Gem.coop Launches 2027 Fellowships for Ruby Open Source Devs
The fellowship invites companies to invest in the Ruby open source community
SAN FRANCISCO, C.A. (Oct 14, 2026) – gem.coop is launching a second year of the Gem Fellowship program, helping companies invest in the Ruby open source ecosystem.
The Gem Fellowship invests in existing, widely used Ruby open source projects by providing them with funding between $2,500 and $25,000 USD for one year.
Last year the program sponsored work on eight Ruby OSS projects including Herb, the new ERB library added to Rails this year, and Rouge, the syntax highlighter used by GitHub Pages.
“Without the Gem Fellowship, rouge had been floundering somewhat - I couldn’t justify the amount of time and labour it took to do deeper maintenance on the project. With the Fellowship’s support I was able to finally dedicate enough time to fix several major issues that I’d been putting off for over 5 years,” says Jeanine Adkisson, 2026 Gem Fellowship winner.
The program is currently guaranteed three years of funding at $100,000 a year (ending 2028), thanks to headline sponsor Mike Perham of Contributed Systems, the company behind Sidekiq.
“I’m thrilled to see the impact the fellowship has had so far on Ruby maintainers building projects like Jared White’s Bridgetown. I have received tremendous value from Ruby open source tools and the Ruby OSS community, and as someone with a company who benefits from these projects I can’t imagine not giving back,” says Mike Perham, CEO at Contributed Systems.
This year, the program’s goal is to expand to 15 projects by raising another $150,000. The fellowship is also seeking additional headline partners to expand the program. Companies interested in sponsoring can learn more at https://gem.coop/fellowship/sponsor/.
“Ruby open source developers and maintainers put hard work into delivering helpful and valuable tools. The Gem Fellowship helps companies in the Ruby ecosystem make that ecosystem more sustainable, and fellowship sponsors benefit from free and open tools without assigning their engineers to development or maintenance. It’s a win for the open source developers, for the companies using the projects, and for everyone in the Ruby community,” says André Arko, CEO at Spinel Cooperative.
Applications for 2027 Fellows will open on December 1, 2026, at https://gem.coop/fellowship/.
For questions about the program, reach out to André Arko at andre@spinel.coop.
About the Gem Fellowship
The Gem Fellowship is a grant partnership with gem.coop, the Ruby community gem server. The program is supported by Contributed Systems, the company behind Sidekiq, and Spinel Cooperative, the coop behind rv. Learn more at: https://gem.coop/fellowship/.
About gem.coop
gem.coop is a next-generation gem server, created by the former maintainers and operators of rubygems.org. Our goal is to provide fast, community-owned, transparent, sustainable, and secure gem hosting for everyone. To learn more, visit: https://gem.coop/.