To simplify our own administrative burden, we have decided to move over the funds to OpenCollective, primarily motivated by the success and positive experience of the new PHP Foundation.

We have started raising money for the Doctrine Project in 2019 through Patreon and Github Sponsors to support the project. It was planned to organize core team get-togethers/hackathons, but due to the pandemic we haven't been able to do this. In addition the legal and tax implications of raising money also caused us some headaches.

The move to OpenCollective will allow us to delegate much of the administrative work to them for a small percentage of the raised capital. The fee is a much smaller amount than the taxes that we had to pay on the raised money previously, so it is a win-win for us.

We want to assure our sponsors that we still plan to make use of the funds to further the Doctrine project and we are actively looking to increase our funding for these goals:

• Regularly organize hackathons for Doctrine Core team contributors, including 3-4 days of accommodation, food and travel for roughly 10-15 people.

• Infrastructure, servers and hosting.

• Marketing material such as stickers, t-shirts and other small things.

• If the budget increases significantly we might be able to pay someone part- or full-time to do maintenance work such as responding to and processing issues, prepare for new PHP releases and general cleanups of the codebase.

As such we hope to convince you to sponsor Doctrine through either our Github Sponsors or OpenCollective directly.