Community Call with Open Collective

Primordial Soup
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After a back and forth on Twitter, I arranged for Open Collective to give a presentation and Q&A on Dec 11th.

Here is the notes file, please add questions here Community Call - Open Collective - HackMD or in this thread ahead of the call.

Open Collective can potentially be used by distributed teams (and non-organizations like EthMagicians) to collect fiat funds for sponsorships, memberships, or donations, track finances transparently, pay back expenses, and more.

This is interesting for open source projects of all kinds, but I’m specifically suggesting that global, decentralized web projects attend this call. It solves some of the issues

More on Open Collective

Open Collective enables groups to quickly set up a collective, raise funds and manage them transparently.

From the About page:

Meetups, open source projects, parent associations, neighborhood associations, pet projects, clubs, unions, movements, non-profits, business incubators - in order to operate, all of them are forced to use a physical glass jar, ask a sponsor to directly pay their expenses or front the huge overhead of setting up and managing a corporation or a non-profit. It’s either inefficient and opaque or it’s overkill.

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Great topic, @boris! Thank you!

My questions are:

  1. Will you support donations in crypto?
  2. Who are the organizers? Why should they have special power to accept/reject invoices? Is it not the backer/sponsor who should decide on it?
  3. Should a collective be a legal entity in order to issue invoices?
  4. What kind of Software or Services will you provide exactly?
  5. What is the difference between “Open Collective” and usual “registered association” (or “eingetragener Verein, e.V.” in german law) .

I have added my questions to hackmd.

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Great, glad you find it useful.

Re: 3, 5 - This is a US based entity so you don’t have to create an association.

Re 4 - please do read the website — it exists today and has many features listed.

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Hi all! Happy to answer any outstanding questions. It was great connecting with you all today.
Really looking forward to collaborating.

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I haven’t cleaned up the notes yet, but did a short recap on the Open Collective Discourse. I suggest if anyone has further questions about Open Collective, to use that Discourse.

There is a full video that is worth watching.

I do think that using OC as a permanent “host organization” for Councils and other meetups would work very well. Crypto is not “natively” supported, but you can track it and pay back outside the system.

Having a collective per Council – and setting the currency per collective – may be the way to go.

I’m going to explore setting up my company as a “host” projects we’re running.

Thanks again @piamancini

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That zoom video is no longer online, and I’ve upgraded my workflow to store these videos online.

For your viewing pleasure, here you go:

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Nice! Thx for reposting this Boris!

I want to mention that Giveth is having it’s last big release, so it can be a crypto native solution without expected interruptions starting early March. :smiley:

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I bet Pia and the Open Collective team would be interested in partnering / recommending you for crypto native stuff. For EthMagicians and others, there is a need for fiat intake, which is where OC comes in. I can see the two working together well.

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Open collective is for sure the best then! I would love the connection! Will reach out on Twitter DM :smiley: