OCF closing announcement writeup meeting 2024.03.08

attendees

angel, april, étienne

notes

Background info

OpenCollective Foundation has been B!B!E!'s fiscal host (aka fiscal sponsor) since 2022, allowing us to accept donations, pay invoices, allowing us to have non-profit status, and filing all of the associated tax paperwork. They are shutting down

The to-do list Open Collective gave us

Send out an update to your contributors ASAP. [working on it]
Export your data from your dashboard. [we should do this asap]
Recurring contributions will pause on March 15th but will trigger a renewal process once you have been rehosted by another host on the Open Collective platform.
If you choose to stay on the Open Collective platform, review the below information on how to duplicate and later merge your collective under a new fiscal host on the platform.

Migration feature availability timeline: Duplicate your collective (should be available before March 15th), reactivation of recurring contributions (end of March) and merging collectives (end of April).

Rough/Proposed Timeline

March 8 - this meeting to discuss plans, draft announcement; also send a first announcement
March 12 - B!B!E! planning meeting in which we will discuss this, among other things, and the planners will have an opportunity to take things on
March 15 - last day to accept funds/receive donations

This is where it could go several different ways...

Option 1: The current planning team finds an alternative fiscal host.

Option 2: The planning team asks the community at large for help and finds a fiscal sponsor that way.

Option 3: Backup plan; we'd rather not do it this way because it only solves the tech fund, not the conference funding but it's best to have a backup plan.

April 15 - if the B!B!E! planners or someone else hasn’t take on the OCF move, it falls to the current OCF team to just move tech funds to Open Source Collective
by April 22? - if needed, have a tech meeting to confirm plans to move to OSC
make some updates to be a more appealing OSC applicant (e.g. linking to Jonathan’s repo which shows recent updates to the code)
by May 1? - if needed, apply to OSC (“we will ask you some questions about your project and manually approve your project within a few working days”)
after approval - it’ll take a little time to duplicate and reactivate the collective
before the end of May? - RE-OPEN FOR DONATIONS??
September 30 - last day to spend or transfer funds

Seems like there are 2 announcements we need to make

update for contributors; send now and say that there will be more info coming
the bigger update with “please get involved and help find an alternative to OCF, otherwise it'll get harder for us to do what we do”; run that by the planners on Tuesday before sending