gem fellowship 2027
Oct 14, 2026
Hello! It’s been a while, but we’ve been working on some exciting new stuff. Today, we’re very pleased to announce the 2027 Gem Fellowship.
Last year, we sponsored work on eight Ruby OSS projects including Herb, which was added to to Rails this year and Rouge, the syntax highlighter used by GitHub Pages.
We heard that the grants made a significant difference to everyone who received them:
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.
This year, we’re continuing with our initial three years funding provided by headline sponsor 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.
— Mike Perham, CEO of Contributed Systems, creator of Sidekiq
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.
This year, our goal is to expand to 15 projects by raising another $150,000. If you or your company are interested, you can learn more and sponsor today at gem.coop/fellowship/sponsor.
For everyone interested in a Fellowship during 2027, we will open applications on December 1, 2026 at gem.coop/fellowship. We hope to hear from you then!