The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Funds for open source (Interview)

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

This week we're talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced "Funds for Open Source." The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Welcome back. This week on The Change, we're talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year, Open Collective announced funds for open source. And the idea is simple. Make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective, along with Gitcoin, announced FundOSS.org as part of May 10 week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 funding open source that you can support. Big thanks to our partners Fastly, Linode and LaunchDarkly

our bandwidth is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com and we love Linode. They keep it fast and simple. Check them out at Linode.com slash changelog and get your feature flags powered by LaunchDarkly get a demo at LaunchDarkly.com. This episode is brought to you by Linode.

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It's been too long. It's been too long. Yeah. Yeah. So let's just dive right into it, shall we? Open Collective. Remind the folks what it is for those who haven't heard of it. Tell us about the platform and what you're all up to. Yeah. Open Collective's an open finances platform it's a platform that lets you raise funds and spend them transparently and it's paired with a whole network of non-for-profits entities around the world that act as that place where you put the

money so if you are a community a group an, an open source project, a mutual aid group, a movement, you want to start raising funds today and you do not have a legal entity or do not want a legal entity, or it's impossible for you to have one because you are distributed around the world, like we've got you, right? We are going to give you the platform that can act as that organizational structure and that place that you can manage your funds transparently and also a business bank account or a non-for-profit bank account where you can receive the money. In the jargon, it's called a fiscal host or fiscal sponsor, right?

So Open Collective kind of combines these two pieces. And you're no longer a fly-by- night. You've been around for a while. And so I think being established and having a history, especially for a fiscal host and a platform is really important. So you get that going for you. Yeah, absolutely. We started five years ago and we've really grown a lot in the open source space. And we'll chat more about that. also we've grown especially last year like substantially in the crisis support solidarity space mutual aid groups i know it's been a crazy year for everyone but for us it was a crazy year compounded with a 10x growth on that and so it's been it's

been a little bit interesting to manage so So yeah, it's been great. Super challenging. Is the spaces outside of technology where the growth is primarily happening or is it just bigger there now? They're both growing, but that was growing at a faster rate. They're both growing,

but that space last year grew at a rate that was completely unexpected. So this is the combination of Open Collective, the platform plus the Open Collective Foundation that is a 501c3. It's a charity. The 501c3 has never been very used or we didn't grow very much until last year. And so 2019, that entity had a revenue for all its across all collectives of, I think it was something like $300,000. And then it was close to $5 million last year. So that level of scale made it quite interesting to survive, especially in the middle

of a pandemic. Yeah. And it's important to understand the full platform too. Like I recall talking to you before on Founders Talk and then this show way back when this idea of, as you mentioned, if you don't have a legal entity in your group, you just want to collect together and raise funds for whatever they are and distribute them transparently in the open. Like that platform did not exist then. And you sort of began in this open space where it wasn't really about open source or even software driven communities. Then that space grew for you. And then now with the pandemic and things shifting as they had the last year, I guess year and a half now,

you're seeing more of a growth in the non-tech spaces. Yeah, absolutely. A lot more than before. In hindsight, or the common thread between both growth spurts that we've had in the open source or tech space and now in the mutual aid or solidarity space, it has to do with the fact that Open Collective is best suited for groups that are, it's like zero to one. You're either able to fundraise or not.

They are doing like, you know, this level of mass scale, global project directed funding option, right? So an open source project, if it's someone, you know, in the US, someone in Mexico, someone in Germany, it's literally impossible for them to fundraise because there is no legal entity that they can create. It doesn't exist. Right. So it's like zero to one. And for mutual aid groups, we found that it was the same.

It's literally impossible for the Brooklyn to a late group or South Chicago mutual aid group to have a functioning charity, non-for-profit, that is able to give tax-deductible receipts, functioning in like, you know, less than at least six months if you're lucky, right? And so again, it's zero to one. These kind of groups also that we've seen this kind of massive growth are groups that are doing cash assistance, that they are putting money together to pay for groceries for folks who have lost their jobs. This polar vortex thing hit, I think it was Minnesota, not so long ago. And just like that,

in one day, a group came together and they were pulling money to get people off the streets into hotels and paying for, like, we're going to help you do that today. It doesn't exist, right? And so it's not about being marginally better at something. It's just about enabling something that wouldn't exist otherwise. And I think that that's where we are kind of quite uniquely suited in that space to work in. That's really cool. And I think it makes sense to think of yourselves as enablers because it's the time where either it's technically or legally either very difficult or impossible in the case of too difficult for one person to pull off to do a thing or in the case that speed is of the essence it seems like that's where open collective really shines because

you can get up and going quickly or if you don't have the expertise or the money or whatever the legal means are especially cross borders and stuff to get something going is going from zero to one. You're really enabling things that wouldn't exist otherwise. Yeah. And you know, we were doing a strategy, very long call, Zoom call the other day. As everyone else, we have like limited capacity, right?

And we need to kind of decide what we are going to say no to and what we want to achieve. And we want to focus on these spaces, whatever they are, but these spaces where it's just not a marginal improvement. It's like this kind of binary kind of situation, right? And scaling that. And I think we did that with open source in a way

for the vast majority of projects that are not under another foundation or are not newer,, smaller or more distributed or whatever. We're also doing it now for this kind of solidarity space. So because of that, do you see collectives or organizations outgrowing the platform? Are they, do they need that marginal improvement? And then the best thing for them is to move elsewhere?

