Our pending OSI incubation graduation

Clearing the Path
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This is an update on our OSI situation.

Background

We joined OSI as an incubator project in 2015. Primarily, they served as fiscal sponsor while we funded a contract with @chreekat to develop the core platform backend. At the time, we defined our incubation period as getting to the point where everything was ready to take on outside projects.

Given the depth of challenges and the shift to all-volunteer team, we have still not reached that goal. We had very little direct support or connection with OSI in the past few years. Then, at the beginning of 2020, OSI Board member Elana Hashman became our new OSI sponsor and worked with us to define a more narrow graduation goal. The OSI will be ending their whole incubation program anyway, focusing on other efforts.

Current graduation goals and timeline

Our updated graduation goal: to finally have in place our full co-op legal structure with official members and operational Bylaws. That will help us have a better independent foundation to handle the rest of our launch process.

EDIT/UPDATE (after recent discussion with OSI accountant): Because our fiscal sponsorship was focused on the development of our how-to-fund-Open-Source concepts and efforts, we need to revisit how that relates to graduation. It’s questionable to focus on the development of a separate org as qualifying for their support. We should probably revisit

Here’s the timeline we’re aiming for:

  • Dec, 2020 Spend any remaining funds that the OSI is holding for us. They will then end their fiscal sponsorship (they do not want to handle the extra accounting and reporting for this in 2021).
    • We must determine how to best direct funds. We are hoping to put them toward legal costs. They should go toward development of the platform and fundraising concepts etc.
  • We submit our 2020 annual report
  • Q1 2021 We clarify our graduation goals and get to where we can officially graduate with a press release etc.

UPDATE: After discussion with the OSI accountant, we know that we’ll be staying on with fiscal sponsorship into 2021, but our goal will be to get everything in motion to completely finalize our graduation during 2021. More needs to be determined there.

1 Appreciation