Celebrating the first round of GitHub Accelerator and what’s next

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.

Recap and learnings 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.