Support for Community-Curated, Domain-Specific Ecosystem Funds

[gusaus]

Following up on the recent Ecosystem Funds announcement — particularly the mention of expanding support for domain-specific Funds and better representation for standards bodies, documentation projects, and foundations that support open source outside of the dependency graph.

Is there any timeline or plan for enabling this?

Happy to help however I can if there’s anything needed to explore this further.

[gusaus]

@andrew @BenJam Following up on the use cases outlined in #256 and #255, I’d love to get a bit more clarity on what kinds of community-curated or domain-specific Funds might be supported under this next phase.

Would the following use cases qualify?

• Targeted cross-ecosystem funds – Packaging together projects aligned around a shared focus (e.g., Community, Sustainability, Documentation, DDI, Accessibility, Publishing, Media, etc.), even if those projects span multiple ecosystems or platforms.
• Foundation or organization-backed funds – Funds curated by entities like the Drupal Association, Open Website Alliance, The WP Community Collective, or other orgs that support a network of projects. These funds could reflect the foundation's priorities and help centralize funding around a common mission.

Also, would Open Source Collective host these types of Funds, or would admins have the option to choose the fiscal host (including their own)?

Having some clarity on these questions would really help groups and organizations evaluate what’s possible and how they might participate.

[BenJam]

Hey @gusaus we're working on the dashboard right now, but in principle we want to support all those use cases including, interestingly, the abstraction making the process available to other hosts, including tax-deductible hosts. I was just talking yesterday to a large philanthropic organisation about that.

Timeline wise, we would like to get to it once we launch the MVP of the dashboard. Unfortunately we're already over budget on the project, with little access to additional budget so any work on this will require conversations with sponsors of the ecosyste.ms project itself (options are amiable at https://opencollective.com/ecosystems)

We are pursuing these conversations with multiple organisations and institutions. If you're able to make an introduction to any relevant representatives who stand to benefit from this we would greatly appreciate them.

[gusaus]

Thanks for the reply @BenJam — great to hear this level of flexibility and long-term thinking, especially around supporting different types of fiscal hosts.

A few follow-ups:

• Foundation or organization-backed funds – Beyond automatic allocations, are there advantages to setting up a Fund via Ecosyste.ms versus a standard Open Collective Fund hosted by a nonprofit?
• Targeted funds – From past convos with @andrew, it sounded like these could already be created using the current system (automatic allocations + OSC as host). If that’s still true, we’d love to explore examples tied to critical programs in large ecosystems like Drupal and WordPress. These types of funds could be especially compelling for orgs looking to support strategic initiatives in a more focused way.
• Ecosystem integration – Getting broader adoption from high-visibility open source projects could be a key entry point for new sponsors—especially if their support is recognized via leaderboards, sponsor pages, or widgets.

Definitely appreciate the transparency around roadmap and funding constraints. I’ll continue to liaison with leadership in these communities and am ready to help wherever there’s a need.