Newsletter: New Technology Investments, Sessions at Open Source Summit, and Sovereign Tech Fellowship Highlights
By Powen Shiah
In Newsletter
Email newsletter on 21 October 2025: the Sovereign Tech Fund's latest technology investments, an in-depth interview with Sovereign Tech Fellow Jan Kowalleck, and video recordings from our sessions at Open Source Summit Europe in Amsterdam and FrOSCon.
In this edition of our newsletter, we highlight our latest technology investments, showcase an in-depth interview with Sovereign Tech Fellow Jan Kowalleck, and offer video recordings from our sessions at Open Source Summit Europe in Amsterdam and FrOSCon. You’ll see how our work strengthens essential technologies, enables innovation, and helps make open source a strategic advantage.
Plus, don’t miss the upcoming events we’ll be attending; these are great opportunities to meet our team and connect in person!
If you’d like to find out about these updates as they happen, you can find the Sovereign Tech Agency on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Bluesky.
New Technology Investments
We invest globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate. Improving the security, stability, and reusability of open software components directly enhances the productivity, competitive edge, and capacity for innovation of startups and small and medium-sized businesses. We’re excited to be working with these maintainers and FOSS communities, and to support the software that forms the foundation of the infrastructure of the 21st century.
Here are some of the projects the Sovereign Tech Fund has recently commissioned work on:
Scala, SDCC, Let's Encrypt, Servo, chatmail, Drupal, Fedify, openprinting, PHP, Apache Arrow, Open SSL, R Project, Open Web Docs, conda, systemd, and phpseclib
Inside the Sovereign Tech Fellowship
At the beginning of the year, we launched the pilot of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship to pay six open source maintainers for their work. With the program, we provide targeted support to maintainers to ensure that basic digital technologies remain resilient and future-proof. For example, Sarah Hoffmann works on projects related to OpenStreetMap, and Stefan Eissing works on curl and httpd.
At the FrOSCon conference in August, Head of the Sovereign Tech Fund, Mirko Swillus, moderated a fireside chat with Sarah and Stefan. In the talk they explained how the Sovereign Tech Fellowship is structured, how the fellows and open source technologies benefit from a paid maintainer, and how they organize their time and work. You can watch the video [in German]:
Meet Sovereign Tech Fellow Jan Kowalleck
We’re thrilled to share another in-depth interview in our series featuring the inaugural cohort of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship: Open source maintainer Jan Kowalleck began his journey with OWASP CycloneDX by fixing a single bug. That small step led to becoming Project Co-Lead, mentoring new contributors, and helping shape the international standard for software transparency. In this interview, Jan shares how he balances maintenance and community building, why SBOMs are key to software security, and what it takes to guide a fast-growing open source project.
Sessions at Open Source Summit Europe
In August, several Sovereign Tech Agency team members travelled to Amsterdam for Open Source Summit. In addition to meetings, side-events, and many great sessions, some of the sessions we took part in are available as video recordings:
“Open Source Is a Sewer” by Powen Shiah, Communications Lead at the Sovereign Tech Agency
Panel discussion about the proposed EU-Sovereign Tech Fund “Securing Europe’s Open Source Infrastructure: A Technical Case for an EU-wide Sovereign Tech Fund” with Powen Shiah
Panel discussion “Europe’s Open Source Motivations and Mandate: Findings from the 2025 World of Open Source Survey” with Paloma Oliviera, Technologist at the Sovereign Tech Agency
Open Source as Europe’s Strategic Advantage
Our technologist, Paloma Oliveira is quoted in the latest report by The Linux Foundation on European open source trends.
“The Sovereign Tech Agency is strengthening the digital infrastructure that powers our democracies and economies, funding it, nurturing it, making it resilient, keeping it open, and respecting users’ freedom.”
— Sovereign Tech Agency technologist, Paloma Oliveira, in the Linux Foundation's report Open Source as Europe’s Strategic Advantage
The report also highlights open source as a strategic lever for digital sovereignty:
“Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency offers a promising model (…) by funding the maintenance of critical OSS projects — an approach that serves both German government interests in ensuring the open digital infrastructure it relies on is maintained and secure, as well as global users of the funded OSS projects.”
— Linux Foundation report "Open Source as Europe’s Strategic Advantage"
Sovereign Tech Agency out and about
- 28 October 2025, Powen Shiah is speaking at Write the Docs conference in Berlin, Germany
- 28 October 2025, meet Adriana Groh and Paloma Oliveira at 4D conference in Barcelona, Spain
- 29 October 2025, Adriana Groh and Paloma Oliveira are speaking at Digital Resilience Forum in Madrid, Spain
- 29-30 October 2025, meet Yasmine Idrissi and Tara Tarakiyee at Numérique en Commun[s] in Strasbourg, France
- 13 November 2025, Adriana Groh will be speaking at IBM's "Parlamentarischer Abend" on "Freedom of Choice for Digital Sovereignty" in Berlin, Germany
- 13 November 2025, Paloma Oliviera is speaking at ecoCompute conference in Berlin, Germany
- 18-19 November 2025, meet Paloma Oliviera at OpenForum Academy Symposium, in Rio de Janerio, Brazil
