Earlier this week I attended a summit of open source software (OSS) projects that are fiscally sponsored by NumFOCUS. So… what’s fiscal sponsorship and who is NumFOCUS? (If this is old news, skip down to the next section on hiring OSS developers).
DETOUR: Fiscal sponsorship & NumFOCUS
Fiscal sponsorship is:
a formal arrangement in which a 501(c)(3) public charity sponsors a project that may lack exempt status. This alternative to the projects starting their own nonprofit and allows them to seek grants and solicit tax-deductible donations under the sponsor’s exempt status. — Grantspace.org
In short, small projects don’t have to go through all the paperwork and effort of getting their own 501(c)(3) up and running — instead they are under the umbrella of an existing not-for-profit organization. This allows the projects to operate with financial assistance from the fiscal sponsor, including providing a means for funders to donate (grant funds) to support the project.
How this relates to OSS: Many OSS projects are born in academic settings (e.g., a grad student starts up a cool project). Often the grants that support someone working on that project are run through a PI’s lab at the university. But what happens when the grad student who started the project leaves and wants to keep working on it? If they go on to be a postdoc or PI somewhere, they could continue working on the project by running grants through their new university. But anyone who’s in academia knows that home institutions can change more often than Tom Waits’* voice. More critically — if they instead leave academia, how do they keep that OSS project going? Enter a fiscal sponsor, and in this case, NumFOCUS.
NumFOCUS is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves as a fiscal sponsor for OSS, specifically scientific computing software. From their website:
The mission of NumFOCUS is to promote sustainable high-level programming languages, open code development, and reproducible scientific research. We accomplish this mission through our educational programs and events as well as through fiscal sponsorship of open source data science projects. We aim to increase collaboration and communication within the scientific computing community.
Here at the Moore Foundation, we support a number of great OSS projects, events, and people through NumFOCUS (including Data Carpentry, nteract, JuliaCon, useR!, csv,conf, and tangentially Jupyter). This is why I was in attendance at the NumFOCUS Summit this week, which served as an opportunity for folks from many of their supported projects to get together and talk shop.
…Back to hiring OSS developers
During the Summit, one of the discussions centered around a new Sloan-funded project to explore sustainability of OSS projects supported by NumFOCUS. Side note: if this sounds interesting, there’s a job opening for Projects Director. Tracy Teal (of Data Carpentry fame) led a great session about challenges around sustainability, and Brian Granger (of Jupyter fame) brought up a particularly sticky issue that the Jupyter Project has been grappling with: hiring and retaining developers.
Of course, hiring developers in general is difficult. Salaries are on the rise, and tech companies are introducing creative strategies to recruit those with coding chops. But Granger brought up an issue very specific to OSS, tied to the fact that much of the work that gets done on OSS projects is on GitHub and viewable by anyone. Essentially the community round OSS is composed of volunteers who are interested in the project and spend some of their “off time” working on software that they feel passionate about. This volunteer pool is a great way to recruit future paid developers on OSS projects, since they understand the software and are already excited about the job.
The issue is that once these volunteers start making valuable contributions to software projects, tech companies notice — and hire them for salaries two to three times what OSS projects can afford. (here’s an article about tech companies using GitHub as a recruiting tool). As a funder of these projects, I was bummed to hear about this issue. Of course, I’m happy that developers with OS mindsets are joining industry and hopefully taking their love of community projects with them. But that doesn’t help with the real problem Granger brought up: they can’t recruit or retain great developers for OSS projects in this low supply — high demand atmosphere.
So what’s the solution? It’s not clear. We talked about things like using funds to pay stipends for talented undergrads rather than professional developers, or going the “contractor” route to enable more competitive salaries, but other ideas are welcomed. Ideas about how to connect Tom Waits to fiscal sponsorship are also welcomed.
*The Tom Waits reference is apropos of nothing — it serves as click bait for music lovers and amuses me.
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Thank you for sharing.