Thanks for your interest in applying for the Sovereign Tech Standards network.

 

The Sovereign Tech Agency is establishing this pilot to support the participation of a cohort of open source maintainers in the standards process. The pilot focuses on participation in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). 

 

Open standards are part of the invisible architecture of the digital world: they shape how systems communicate, how data flows, and how secure, accessible, and interoperable digital infrastructure is. Participation in their development enables individuals, industry, and governments to shape the direction of key technologies and ensure that they remain aligned with public interest goals. Open source maintainers often have deep implementation experience with widely used technologies, yet their domain knowledge and technical interests are not always consistently represented in standards development processes. By investing directly in the people responsible for maintaining widely used open source components, the Sovereign Tech Standards network aims to strengthen the connection between implementation practice and standards development.

 

The pilot will provide funding and structural support for a cohort of maintainers to participate in relevant standards work. The goal is to improve the quality of standards and specifications by grounding them more strongly in real-world implementation experience and by incorporating concerns specific to the open source ecosystem.

 

If you want to apply for multiple standards organizations through this program, please submit a separate application for each one. Please note: you will only be selected for one.

 

For further questions, please visit the Sovereign Tech Standards website and check our FAQs. In case you cannot find answers to your questions, send an email to standards@sovereign.tech.