Yeah, absolutely. And look, right now, this year is about, for me, focusing a lot on like the whole life cycle of a collective, right? Like we've become really, really good at you need to be up and running today. Like we've got you, you know, this is what you need to sign. This is what you need to send the money. This is how you do it. It's like super clear, like zero friction. But then as groups start to grow on the platform, we are not so good at taking care of like that middle kind of size group that, you know, they manage anything between 500,000 to, you

know, over a million budget or 300,000 to over a million. Then they're like, all right, at what point is it worth for me to start doing my own thing, my own entity? Is it now? Is it later? So we want to focus more now on also supporting those groups. And once they transition out, what I would really like to see is for Open Collective to also kind of accompany these groups as they transition out. And so we become kind of the backend, this kind of transparency and open finances kind of ethos that we bring

stays with these organizations, even as they become their own legal entities. You know, we just keep giving them for free the open collective platform for them to kind of keep this transparency. And then I guess maybe more future thinking, how can we more like strive for nonprofits kind of style, right?

So you become a collective, we help you grow, you grow with us, you raise funds. It's time for you to kind of move on. We'll give you open collective as your backend, but look, it's hard to do non-for-profits. We've been doing this for many years. We have legal advice. We'll help you create your non-for-profit and then you can go do your thing in the world, right? That kind of whole life cycle for me is very interesting without losing like our core focus that is from zero to one really helping initiatives today. Right.

Because the crux, the important thing is the upstarts, the getting started fast, zero to something quickly. Yeah. And obviously graduating or incubating a group or an entity or a non-profit or you know a sub-non-profit however you want to frame that to a point that they can blossom and move along and self-sustain but still use the platform would be yeah ideal is that happening a lot where that's the focus now is that why it's the focus now because it's just you've been around for five years and you got a lot of groups that have grown with you and now they need to move

along and they still need tooling yeah we have we have that. Like we've been an incubator of really interesting initiatives and look also for open source and they not necessarily move into another non-for-profit. Like we've had groups that because they've been able to support their maintainers during, you know, their initial period, then they were able to create a project that then, you know, they can make a business of without losing their open source or without losing the community. We're seeing some open source projects also moving into other types of business models or projects being hired by a company full-time to work on that open source project. But they were able to do it because

they were able to dedicate enough time because they were getting paid initially by their community, right? So we're seeing that it's a bit tricky sometimes and it's a challenge of mine to help, I guess, the ecosystem a little bit more in like governance tooling when these kinds of things happen, especially when an open source project moves into being for-profit venture. The line between what's part of the for-profit what's part of the community how the for-profit still supports the community it's a very interesting conversation yeah has that happened with anybody well gatsby is a good example gatsby was a collective and now they are like a super big vendor back right and the relationship between gatsby the company and you know i think was well managed, but it was well managed because it wasn't a huge community in terms of like a lot of people being very invested in that, but now a smaller group. And so the smaller group turned into the company.

Starting to happen some. another case where they raised money and they became like their own entity and thing they still have a collective and they manage octobox as well right like you know octobox has the company and the project and they have different practices but i think as a community you know we can start discussing talking more about like what are best practices when you're open source project you know you're going to turn it into a business, right? I guess because the funds in Open Collective are transparently available to the world, you can sort of dictate. So if you're a company that also has, or even a project that graduates into a company and still maintains a collective, those funds are used, I'm assuming they're used for like

community related things. Yeah, that's exactly right. Not really business expenses, not really business income. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. Is that how it plays out for that? Yeah. So one thing that I quickly want to clarify is like the open source collective, which is the fiscal sponsor of most of like at this stage, 2,500 open source projects under our umbrella. It's not a tax deductible kind of entity, right?

It's a non-for-profit, but it's not a charity. So I just want to clarify that just in case, because like they have different regulations. But other than that, yes, the funds in the collective are are used the intention is that they're used for community stuff definitely we wouldn't pay back into a company right like our bylaws or our you know regulations wouldn't allow us to do that but also like we kind of want to see more of like money from the companies to the collectives actually and that money being invested in the community. I think it's positive that open source projects find different business models and that more maintainers make a great living

out of doing this. So I'm by no means saying that this is wrong. I'm just saying that sometimes the line, we need to walk that line, right? And as a community, we need to kind of discuss what our best practice is, I guess. It's worth mentioning that a core tenet of Open Collective is the open side, and that that line, right? And as a community, we need to kind of discuss what our best practice is, I guess. It's worth mentioning that a core tenet of Open Collective is the open side, and that's transparency, right?

And so it's transparency, money coming in and money going out, right? So all the expenses are itemized and explained and visible. And that's really cool. I wonder if that's been perhaps problematic for certain groups or, you know, there's certain times where like, well, this is a little bit gray and like, I wish I could just, yeah, I get it. I totally get why it's there.

And I think it makes sense for accountability purposes. But we were talking with Sokra, you know, from Webpack and I mentioned that he had never given himself a raise, you know. And I was like, does it feel weird to just like go into your open collective and just start paying yourself more? Like, why haven't you done that? And he thought, he just was like, does it feel weird to just go into your open collective and just start paying yourself more? Why haven't you done that? I can't remember exactly what he said, but he kind of just shrugged it off. As an example, maybe there's just a weird social thing of him giving himself more money, even if he deserves it. Everybody else gets raised over time.

