@dvzrv@chaos.social That "partnership" is, to my knowledge, nothing more than a "bulk grant" that is issued to an ecosystem, to then be distributed as smaller grants to participants of that ecosystem, without the grant organization needing to individually manage every small project that applies for a grant (which would result in a lot of overhead).

It's a model that iirc NLNet (and others) have used more frequently, to provide better coverage for individually smaller contributions that would themselves not be worth the overhead to go through the formal grant process. It doesn't result in more funding; it just cuts the funding pie into smaller slices, and delegates the allocation responsibility to another organization.

But that's not a conflict of interest; that's a process optimization, and to my knowledge something that is (principally) available to any ecosystem that is a) of general interest to the grant organization, and b) composed of many decentrally-organized initiatives rather than a centralized governance/development model.