Fiscal sponsorship - supporting a pathway to direct funding for the Turing Way

[Arielle-Bennett]

Hi all,

Opening up a discussion to talk about the financial future of the Turing Way project and some concrete next steps to address it.

The problem as it currently stands:

• We want to apply for funding to support multiple different aspects of the Turing Way project: infrastructure, book dashes, translation work, new working groups, training, community management, and lots lots more!
• To be eligible to apply for a lot of grants we need a way of handling money to the project directly
• We don't have the resources or infrastructure to contract or employ someone to manage money disbursement full time for the project as it stands

My suggestion for tackling this is to propose we look into whether fiscal hosting by OLS is feasible/desireable for the community. There are other fiscal hosts available (OpenCollectve, Code for Science & Society, NumFOCUS etc) that we could explore, but I think OLS is well aligned with the Turing Way community and its values. More info on OLS discal hosting here: https://we-are-ols.org/open-incubator/fiscal-hosting/

This proposal would not prevent community members from seeking their own institutional funding to support projects and work that interact with the Turing Way, but is to offer people who may not be able to apply for funding through typical institutions for many reasons a path to receiving money for the work that they do for the project.

Happy to discuss in community forums etc and very open to other suggestions for tackling this problem for the project in 2026.

[EstherPlomp]

OLS sounds great to me!