2.5 Years of STA Bug Resilience: how we helped a lot of FOSS

Since October 2023 Neighbourhoodie Software has been the Sovereign Tech Agency’s partner for the Bug Resilience Program and has helped improve a large number of high-profile FOSS projects. For FOSS maintainers, this talk covers how the program works, how you can apply and what you can expect from it. For the generally curious, this talk gives a fascinating insight into the variety of the FOSS landscape, what projects of different sizes, ages and importances struggle with, and how the team at Neighbourhoodie managed to make substantial contributions. The insights begin with the peculiarities of how certain projects organise their project communication, what they think is important to address (versus what the world might think is important) and we’ll cover the gratitude project maintainers send us after a job well done. This talk also covers strategies for how to become a valuable contributor in projects of high complexity and impact in just a couple of days. Communication and honesty are obviously key, but some skill is required and this talk will help you get up to speed, should you want to join and help a project.

26.foss-backstage.de · FOSS Backstage 2026