But that was just an example of where maybe the transparency kind of backfires. Have you ever noticed that? Yeah, for sure. Radical transparency is never easy, right? Yeah. And social pressure is tough. And it's also a hard ask on maintainers who are like, most of them are really good developers and great at what they do.

They might not be the best kind of at managing communities or people or because there's a different skill set and not all, I wish all open source projects had like a more diverse skillset. And it's something that again, like we should really strive for. And this is one of the reasons why, right. There has to be like, you know, it's a lot of pressure on the maintainers to do what they do, earn what they can, raise money, and also kind of manage the social expectations of like, oh, how much you're getting paid for, you know, this work. It's tough. I get it.

But like for us, that is like a non-negotiable space because I feel that the benefits of having this level of openness, like by far outweighed. And also the uncomfortable moments. And also I think that as a community, we should also kind of take stock of how poorly some of these folks are paid and we should be paying them more. One of the main goals of the Open Source Collective is making working for your open project, for your community, like something that is comparable to working for a corporation.

And the only way of getting there is paying maintainers, like a competitive salary. And we really want to erase this choice, you know, of like, oh, I need to be poor and work for my community, or I'm going to make money, but also I need to work for a corporation. You know, if we can close that gap, like narrow that, make it as comparable as possible, for us, that's a huge win. But the only way of getting

there is like being open about the need to pay folks right money causes a lot of problems especially in groups you know i think the transparency is certainly a competitive advantage because when you bring together a group you have to have trust around funds even if it's like yeah like that's got to be the core thing that brings groups there for one, but then enables the continued long term trust between one other because everything that comes in is visible to everyone and everything that goes out is visible to everyone. So there's no scrutiny. And even as someone like you who runs twenty five hundred or more or, you know, at least

the fiscal sponsor of twenty five hundred or more open source projects that even on your conscious that you've got this feeling that, well, hey, look at the ledger. Right. The ledger is what it is. I mean, there is, you may be able to say, hey, you shouldn't have done that. Or, hey, in your case, Jerry, where you mentioned you shouldn't have paid yourself more. Why'd you do that? But at least it's there and the questions can be asked. Yeah.

And all those details are out there. Yeah. That's a competitive advantage in my opinion. Absolutely. I think that we have worse problems with our transparency than what everyone's getting paid. I think that where we really have struggled with this kind of radical transparency stance that we have is when we risk exposing community members like trans folks

or they struggle with their chosen name and their dead name and we because we're a regulated non-for-profit like we need to have you know the name that folks are submitting you know their tax reports in otherwise it's problematic for us but or for example we have a group that is making grants to folks that are struggling. So they're paying for their mental health bills. Like having that transparent, like that's far worse than the discussion about. The details of the transparency, not so much who it goes to, but the details of it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess in some cases, the actual name, because you've got to, for necessary reasons of clarity. Absolutely. We have, for example, an internet freedom Technology Fund under the Open Collective Foundation, where we are supporting a whole group of projects working with privacy, anti-surveillance, protecting tools for human rights activists, VPNs that are being deployed in, I don't know, like countries like Myanmar, for example. Like we absolutely cannot expose them. So that's where, you know, we came to the limits of our very strong radical transparency kind of platform, very opinionated platform. That's where we hit the, you know, should,

what do we do now with this? You know, we want to, like, we have this money that we want to give to all of these projects doing technology that is keeping internet freedom technology, right? That is keeping our activists or human rights activists safe. At the same time, we have this platform that is like radically transparent and we cannot have that, right? So, you know, that's really, for me, the most difficult space to navigate. And we're still working with these projects and we're doing some special features to guarantee

their safety. I think that's transparently interesting and it's fantastic. But also you sometimes obviously run into this clash between transparency and privacy and identity protection that you need to navigate. And normally the ones that are hurt the most or if those protections are not in place are folks that are more exposed or minorities. So yeah, it's an interesting problem for us, but yeah. This episode is brought to you by Retool.

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Again, that's retool.com slash changelog. So you have a brand new initiative as of March, the Funds for Open Source project on Open Collective. And it's all about getting corporations better involved, more involved, bringing more corporate money into open source maintainers hands, making that easy and accessible. You want to tell us where that idea came from and what you've been working on? Yeah. So funds for open source came from our awful daily soulless relation with corporations purchasing order process. Okay. Yeah. Their financial systems and onboarding as a vendor and getting them to get their financial departments to approve payments is just bad and it's difficult.

And we want to make that very easy. And it's bad for everyone. Like you have to use like SAP. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, it's bad. Yeah, right. SAP. Coupa, SAP, payments, yes.

It's terrible. It looks like Coupa, exactly. No, I want to die. I mean, with all the love in the world. And it's bad for everyone. Okay, so for the projects, it's impossible, right? Like if you don't have like a non-for-profit or a legal entity with the right, whatever, checks and EINs and things like that, it's like a non-starter. But that's more like the open collective proposition.

