Hi all and thanks Guus for the update
The Board has reviewed the current program and agrees that, at its
current scale, the effort and administrative overhead are not
justified. There is consensus to phase out the fiscal hosting program
in its current form.
I missed most of the discussion regarding this as I was travelling! This
is not the decision I was hoping for, mainly because I think it's good
for XMPP to have its own funding support rather than rely on more
centralised alternatives like the Open Source Collective, but I do agree
that Open Collective's originally quoted fees were inordinate.
I just wanted to check if there has been any further communication with
Open Collective regarding this? They seemed open to negotiation, so
perhaps they can get rid of the Wise fees or reduce costs in some other
way, if we ask them. (The quoted discussions were from an email
conversation between Open Collective and myself, who didn't know much
about the details and only wanted to initiate the
discussion. Personally, I think their pricing was made thinking of a few
large projects and didn't take into account a multitude of small
projects like XMPP has).
(Of course all this is assuming the fees are the main reason for
deciding to discontinue the programme, and low participation etc. were
secondary issues)
We plan to handle this carefully, supporting existing hosted projects
in transitioning to alternative funding mechanisms such as direct
donations, Liberapay, or other platforms. This will help reduce
disruption while ensuring fairness to the projects.
Please let us know if you have any immediate concerns or suggestions
regarding this transition. We aim to ensure a smooth wind-down without
impacting ongoing project activities.
Moving forward, I wanted to share some general notes regarding the
Indian situation since that was brought up but not covered. Being from
India, I have been hanging out in the MUCs of and participating in a few
of these projects. That said, what follows is with my "personal hat"
rather than that of any project ;-)
Besides limited payment options (India is very finicky about letting
payments in), "having a legal entity to collect donations on our behalf"
is also an important service for projects based in India. Indian law
does not allow donations except for very specific purposes like
education, so the way we do it via fiscal host is that the fiscal host
receives donations, and individuals in India then "bill" the fiscal host
for the "work" they do (as far as Indian-facing accounting is
concerned). This is what I've been advised to do for my NLnet grant as
well, to just declare it as income (and potentially pay taxes on it; I'm
"fortunately" under the tax ceiling at the moment).
I wonder if there is some way the XSF can help this happen regardless of
Open Collective or not (and without putting too much burden on Peter who
has already gone through a rather unpleasant time signing up for Indian
money transfer services before we ended up going for bank transfer!)?
Personally, I had my eye on XSF fiscal hosting for Convo as well once it
got stable after the NLnet grant concluded, so this is something of a
setback (I have Liberapay linked to my personal account but it's a legal
grey area and I'm not sure if I'll be able to continue it).
Alternatively, perhaps there's some other organisation we're in touch
with who's more in the business of moving money around? We could work
out a system where the XSF vets projects and then passes them on to the
other organisation to do the actual administrative work.
Finally, regarding participation in the programme: I do think
early-stage projects (that are yet to grow big enough to manage their
own things, but just need a head start) are the ones that get the most
benefit from this programme, so it helps to have the option ready for
when such a project comes up, even if no such projects are there at the
moment. I'm going to be self-centred and pull up Convo as an example
again. Assuming Open Collective fiscal hosting is discontinued, perhaps
we could set up a place to collect names of such projects who think they
would benefit from some kind of fiscal-hosting-type support, and if we
think there's enough interest we can start looking into how they can be
supported?
I like the idea suggested (I think by Guus, in the MUC?) of continuing
to list projects that are looking for funding. That would help increase
peoples' trust even if the projects are opting to use a less-known
platform for whatever reason.
Best,
Badri
