[SciPy-Dev] fiscal sponsorship agreement with NumFOCUS

[Eric Larson]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Sounds like a great idea. I'd be happy
to be on the subcommittee.

Eric

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 18:56 Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com wrote:

> 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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