Closed spurkis closed 1 year ago
OpenCollective is the most prominent example of a group of relatively new organisations that provide a more limited range of fiscal sponsorship services and do so in a more automated way, making it easy for Open Source projects to set up a way to receive and spend funds immediately. However, because the involvement of the organisation is limited, this approach may exacerbate problems in a community and can sidestep the establishment of necessary governance.
Karen Sandler, https://academic.oup.com/book/44727/chapter/378968544
Have looked into this further, OpenCollective is for when you don't want to have a incorporated entity like a foundation and instead have everything a foundation would deal with be done by your fiscal host. In this way, fiscal hosts are I think offering a similar type of legal and financial wrapper to projects run as collectives that would be offered by a fiscal sponsor like the ASF to incubating projects.
I think that the value of incorporating the foundation might be undone by tying the foundation to a particular fiscal host in order to use OpenCollective. Additionally, I don't know if the necessary reporting (e.g. to Companies House) would be possible.
However, we might want to use OpenCollective:
NB: there is a known SEO scam involving spurious sponsorship of projects by e.g. betting websites.
Moving to Review, unless this info needs to be written down elsewhere (I don't think we should?) then I'd like to close this.
Agreed to close, info on ticket sufficient.
Evaluate https://opencollective.com/
Particularly: https://opencollective.com/fiscal-hosting
Mentioned by Simon Clifford, looks like a good way to manage funding transparently, and take on the legal & accounting side.