities. It is an invitation to communities to come together and share their needs in order to help build structures that can actually support their work.