But it's also awful for the folks involved from the company side, right? Try to get, you know, you are an engineer or an open source officer in a company and you're trying to get funding for projects and you go around to your financial department and you're like, okay, great. We need to make 17 payments of $5,000. So 17 different purchasing orders to, you know,

these entities, some of them are entities and then a couple of PayPal to maintainers. Like it's impossible. That's not going to happen, right? So what we did was this funds for open source proposal where companies have like one payment, one purchasing order, a large tech. It's not surprising,

but it's far easier to get $100,000 from a company than to get $10,000. A lot easier to get $100,000 from a company than to get $10,000, a lot easier to get $100,000 because they understand that. The $10,000 like raises a ton of flags. But a large tech to one non-for-profit that is already a vendor, it's a really easy process for everyone. And then what we do is we turn around and create a fund for this company. And so they can obviously give money from that fund to collectives on Open Collective or under the Open Source Collective umbrella, which is really easy. But they can also

use that fund to disburse money to other organizations. So we have, for example, a CMS, the Google CMS fund. They gave us their whole budget and then they wanted to give money to the Drupal Association. But instead of getting Drupal Association, that is now a very small organization in terms of staff, to go through all the process of procurement with Google, we just send them the money from the fund. So it's a lot easier for everyone involved to give money to open source projects and other organizations. Funds for open source also has a grant making feature built in, right?

So projects can apply to get funding from these grants. That's cool. And again, instead of that being, you know, one project storybook, trying to get into Google to get the funds, they just do an application through the open source collected to the fund and everything is a lot easier because the money already left the corporation. Yeah. It's been allocated to the cause of open source essentially. Yeah. And it's been through a trusted resource, which is their fund on open collective. Yeah.

And they can disperse from there. Does the same radical transparency participate there too? So money in, money out is the same on those funds as well? Yeah, absolutely. That's cool. Yeah. That's beneficial for those organizations too, because it's like, well, you can see how much we're participating, which has been a challenge. You can see some organizations taking advantage or some organizations giving a lot and it's all behind the scenes. And the only way to really do it is maybe come on a podcast or put out a blog post or just your advocates sharing this information. But in this case, it's like, here it is, you know, for the world to see in many ways the stage where funding happens in open source.

There's many places it does. But this is one of the many prominent places where trying for open source does happen. Yeah. And also I think it gives like this, like another, I guess, entity, if you want, in a way, like another kind of seniority is like, this is Airbnb's, you know, open source fund. Right. Right. And from here, we're going to do a ton of things. Most of them of which would be very difficult to do if the money was like in pieces coming out of Airbnb.

Right. Doesn't mean that the endpoint that gets funded has to be involved in Open Collective? Or does that mean that this is just their fund? You can issue checks to somebody outside of Collective? Absolutely. You can issue checks to anyone. Good. Like we really wanted to be very clear.

Well, we are very clear, but we really wanted to enable that to happen for smaller organizations as well, right? Because for us, like Open Collective team, or it's the same to give money to a maintainer or to give money to another organization. It's the same process for us because we're set up for doing that, right?

So we can give checks to any entity or open source projects, whether they're with us or not. And I think that that's what makes like a huge difference for these kind of corporate players. You mentioned Airbnb. We had a conversation with Duane O'Brien way back on the change.

Jared missed that show. Where were you at, Jared? I was just listening. Just listening. Episode 392, it was Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund. Yeah. And I know that you know Duane well and Indeed is a part of,

they have their own fund on Open Collective. Is there any backstory to some of the trials and tribulations Duane went through and shared on that show to kind of continue into what you're now doing? Has there been any crossover? Has he been an advocate or a confidant to you? Oh yeah, he's been a great advocate

of like funds for open source or like the first contributor fund, for sure. He's been like right there talking to his, you know, fellow open source peeps in different companies and getting them to start this like indeed's experience was really kind of i think it really kick-started a lot of what's happening now with funds for open source i mean especially they are kind of very democratic way of deciding which

projects to fund that they decide they have like this poll with the employees right it's not everyone though it's really interesting. It's not just everyone who's an engineer that can vote. It's those who have contributed to open source. So it's really, they don't just want to get them to decide which project to fund.

They also want to get their staff to contribute more to open source. Right. And that was certainly like a huge inspiration and Indeed has been very open about their blueprints and their starfish the tooling that they use and other bits and pieces so i think they're really like a role model in that

and we just came into again enable that's what we do we facilitate we enable we kind of catalyze these things we want to make it so so simple for companies to say okay we're just going to put this money here and from here we'll decide how to spend, we'll spend here, there, we'll do offer grants or whatever. But it's like, it's a hundred times easier because they have the money in one place. I guess the biggest example that we have is Chrome's fund. They have like a pretty big fund on opencollective.com slash Chrome. And I think it's about 700,000 and they just committed another half a million for this year. And so they've been great at this. And you can go in there, you can see not only they are kind of dispersing money to projects and Open Collective, they're creating

like special projects from communities. They're encouraging open source projects to join Open Collective so they can like it's easier for them to give them money and also track how that money is spent. Adios Money at Chrome has been like a really good partner here. So yeah, funds for open source is a big one for us this year. And when we launched, it had a lot of traction. And so it clearly kind of, I think, struck a chord with, again,

everyone who's involved in procurement processes in companies. Right. You mentioned persuasion, or you didn't say the word persuasion, but I was thinking about that, or activism, or encouragement, I think is the word that you used. And you're an enabler. I'm curious if there's like a missing component to this, because you have the tooling now, you have like a mechanism, you have enablement. And then it's like a lot of corporations need encouragement, or they need basically a sales pitch of why this is worth their trouble.

Even though it's way less trouble here than it would have been before phones existed, right? It's easier, but companies think about ROIs, they think about bottom lines, cash flow. There's capitalistic reasonings behind it. Are there tools, are there people? Are there class you can take like how to convince your organization that it's worth it to do this? Or is it just going to be a thing that everybody has to slowly come to the light and realize that they're standing on infrastructure that they didn't participate in and that they're just reaping benefits, but they're not giving back? What does that look like today? And what might we do to make it better?

