Small seeds - why funding new ideas matters

How do we fund technology in a sustainable way? Fund infrastructure, fund maintenance, fund that project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. While infrastructure is extremely important (no questions asked), in this talk we want to explore why a diverse funding landscape that also allows for supporting new people and groups with fresh ideas can only be incredibly valuable to the field of FOSS. 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 novel ideas and more inclusivity to our communities - and we want to talk about how to do this in a sustainable way. 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 of their traditional funding models and create a broad and vibrant network of small, diverse and lightweight funds that meet the needs of different groups and 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. There is hope in FOSS projects, old and new, big and small. Let's hack all kinds of systems to give them the support they need.