The DevX Initiative Rust Ecosystem Sponsorship Program

3 min readNov 2, 2021

Update: The DevX Initiative is no longer affiliated with Concordium. Please see the medium blog post for more details.

TL;DR

The DevX Initiative, believes programmers are creative, passionate individuals and understands that engaging developers is about contributing to their already active communities in the spirit of reciprocity. The DevX Initiative will support developers who want to grow in the Rust community through its Sponsorship program, which focuses on empowering maintainers of crates and infrastructure that benefit all in the Rust Ecosystem.

The DevX Initiative is excited to launch its Rust Ecosystem Sponsorship Program. This program aims to help address one of the biggest challenges many Open Source communities face: the support of maintainers.

Why We’re Doing This

The DevX Initiative created by Beni Issembert & Ernest Kissiedu focuses on holistically contributing to the Rust Ecosystem by aligning with the Rust Project’s core goal of empowerment. It began life within Concordium to reshape the relationship between commercial entities and developers within Open Source communities.

The Sponsorship Program aims to fund developers whose efforts are critical to the Rust project but who are not currently being paid to work on Rust full-time. The DevX Initiative takes its lead from examples set by Embark Studios, Discord, Fly.io and Ockam.

The Concordium Foundation has given an initial endowment of $100,000 to the DevX Initiative to distribute throughout the Rust Ecosystem. It will focus on supporting individuals who contribute holistically to the Rust Community.

“It is essential that those who choose to maintain Rust feel empowered and supported by the commercial stakeholders who benefit the most from their work.” — Ernest Kissiedu

We Didn’t Begin with Money.

The DevX Initiative by Concordium began contributing to the Rust Community by co-founding the RCIG (Rust Cryptography Interest Group), supporting the RFMIG (Rust Formal Methods Interest Group), and contributing code to crates in the Rust Ecosystem.

Concordium believes it must contribute to the Rust Ecosystem beyond its commercial scope to strengthen the Rust community and support the programming language’s growth and adoption through the DevX Initiative.

The Open and Free Social Contract

DevX aims to be a dynamic, practical dialogue with the Rust community rooted in the philosophy of reciprocity as a principle. Reciprocity, as a principle, does not mean quid pro quo. Our philosophy comes from a melding of Karl Popper’s Golden Rule that led to the Principle of Reciprocity and Rousseau’s Social Contract.

“By the principle of reciprocity, I don’t mean you need to give to get, but that by contributing to the collective as an individual, you’ll also benefit. This is what we call the Open and Free Social Contract.” — Beni Issembert

Sponsoring Josh Triplett and Mara Bos

The DevX Initiative by Concordium is excited to announce it will be sponsoring Josh Triplett from the Rust Language Team and Mara Bos, the lead of the Rust Library team. They will help guide the sponsorship program together with Ernest Kissiedu from the DevX Initiative. Additional members from the Rust ecosystem will be added to this team to help steer the sponsorship program as it grows.

The DevX Initiative will support Josh as the co-lead of the Rust language team and his work on the Library and Cargo teams, and Mara as the lead of the Rust Library and Edition teams.

“I believe the DevX Initiative has an ideal model for supporting Open Source development, with a long-term view and a focus on sustainability and scalable development. I’m thrilled and thankful to be sponsored by DevX, and I look forward to working with them to sponsor others in the Rust community as well,” — Josh Triplett.

The DevX Initiative has a Roadmap that maps out the range of ways it aims to contribute to the Rust Community beyond providing funds for sponsorship.