Yeah, I think we need to be better at that. I think companies are more aware now of, you know, the need they have to invest in the open source ecosystem. I've been seeing a lot of companies, like Trivago is one of the greatest examples of this, like Trivago. They're very invested in supporting Webpack, Babbel and Preact. And they've seen like they're recruiting, forget about last year, right? Obviously, but their recruiting process a lot easier and grow. And they've seen people who wanted to work at Tribago because they knew they were so

invested in the open source ecosystem, right? And so I think that more and more companies are seeing this as an investment and not as like a charity. It's more of a, I need to do this if i want to hire if i want to keep my employees and my engineers like happy and working for us and also if we want to have like a good name in the community want to be responsible citizens i mean i'm not saying that this is like we've done it folks we're good but like i think we are i think it's better it's improving and so we need

to be better. Like we open collective and open source collective need to be better at having this conversation with companies right now. It's kind of quite centered in me. And well, luckily now Ben Nichols joined as the executive director of open source collective. Shout out to Ben. Yes. Hi Ben. But like still is a very kind of interpersonal relationship, which is fantastic. But I also think every single day about how I can make myself redundant from my own company, because I think that the only way of sure I want to create something that survives me. And I believe that sustainable is a mission that survives its founders. Right. So I think a lot about that. And I think a lot about that in the context of like, you know, my relationship with all of these companies in open source space. And so I think that we need to do better tooling. We try to do like, if you're an engineer and you need to move this up the chain, this is a letter that you can use to write to management, or this is what went well in these companies, or read all of these use cases, or maybe try and these kind of five or six steps. We do a little bit of that, but like not nearly enough.

Sustain was obviously a big part of that kind of conversation of convincing companies that they need to invest in this space. So yeah, I think I would like to do something that is like a toolkit for, you know, your sustainer toolkit, right? Like you're in a company, you need to, you know, these are all the resources at hand. These are all the stats. This is a presentation you can use. Use these five slides.

And then keep inviting me to your show and talk about it. Well, you might be preaching to the choir with our show in particular, but point taken. To some degree. Well, you launched this, at least by the blog post March 24th. We've talked about Airbnb, Chrome, Indeed as participants of funds. How many funds are out there? How do you find these funds? If somebody wants to start a fund, what's the process to begin that workflow? Is there a button on site or is it something where they got to get in touch with

somebody directly? What's the beginning of that? Yeah, right now they need to get in touch with us and we are doing a lot of outreach ourselves with this in any channel, Open Collective channel, Twitter, support at Open Collective, Pia at Open Collective, Ben at Open Collective, you know, everything gets to us. Star at Open Collective. Yeah, collective yeah yeah exactly we are working on a flow for fans i do not know how many fans we have to be honest i have no idea we've been doing two things we've been getting new fans but also and i'll tell you about the types of fans as well which is interesting and also converting existing sponsors on the platform that they are giving recurring donations and they're sick and tired of their monthly credit card on their expense on their corporate credit card or whatever it is. We're turning them into funds as well.

So we're like, instead of spending monthly this money, send it to us one year, one invoice, one payment, and that's it. So it's like both kind of like it's an outreach and also like internal corporations already on Open Collective. And then the types of funds that we've been seeing, we've been seeing corporate funds like Samsung or Salesforce. But we've been also seeing, which is really interesting for me, because I wasn't really expecting this early in the process, like more like topical funds or themes funds, right right we want to create a fund to give money to web three projects and it's different companies putting together a fund to do something i really like that idea because like the economies of scale are amazing and so we've been kind of helping some

funds and one of the biggest ones that we have is we have two really large ones at the moment. The Digital Infrastructure Fund, which is, you know, a fund put together by Ford Foundation, Sloan, Omidyar, Mozilla and Open Society Foundations to give money to research and implementation in like public digital infrastructure projects. So anything from like open source and COVID to climate change to FOSS foundations, like research in any of those areas, like public infrastructure in India. And again, it's like this structure where we can pull money from different corporations or foundations to support like a specific kind of set of projects. The Internet Freedom Fund is another one where we put money from Ford, Luminate, also Facebook started one with us to support this type of internet freedom technology projects. We're seeing like both,

like single company that's like, I'll give you my money, please spend it on open source. And let's put money together to support this specific type of projects. I'm a fan of anything that happens in funds for open source i think it has been like a really interesting initiative have you begun to quantify the impact because anytime you talk about organizing people and enabling and assembling

these opportunities for corporations to participate sometimes the as jerry was saying how do you convince or what was the encourage courage if you're trying to encourage sometimes the as jerry was saying how do you convince or what was the encourage encourage if you're trying to encourage sometimes the way to do it is through yeah nudge nudge is through you know what the actual impact is can you share any details around you know the launch of funds and the initial impact where you're seeing things going and if it keeps going that way here's the trend can you kind of quantify some of those things to some degree no impact i'm really bad at that to be honest it's not my kind of i don't know it's not in my skill set i should do more of that like we open collective also doesn't track anything we don't even use google analytics or anything that's how we are you know we're radically

transparent but we also don't track anyone and don't keep any kind of analytics from users on the platform. So there's not a lot I can say on that. We really just launched. And so maybe like, I don't know, in two months, we'll look back, look at the numbers and write a blog post about it. Right. I also want to say that Open Collective's data is open, right? And we regularly post all our data on like a Google drive that is publicly accessible.

