🛠️ Maintenance Grants

Maintenance Grants are yet another idea to get involved with the Polkadot community. If you are a user of an open-source library that has gone out of date, or you simply want to work on small new features/fix bugs in these repos, we can support your contributions via a grant. We are happy to award rolling grants on a monthly basis, as long as the work done within each time period is performed to a quality standard deemed satisfactory by the grant evaluators.

Application Process

The process of applying for a Maintenance Grant is similar to what was already outlined above, but instead of defining very detailed deliverables for each milestone upfront, we will ask you to specify, where possible:

• the repo(s) that need maintenance,
• outline of why the specific project should continue being supported,
• broad overview of the features/bugs that need development contributions,
• an assurance that the current project owners are willing to review/accept your contributions (a note here: if you're fully taking over the project, it would make more sense for the current owners to transfer the repository to your organisation. If you can't get in touch with them, you may, of course, work on a fork), and
• max budget per month.

Then, at the end of each month, you will need to provide a comprehensive report of the work done, including the list of issues/bugs/pull requests worked on, time spent on each of these & finally the associated cost. It is quite likely that the time allocation & cost will vary from month to month, depending on the nature of the project you're contributing to. The delivery process and format should follow that of a typical milestone delivery, as will the processing of the payment.

Notes

• Maintenance grants, as the name suggests, are meant to allow teams/individuals to maintain a certain project, and not to continue its development or implement larger features. Please use the traditional application process for this purpose.
• The 1-month timeframe is just a guideline. If you find it unsuitable for you or the chosen project for any reason, feel free to adjust as seen fit and point this out in your application.
• Please bear in mind that the Grants Committee might be stricter in accepting maintainers when compared to typical grants, mostly selecting for applicants with proven experience in the relevant tech stacks.
• Maintenance Grants are only awarded for fixed timeframes. The requested duration needs to be specified in the application.

Help

• For a list of previously accepted maintenance grants, see the applications/maintenance folder in our grants repository.
• For a list of ways to reach us and ask questions, see our Help page.