Announcing Appium's Sponsorship Program

Over the last several months, the Appium team has been working on a sponsorship program that is designed to help give back to Appium's contributors as well as to recognize important partner individuals or companies in the industry. This program is now officially launching! Let's dive into some of the details.

First of all, the details and fine print will always be available at Appium's Governance document, which outlines how the project is run, who makes project decisions, etc... This document will be kept up to date with the latest details of the program, so that's the place to bookmark for reference!

As of now, Appium has opened up sponsorship opportunities via our OpenCollective page. OpenCollective is a service which allows people to donate to open source groups. We've defined a number of giving tiers for donations, within a very wide range, and welcome any financial amount with gratitude! Based on the donation tier, sponsorship comes with a variety of benefits, including recognition at different places in the Appium repo, docs, and website. In addition to financial sponsorship, the project has decided to recognize significant donations of project leadership and maintenance efforts from companies who have invested heavily into Appium with their employees' time (we call these "Development Partners").

What will the project do with the funds raised through this sponsorship program? We aim to give it all back to the Appium community! With the details again available at our Governance document, we have implemented a scheme very much inspired by our friends at WebdriverIO (thanks WDIO friends!) There are three groups of contributors to Appium that this scheme supports: (1) project maintainers (those who devote consistent time to leading the project), (2) project contributors (anyone in the wider community that contributes code or documentation), and (3) upstream projects (other open source projects Appium relies heavily on to work well). Each month, the funds raised via sponsorship will be distributed in different amounts to each of these groups. So if you make a valuable contribution to Appium moving forward, you'll be eligible to get some cash as a thank-you! (You'll need to have your own OpenCollective account in good standing to receive funds).

We're very excited about this new program, and hope that it helps existing and new contributors to feel even better about donating their time to making Appium better. And of course, none of this would be possible without the amazing Partners and Sponsors we hope to attract! On that note, stay tuned over the next few weeks as we unveil some of our initial program launch Partners! And if you or your company would like to participate by supporting Appium financially, you are most welcome. Just head over to our OpenCollective page and choose the tier that reflects your desired contribution level.