And if you go to a homepage, there's a link to open data and everything is there. So anyone who wants to do this and run these numbers, and if there's like any data scientists there, who's like, Oh, I want to see how they spend the money. Please feel free. One of the things that we are doing though, is we're building like proper kind of metrics tooling for collectives and fiscal hosts. So we will have a much better understanding of, you know, they've been spending money on this, right? Or from, you know, from this budget, open source projects normally spend 90% of their budget on a monthly basis, right? Or they keep their budget forever or like all of that kind of metrics and readings i think with the new metrics dashboard for collectives are going to be much easier for us to do and have at a

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Could the impact be quantified to some degree, maybe just simply new money in? Because it's assumed that the money is going to go somewhere and the money is going to have some sort of impact. You have a metric for new money in or sort of how the total raised has gone up 25 percent. Or I'm looking at like the budget for Indeed, for example, is $120,000 total raise so far. And that's a new fund. So I'm assuming that's pretty much new money. Yeah, I have, let me see, let me open my Metabase dashboard. I have a fancy dashboard for this. Metabase.

Metabase. We've done a show on Metabase. You did? Very good. After 10 years, you've done a show on everything, pretty much. That's true. after 10 years you've done a show on everything pretty much and obviously we're changing things on the oh we're having a good month that's great

surprise surprise is great like we're actually can I say something we're like sustainable which is so amazing because it was so scary for me especially when i i my co-founder left and i was like all right this is you know this is your thing now and you're losing money every month like a lot and now we are on the green and it's like congratulations that's awesome thank

you yeah i know that's a impact right there alone. Exactly. We're not going to die. Sustainably sustaining. Exactly. Exactly. We're default alive, you know, which is great. What I was trying to extrapolate was just essentially, if I just go and add up Airbnb's fund, it's $385,000 total raised. Indy's is $120,000. You know, you mentioned Chrome and their number, at least on site, is 650,000 total raise. You mentioned another half a million more. So we're talking about, just doing real quick math

here, almost a little more than or close to 2 million or a little bit more than $2.3 million new money, if that's new money, all at once, rather than trickling into the system over time. It's a lot easier. It's almost like, wow, here's a ton of runway. And it's more like invigorating because you as the collective and you as somebody that's active in these communities, you can be much more encouraging because you can see like, well, we got $2.3 million to do something with. Whereas before it was hard to see that, you know, you sort of count on this recurring monthly payment or whatever, but it's just, it's just harder to see the long-term finish line because you got trickling money versus

big wad of cash. Yeah, no, absolutely. And look, also that's also part of why we want to do better metric tooling for collectives. It's like now we have a fair bit of maintainers that are working full-time for their communities. If I need these metrics to run our company, they need these metrics to run, you know, our company, like they need these metrics to run their project as well. Right. They need to know how much money they're getting in.

And not only each month from that, how much is recurring revenue? How much is one time revenue? How often do they lose donors? You know, what's the churn? All of those metrics. Churn, yeah. Yeah. That I have for Open Collective, like they need for, and don't ask me about those

because I need to look at them. We also need to provide it to collectives. I think that historically the Open Source Collective has raised $15 million. That was like last year. A ton of that was in the past two years, for sure. But that's a lot of money. $15 million is a lot of money,

at least for us to go to open. It's not nearly enough what the ecosystem needs, but like it was zero for many of these projects five years ago, right? I was going to say, it's better than zero.

Yeah, it's a lot better. It's more than zero and it's better than zero because it could be if you and team weren't working so hard on this these last five years, you mentioned

some of the ups and downs. Like if you weren't doing all this, it could still be zero. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not. doing all this, it could still be zero. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not. It's not. It's $15 million.

Probably more this year. I'm trying to look at a Metabase query that I absolutely cannot find that gives you like how much money. Ah, here it is. How much money was raised by the host? Do you see? $15 million. $15 million. That's great.

Yeah. Nice. And 34 in gbp that's for the open source collective i don't know why we have

something in gbp it was very funny you must have amazing accountants yes i have a whole

team very patient yeah very patient yeah very fastidious that's what it takes

and external auditors thank you very much. Thank you. Necessary. Well, yes. Yes,

for sure. I wish I could say no. I wish I could say, nah, we incorporated our non-for-profit in Delaware. No one cares about how much we,

like, no, we just went ahead and did it in California. Thank you very much. So, yes, a lot of external

audits. Yeah. California, yay. yay yeah you could close the company and sell to your new company in corporate indelible yeah it's not my company it's a non-for-profit yes but doing that it's a little bit expensive and i think it would derail our focus because we would need to kind of merge two legal entities we could do it but you know lawyers are good at that stuff yeah lawyers are expensive too lawyers are expensive yeah yeah where you said because it could be i know how transparent you are it could be a small aside in there where you said the last five years

cash flow in the green out is that something that we can leave in or is that something if it makes sense to leave in yeah absolutely i'm are you okay with that i'm just playing director now or editor yeah later on at some point to say does that make it no no leave it in there if you want like our investors updates are posted on our blog so right yeah that they are um right you're just you know airing out your stress essentially of the last several years where you've made it, you're sustained, you're sustainable now. Well, it's tough, man. It's tough to, you know, make it sustainable. And we are 15 people now. We have complete empathy for you. I mean, we feel the same. Yeah. And we're 15, you know, across the world. I am, you know, I feel mightily responsible for a lot of people. So, you know, last year between, you know, the pandemic,

also like shout out to my amazing executive coach, Yewandi. If anyone ever needs a referral for an executive coach, she is the best out of Nigeria. And now I think UK, she's amazing. And she really helped me through, I don't know, we were losing a fair bit of money in February last year.

