Build what's next on GitHub, the place for anyone from anywhere to build anything.
Join us October 28-29 in San Francisco or online for GitHub Universe, our flagship developer event uniting people, agents, and the world's code.
Celebrate the maintainers of the first GitHub Accelerator cohort, learn what they have been up to since, and hear what’s next for GitHub Accelerator.
We expect open source developers to drive the next wave of innovation on GitHub, including AI. GitHub’s vibrant networks of open source software require people and communities to keep them running. However, perceptions and expectations that open source projects can continue to provide widespread value without significant changes in funding support puts people and projects at risk.
We launched GitHub Accelerator this year to address some of these challenges and to create pathways toward viable careers or businesses in open source. After a successful first cohort, we are excited to announce that we will be opening applications for the next cohort of GitHub Accelerator in early 2024. Sign up to hear more in coming weeks here.
Our 20 projects from around the globe met multiple times a week in a cohort-based education program with expert guests to talk about open source funding paths and explore the needs of their individual projects. The builders used the time and $20,000 in funding to ship features, explore product direction, support co-maintainers and contributors, improve documentation, create ways to stay in touch with users, and more. These builders presented at our Demo Day to showcase their project and highlight where they were going.
Every journey was unique because every team was at different stages with different goals, or objectives. During and after the program, projects learned and iterated their business models, grew their user base, received funding, joined accelerators like Y Combinator, and launched products.
“Participating in the GitHub Accelerator gave us more attention and focus to close our preseed round and helped us launch our first product,” Johannes Dancker, Co-founder, Formbricks said. “During the session we learned a lot, both from the speakers as well as the other teams. Additionally, being recognized as a promising open source project by GitHub helped us gain visibility among customers and investors.”
Throughout the program, we received feedback on challenges of building open source projects. From managing and building communities, navigating sustainable business models, and evaluating funding with opportunities learned from licensing, governance and community building, there’s a lot of work to be done.
Some of the barriers open source projects encounter:
We are continuously creating and iterating on our programs to support open source builders. The GitHub Accelerator provided time and resources that are critical to helping maintainers decide what is next for their project. The GitHub Accelerator is also one of many programs GitHub offers—here are other programs we offer:
The work towards enabling a fully sustainable open source economy is not done. Let’s keep building.
