NEWS 📣
The Sovereign Tech Agency today is launching the Sovereign Tech Standards network, a new program designed to bring open source maintainers directly into global standards development.
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@sovtechfund How focused do you want the applications w/rt single drafts? Of my dozen-or-so active IETF drafts, about half of them should qualify for public interest relevance (the rest are more niche topics), and no single of them would take a year of 10h/week to complete. Is improving an ecosystem on several fronts something you'd like to support, or do you need a single use case linking them all?
@sovtechfund Is there a way to advocate, in order that ACCESSIBILITY becomes one of those standards?
@elettrona Accessibility is already an active topic in open standards, most notably Web Accessibility under the W3C, but also comes up in other standards development organizations (SDOs). We encourage and welcome maintainers of open source accessibility infrastructure who want to engage with an SDO to apply. Please share with your communities!
@sovtechfund I'm wondering it, because too many current alternative suites have no accessibility - onlyoffice hasn't, despite declaring it (I did an assessment for them), NextCloud collaboration platforn doesn't, Linux systems have it but it's very very basic...
@sovtechfund are you already in w3c @bagder ?
@ketumbra @sovtechfund the IETF is a much more relevant standard org for me and curl related stuff and I do participate in some of the groups there
@sovtechfund this sounds like great boost for some very important ongoing work. thanks for supporting this!
is it possible that this might expand to include other standards which are critical to specialty areas of open source tech like @tdwg / @gbif for example?
@sovtechfund @hongminhee i love your work on fedify and how you've been actively reflecting and critiquing the ActivityPub implementations. I wanted to tag you here as this may be an opportunity for you to be more involved in the standard, and your voice is one I'd very much like to see represented 💛💜
@chartgerink Thanks for thinking of me, Chris. I'm really glad you tagged me. The Sovereign Tech Standards program does look interesting, and I'd like to be more involved in ActivityPub standardization work at some point. I'm just not sure yet whether I can make room for it this year.
@sovtechfund ahh superb, that is great to see 🤩
Too often, the maintainers who build, test, and operate open source software aren't part of standards development, even though these standards directly shape their work.
The result? A structural risk to our digital infrastructure, as standards can become more difficult to implement or misaligned with the public interest.
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The pilot program bridges this gap by supporting a cohort of open source maintainers to participate in standards work at the @ietf @w3c and ISO. It provides training, mentoring, compensation, onboarding and on-site meetings at standards development organizations.
Applications for the first cohort are open until 19 May 2026.
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@sovtechfund Maybe for ISO, I would recommend to push them to make the standard freely available.
Learn more and join the Sovereign Tech Standards network: https://www.sovereign.tech/news/join-sovereign-tech-standards-network
#SovereignTechAgency #DigitalInfrastructure #FOSS #Maintainers #FOSSJobs
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@sovtechfund this is great! It very much looks like the work you are doing with us on Open Cloud Mesh, bringing software development and standardization together. Very pleased to see this being formalized in a more structured way.
If you want us to help out in any way, having had some standardization work under our belt with OCM, you know where to find us. I think we'd all help out if we can.
@sovtechfund I have no idea how good this programme will be (wouldn't mind test driving it), but hell yeah!
It's pretty tough to get in, even if there are open doors to it. Most of the difficulty is on the unspoken, political side. But that is precisely why an influx of FLOSS folk can only make these things better!
