[SciPy-Dev] fiscal sponsorship agreement with NumFOCUS

[Evgeni Burovski]

Hi Ralf,

Great idea, thanks for pushing it through!
Count me in for the subcommittee.

Cheers,

Evgeni

On Sun, Dec 23, 2018 at 9:18 PM Matt Haberland <haberland at ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> Thanks, Ralf. I'd like to volunteer, too.
>
> On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 9:09 PM Eric Larson <larson.eric.d at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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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>
> --
> Matt Haberland
> Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Program in Computing
> Department of Mathematics
> 6617A Math Sciences Building, UCLA
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