In November 2025 I joined OLS as the first dedicated staff member on the organisation’s Fiscally Sponsored Communities Programme. One year on: what have we been up to?
Our ongoing communities continue to go from strength to strength. RCM Co-op continues to establish themselves as a centre of excellence and expertise for research community management in the UK and beyond. We employ one member of staff through OLS, and hope to bring on a second one soon. RSE AUNZ have just finished organising three Research Software conferences, aiming to build and strengthen communities of research software engineers across Asia-Australia, Latin America, and Africa: and they’ve already started organising for 2027.
Our fiscal sponsorship programme isn’t just for long-term arrangements. We acted as UK fiscal host for this year’s Open Science Retreat, organised by the Digital Research Academy and held in Machynlleth, Wales. While we’ll be ending the fiscal sponsorship relationship soon, we still collaborate with DRA on other projects like OSPARK (and you might just see some OLS folks at next year’s retreat in Germany!).
This year, we started hosting Incubation Fellows: individuals who are building open research communities. These placements are designed to be fixed term, to enable Fellows to focus on building out stable and sustainable community infrastructure. Jyoti Bhogal is currently developing RSE Asia Association (including collaborating with RSE AUNZ on the RSE Asia-Australia conference). Ella Kaye from rainbowR has completed her fellowship, with rainbowR establishing itself as a financially independent organisation after a successful first conference held in February 2026. Ella told us what she learned in a blog post earlier this year.
Behind the scenes, a lot of work has gone in to building out processes and policies to help our fiscal sponsorship programme run smoothly: from an array of github issues to manage grant applications and contracts on behalf of our organisations, to reviewing internal policies and procedures to check that they cover our global community, to helping troubleshoot missing honoraria payments and last minute budget reviews. While I’m the only dedicated FSC member of staff, the programme couldn’t run without finance, comms and management colleagues from across the UK and the Americas. We work mostly remotely, but we did get to spend a few days together on a farm in the UK in June on OLS’s annual retreat (pictured above): making sure our programmes are learning from each other, planning for the future, and meeting some friendly cows, chickens and goats.
Heading into 2027, I’m excited to report that we’re in talks with some new communities who are interested in OLS fiscal hosting. If you’re working on open research and you think your community might benefit from fiscal sponsorship, you can read more about what it entails on our website: please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss this with us!