More money for Free and Open Source Software - a never ending issue. In a tech world built on start-ups, venture capital and data-gathering apps, the fight for sustainable funding for ethical technology projects is a fierce one. After some big victories for FOSS funding in the last years, this talk is about the importance of not forgetting the small, underdog civil society projects.

How do we fund technology in a sustainable way? Fund infrastructure, fund maintenance, fund that project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. While infrastructure is extremely important (no questions asked), in this talk we want to explore why a diverse funding landscape that also allows for supporting new people and groups with fresh ideas can only be incredibly valuable to the field of FOSS.

How can we use existing funding structures, bend and twist them to meet the real needs of communities? How can we make them more useful to projects and people who are not typically the recipients of their money? We want to talk about how to build support infrastructure that allows us to fund in ways that bring more diversity, more novel ideas and more inclusivity to our communities - and we want to talk about how to do this in a sustainable way.

The background to this talk is our experience in managing the German FOSS Prototype Fund, which has funded nearly 400 projects over the past eight years together with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Following an extensive internal and external evaluation, and as the initial funding was coming to an end, we spent the last year designing and setting up a new, more sustainable funding structure for early-stage projects.

This talk is a call to government institutions, funders and other organisations with the power to distribute money to join forces, break down the barriers of their traditional funding models and create a broad and vibrant network of small, diverse and lightweight funds that meet the needs of different groups and communities. It is an invitation to communities to come together and share their needs in order to help build structures that can actually support their work. There is hope in FOSS projects, old and new, big and small. Let's hack all kinds of systems to give them the support they need.