Heldôfbylding

2022 Impact Summary

Aug. 5, 2024
Mehan Jayasuriya

Skreaun troch Mehan Jayasuriya

Overall, we view the inaugural cohort of MTF awardees as having been a success. Through workshops, peer-mentorship and mentorship from experts like our Senior Trustworthy AI Fellows, we were able to address specific project needs and connect teams to resources. During the course of their participation in MTF, the majority of projects (80%) reported increases in sustainability, contributors and users and were able to both build new infrastructure and conduct ongoing maintenance. The majority of projects made visible progress over the year (e.g. new features, new designs, new research reports) and many received coverage in the press for their work. One member of the 2022 cohort successfully applied to join the 2023 MTF cohort and has continued to build on their track record of success.

The 2022 cohort also helped us test many hypotheses we had about how best to support open source projects. Following our work on the MOSS program, which held awardees to a stricter, more contract-like set of milestones, we aimed to provide MTF projects with more flexibility while holding them to high standards for the work completed. This was appreciated by the awardees: as the Algowritten project maintainers wrote in their final report, “The MTF offers an opportunity to engage with a funder/supporter who understands how to balance accountability and trust.”

Building on MOSS’s focus on sustainability, we were explicit in our MTF call for proposals that we sought to fund maintenance work and not just new feature development. Many of our projects took advantage of this policy to pay down technical debt and build out their documentation. “Even though the Fair EVA project is a small and committed group of contributors, the funding I received from the MTF made it possible to pay contributors to make significant improvements to the code and to launch the database,” the FairEVA project wrote. “Not only did this result in new features, it also funded user documentation and architectural improvements that will make code maintenance significantly easier in the future.”

Finally, our willingness to place “risky bets” on new and emerging projects helped us fund the development of new pieces of open source infrastructure that might not have otherwise been built. “This award allowed the team to build a major piece of infrastructure: the open-source TikTok analyzer tool,” the TheirTok team wrote of their core technology, which was one of the first tools available for collecting data from real, logged-in TikTok users. “This tool has not only been beneficial for the TheirTok project but has also been adopted by other artists within the community for their own work.”