At Ruby Central, we've been exploring new ways to support open source maintainers and make their work more sustainable. After speaking with project owners across the ecosystem, we heard a common theme: fundraising requires a huge amount of time and pulls maintainers away from building and working with the community.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Ruby Central is well-positioned to support open source projects with the administrative side of fundraising through fiscal sponsorship. And today, we’re excited to share our first partnership: Hanami!
What does fiscal sponsorship mean?
Ruby Central handles the back-office aspects of fundraising, including donation processing, accounting, and reporting. This means that the Hanami team can focus more time on improving the framework. This also makes it easier for individuals and companies worldwide to contribute through a trusted and transparent structure.
What is Hanami?
Hanami is a lightweight and flexible approach to building Ruby web applications. It’s one of several projects that are helping expand the possibilities of how Ruby can be used. We’re excited to help remove some of the admin overhead from their work.
If you’ve ever used Hanami, dry-rb, or rom-rb consider supporting their fundraiser here: https://sponsor.hanamirb.org.
What’s the long-term vision?
Hanami is our first fiscal sponsorship, but it won’t be the last. We’re already thinking about how this model could extend to other projects. Our goal is to ensure that important projects have the resources and visibility they need to grow and that critical libraries remain strong into the future.
In addition to helping open source projects, fiscal sponsorship also helps Ruby Central. We charge a small administrative fee (significantly lower than other platforms, such as Open Collective), which enables us to offer this level of support to more projects.
We are excited to share more as the program continues to grow and we bring on more projects!