The Urbit Foundation runs a Grants program, where you can earn address space (stars) in exchange for contributing to the project.

Grants come in four different flavors at present: bounties, proposals, scholarships and gifts.

If you're curious about grants, join the conversation in Landscape at ~wolref-podlex/foundation or book some time to talk with us.

Bounties

Bounties are specific, tightly-scoped pieces of work that we at the Urbit Foundation think are of high value to the ecosystem at large. They're frequently development-focused, but also often relate to marketing, community-building or technical writing.

Bounties are usually competitive—worker requests should provide plenty of information about why the requester is right candidate for the job.

Proposals

Where Bounties are put forward by the Foundation, Proposals come from the community. These are things that our community thinks Urbit needs, and span a wide range of topics: we've got books being written, videos being produced, help with production of events, marketing and documentation, and ambitious development projects all happening. If you've got skills and time to put into Urbit, we'll put you to work.

Proposals are more likely to be approved if their relevance to the project is made clear, their scope is clearly defined, the proposer is qualified, and it's obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the idea.

If you've got an idea and want some help turning it into a proposal, book some time with us here.

Scholarships

Scholarships are the newest addition to the grants program that pairs contributors with core Urbit developers to tackle infrastructure projects. These generally take the form of contributions to Arvo or Vere.

Tackling a scholarship requires an advanced understanding of Urbit. It's expected that you've got a demonstrated command of the Hoon language or other part of Urbit through existing contributions on our repositories or successfully completed grants.

New scholarships are posted within the Foundation group in Landscape (~wolref-podlex/foundation), and you can sign up for the waitlist using this form.

Gifts

Not every contribution is made with a plan or according to a specification. Sometimes people just fix issues, help newcomers, or promote the project because they want to.

Roughly every six months we give out a bunch of address space to those that have helped the project without asking for anything in return, just because we want to. It just feels good, man.