And we were, you know, having really good profits in December last year. And that I think she helped me through all of that in a way that I'm very grateful. And so, so yeah, get an executive coach if you can, Pips. They really help. Don't do this alone. Yeah, that's crucial. I hear CEO coaches, I hear CEO coaches, I hear life coaches, I hear executive coaches.

Essentially somebody that's like, you know, outside your organization that can give you good advice to take action upon. Yeah, and someone, you know, to help you through dark times and insecurities. In Open Collective, we changed. You know, we've been tinkering

with our business model for a while. This is something that I don't think a lot of people know, but most of our collectives are now on a tip basis. We don't even take a platform fee. So last year, during the pandemic, we went to zero platform fees for all COVID- projects for three months initially. And then we extended it. So we just gave up all our revenue because we felt like we needed to do something, you know, for the situation, right? Like we were seeing all of these people coming together, putting money together, trying, supporting each other. And, you know, we're like, what can we do, you know, besides enabling this, like what's our role today? other and you know we're like what what can we do you know besides

enabling this like what's our role today and you know make this as easy as possible so we just we went to zero fees and that was in march last year when you know we were losing um we're still bleeding money every month you know it was the right decision it was a no-brainer of a decision because we knew that that's what we had to do but it was a tough goal also in the sense of like, we are giving up all our revenue. And so that was in March and halfway through March last year, we decided to experiment with something that I've always wanted to have an open collective, but we never had the guts to do it. That is like tips. We're just going to try and see if we can just sustain ourselves instead of just getting a fee from the projects, like enabling donors to give a tip on

top of their donations and, you know, use that as our revenue. And we were so surprised. Like if, for example, Open Collective was taking 5% platform fee. Then we moved to zero. When we went to tips, it was always over 6%, 7% that we were making. So by going to zero, we actually increased our revenue. You learned something. We learned something.

And so we roll it out for almost everyone. Certainly everyone in Europe, all other hosts have that kind of tipping model. Yeah, it's been great to see, and we want to expand this and keep kind of rolling out more hosts and more collectives on this new plan. But that was like,

I don't know, it was a very humbling moment, I guess, for us. And for me, you know, facing our team and saying like, all right, we're going to go to zero platform phase. I was like... What are you, crazy? I hope you trust me, folks.

What? For real? No, no yeah so how do the tipping work is it the the collectives that tip the host or is it the so the donors the donors tip the platform the host keeps their fees if they want so let's say i'm gonna go give two hundred dollars to the open source collective and i put in my two hundred dollars is there like a button that says would you also like to tip open collective is that how it works yeah okay cool do you quantify like some give five some give six percent do you quantify that and give them norms yeah is it like square whenever I go and pay my barber it's like do you want to give 10 or 15 or 20 percent because I know that's what happens when I do when I slab my card and it's like 15 20 25 percent you get some options essentially

yeah exactly options and then no thank you you know you can always opt out yeah but like these when I slab my card and it's like 15, 20, 25%, you get some options essentially. Yeah, exactly. Options and then no thank you. You know, you can always opt out. Yeah. But like these metrics, these ones I know because I've been looking at them very carefully for the past year. We are at about over,

I think it's about over 55% of orders like have tips which is huge because they could have zero and they have tipping. And so we changed that model and we also changed our relationship with other hosts. So Open Collective is a platform that has a platform. It has our hosts like Open Source Collective and Open Collective Foundation, et cetera. But we also enable other non-for-profits to use the platform for their communities, like the WordPress Foundation, for example, or.NET Foundation or Social Change Agency, whatever. And now we have, I hate myself for saying this, but like an Apple Store kind of relationship with them. If it's a non-for-profit that they don't charge their collectives, we do not charge the non-for-profit. Like if they're doing this as a volunteer kind of thing, like we don't charge the host.

But if they're charging their collectives, we assume that they're like a professional fiscal host and we share a 15% of their host fee, right? Which has really aligned our incentives and other hosts incentives really well. And it made like clear proposition. So all of this was like last year madness in the middle of a pandemic. So yeah. How do your costs scale with the scale of users

or collectives or donors? Not a lot, to be honest, because we're still 15 is a lot, but it's also 15, right, only. And the open source collective has like two one full-time person and support staff and it's for 15 2500 open source projects or you know the foundation manages like suddenly a seven million budget in a year and it has again one full-time person yeah double that. Double that to 5,000 projects.

How many? You still got one person? Do you have two? I don't think so. I think maybe, yes, maybe two. So not too bad. Yeah. Two and a half.

