Sam WhitedDoes anyone know of any non-profits (and preferably co-ops) acting as fiscal hosts for small open source projects? Most of them will only take large, established projects with lots of contributors, but I've got a small project with just a couple of regular contributors that recently lost its only way of taking donations via Open Collective. I can set something up with my personal account, but that feels bad given that others are working on it too. I know small projects with a few donations a year are a huge overhead and burden for fiscal hosts though. We're not on #GitHub (we use #Codeberg) which also seems to be a problem for some of the hosts.
Alternatively, is anyone else in this position? Maybe if we pooled our resources and did this as a co-op with a handful of other small #FLOSS projects we could amortize the cost of doing taxes and maintaining a bank account and business entity and all that across all our projects and make it worth it?
Andrew Escobar (Andres)@sam it would be a lot of work, but it seems like it would be a worthwhile endeavour. how would you structure it? incorporate as a not-for-profit, a member cooperative, or a worker cooperative?
@andrewe my initial thought is that it would have to be a member co-op (I assume it wouldn't have employees, so a worker co-op wouldn't make sense) where the projects each put a bit in the pot to pay for taxes at the end of the year or any fees on the bank account or what not. Making it a 501(c)3 (if in the U.S.) or some other classification may or may not make sense depending on the goals, but that can also be a lot of extra work to get set up so it may not be worth it for small projects who don't need tax deductible donations anyways, that would probably be something for the members to decide on eventually, probably not something that has to be considered up front.
Nemo_bis 🌈@sam I can potentially help. Running costs for a new cooperative in Finland start at about 2000 €/y.
Are you saying Open Collective Europe wouldn't take you?
@nemobis It's been a while since I looked into the fiscal hosting side of their operation, I didn't realize there was a separate European one either so maybe it's worth looking at. Previously the Open Collective Foundation (or whatever the actual host is called, I forget?) wouldn't take you if you weren't on GitHub and I believe you had to show that you had a certain amount in donations and contributions either way that we didn't meet (this is like 3 people periodically contributing, mostly we don't even get enough donations to cover paying for the domain name every year)
@sam OCE seems https://docs.opencollective.com/oceurope/faq/general-faqs more permissive than OSC https://docs.oscollective.org/interested-in-joining-osc/acceptance-criteria but I think they also do a bit less, for example I'm not sure they accept to hold domain names for you.
Susann Auer@nemobis @sam I agree, Open Collective Europe is definitely an option for a small non-profit and there is no expectation of Github or steady income, donations can be easily received over their platform. Can recommend, we use them for our reproducibility initiative that is US and European based. Also, the service is good, you quickly get answers to issues and the onboarding was very efficient.
@SusannAuer @nemobis thanks for the recommendation, glad to know they have an EU version too and I'll definitely look into it!