[SciPy-Dev] fiscal sponsorship agreement with NumFOCUS

[Ralf Gommers]

Hi all,

To start with the idea: I propose that SciPy applies for comprehensive
project sponsorship with NumFOCUS, and sign a fiscal sponsorship agreement
(FSA) to that effect.

Why?
----
We're already an "affiliated project", which lets us participate in the
small development grants program, the NumFOCUS project mailing list and
Slack channel, and a few other benefits. The main difference that
comprehensive sponsorship will make is that it will allow us to accept
donations, grants and other kinds of funding as a project. In addition we
get funding for a representative of the project to attend the yearly
NumFOCUS Summit, some hours of high-quality legal help in case we need that
(for example in case of licensing questions), and probably a few other
things that I'm forgetting right now. NumFOCUS sets a higher bar for
comprehensive sponsorship than for affiliation, but we should easily clear
that bar. We'll be joining most other core scientific Python projects, who
are already sponsored [1].

I'll also steal some language from Nathaniel when he made the same proposal
for NumPy [2]:
The basic idea here is that there are times when you really need some kind
of corporation to represent the project -- the legal system for  better or
worse does not understand "a bunch of folks on a mailing list" as a legal
entity capable of accepting donations, or holding funds or other assets
like domain names. The obvious solution is to  incorporate a company to
represent the project -- but incorporating a company involves lots of
super-annoying paperwork. (Like, *super*
annoying.) So a standard trick is that a single non-profit corporation acts
as an umbrella organization providing these services to multiple projects
at once, and this is called "fiscal sponsorship". You can  read more about
it here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_sponsorship

How?
----
We form a subcommittee of 5 people that will sign the sponsorship
agreement. Those people mostly should be part of the SciPy Steering
Council; there can be an external member. The job of that group is
basically to interface with NumFOCUS (in practice there will be 1-2 people
as first contacts), and to ensure that if we use funds, that they are used
in agreement with the mission and nonprofit status of NumFOCUS. Once we
have those 5 people, we can send in a formal application. In practice that
takes very little time - probably no more than an hour per year, except for
the 1-2 first contacts (they get 1-2 emails per month that need responding
to).

For more background and details on the how and why, see
https://numfocus.org/information-fiscal-sponsorship.

Thoughts? Questions? Volunteers to be on the subcommittee?

Cheers,
Ralf


[1] https://numfocus.org/sponsored-projects
[2]
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2015-October/073889.html
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