Hello, We would like to announce that the German government-backed Sovereign Tech Agency has decided to contract research and development work for PyArrow. The application to the Sovereign Tech Fund program has been handled by Apache Arrow committers: me, Nic Crane, Rok Mihevc and Tadeja Kadunc. Open Source Collective will serve as fiscal host, managing the finances on behalf of Arctos Alliance.
This contract allows funding the work that has stalled and is unlikely to be paid for by regular corporate sponsors. It represents on average 1.9 FTE during the remaining of 2026 and full of 2027. Me, Rok and Tadeja already started with pushing forward the PyArrow annotations work in which Rok already invested lots of his time in. Nic is continuing with the work on issue backlog, looking at unaddressed bug reports that have existed for multiple years. Nic will also focus on the project’s AI readiness: designing and implementing the tooling to help maintainers deal with the high amount of agentic contributions. In 2027 I plan to research if full documentation can be built without the need to have PyArrow installed which will be linked to the type annotations work. I also plan to spend the remaining of 2027 on improving the documentation: Python User Guide, API examples and the Cookbook. Tadeja will focus her time in 2027 on improving Extension Type support in PyArrow and related compute kernels. We look forward to working and collaborating on the above topics! Best, Alenka