Two and a half. Yeah. But you know what? Like the Open Collective Platform actually makes it really easy for us to manage all of these groups. So I guess, look, it depends on how we want to grow the hosts, right? So for example, we started doing non-monetary asset holding for projects. We are starting to offer employment

services for projects, right? Because we acknowledge that if we are, you know, coming into the world saying we want a community to have economic power and we want people to be able to make a decent living being paid by their community, We need to provide, you know, that services for that to happen. So employment services, every kind of thing that we add on top of just our bare bones financial get money and spend it proposition obviously scales our costs. But as the groups grow, we are running into more and more this space where they need services for larger projects. Legal, things like trademarks, things like that. The reason I ask is I thought, well, if you get 7% on tips,

that'd be one heck of a way to scale the user base. No platform fees, completely community supported, tipped only. I don't know if that's feasible or you know smart but it just seems like if you want to be the enabler for more people yeah like reducing those platform fees to zero i mean zero is obviously way better than any other number for that for marketing purposes is that something you've considered or is that just like a bridge too far like it was good enough for a pandemic but you know it doesn't really no no

we keep that no no we keep that so No, no, we keep that. So for all charitable collectives, our platform fees are zero. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's just tips. It's forever. I love that pandemic thing. Yeah, no, no, it was a pandemic thing, but when we saw that it worked, we just, that's it.

All right, that's awesome. I missed that part. Yeah, I think, I agree. I think that zero is the best number for this. We haven't tried it yet in the open source space because the charitable ecosystem is very clear. Donors are used to tipping on top or tipping the platform or they understand that there are admin costs involved

in managing tax-deductible donations and things like that. It's unclear to me and I want to try it. I really want to pick collectives to explore if this is feasible for the open source collective to move to zero platform fees and just tips. It's unclear to me yet. Like I want to find an excuse like the pandemic for the charitable collectives to be able to try this and see if it works because it's a huge leap of faith to do it. Well, it doesn't work. It's hard to unroll that back, you know? It's impossible to roll it back, I think, without losing your community. Do you think it's different because of the corporate support of open source?

Like a lot of its corporations, whereas maybe on the charitable side, I'm guessing a lot of its individuals, but maybe I'm wrong there too. I think it works when you have people going to the platform and using their credit card to give a donation. When you have people just wiring money to you, it doesn't work because the platform is not, we don't have a space to offer this, right? Right. There's nowhere where I can put this.

Hey, do you want to give money to the platform so we can, you know, keep offering collective zero fees? Like I don't have because you're Google and you're sending money to a bank account and, you know. It kind of flies in the face of the funds effort, which is to make it dead simple for these corporations to do it. Whereas now you're making it more complicated again by adding this tipping mechanism. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Is that platform fee a part of the transparency ledger, so to speak? So when somebody donates, you see it was this plus 5% or whatever, if that's the number. Yeah. You see that in the ledger? Yeah. You see that on every transaction. If you click on any transaction, you'll see donation amount,

platform fees or fiscal sponsorship fees if they have a host, payment processor fees, and then net amount. I was going to suggest maybe A-B testing it versus at an individual level or an individual collective, maybe just A-B test where it's like, hey, for this transaction, you show the 5% platform fee for this next transaction, which is just maybe who knows what, the option to do a tip mechanism. So the current UI you have to swap between the two and just test 100 transactions and

see what the results might be. Yeah. Rather than like doing an opt-in and involving other humans and deliberating, because if it's all transparent, you could just, in that same ledger, say there's no platform fee, there's no tip. Or there is a tip and it's 7%. It's very clear in the ledger. Yeah.

That way you can kind of maintain your transparency as you do already. Yeah. Or even something like this transaction has costs for the collective. Do you want to cover them? You know, and then boom, that's it. Like some very simple kind of thing. We've done that too. Through our shows, we've donated on host's behalf.

And 10 times out of 10, we're adding two to cover the platform fees for the donation. Exactly. Because we're like, I don't want that organization. We don't want that organization to have to pay the fee. And we're appreciative of the person's efforts with us. And we're appreciative of the organization

and all the work that goes into it. So just as an act of generosity, like, yeah, sure, cover the fee, whatever it is. I mean, if it's 10 bucks, if it's 15 bucks or it's two bucks, I mean, it can be whatever it is. It's, it makes sense. And I think in most cases in this scenario, I guess maybe a lot of the cases in this scenario, people are generally generous and that's the whole point. They're on this platform to be generous. They're giving a donation to something or an attribution to a fund somehow. So it's an act of generosity already.

I'm going to try it. There you go. I'm going to A-B test that. I was always thinking about this from the point of view of like, I need a collective who wants to try this. But actually, no, we just need to kind of randomly see, you know, put this in front of contributors, financial contributors, and yeah, just...

See what happens. Someone has to pay for us to exist in the world. It's either we take the money from the collective or you can cover it. Right. Yeah, and I think in most cases, every case for us, at least, in our example of usage of Open Collective

or other platforms, we would want to pay for the fee for them to not have to incur it. So that all the money we want to give to them goes for their cause. See, it's funny because when I've done it, maybe I'm the cheapskate because I always say no

because I just want my round number. You know, like I'm giving $200. I don't want to give $205 or $250, you know, whatever, $203.75. Like I like the round number. So I'll just be like, maybe I'm just being selfish. Our A-B testing here is going to be 200, 220, 250.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, so Daryl will be a zero and I'll be a 7%-er. If you could round up, as long as I can round up for 200 to 250, fine. But if it's like 20375, like who wants that on their ledger? I'm just a round numbers kind of guy.

I get that. I get that. I actually get that. I can appreciate that too. Yeah, me too. I. I'm the person at the gas tank, the gas pump, you know, I'm trying to get it exact. Yeah, just like top it off. 75 cents, fine. 76 cents, there's no way I'm stopping. I gotta go to round dollar. I have my guinea pigs here, folks. I'm going to send you links in like two weeks. Here's your A, B test. Adam's A, I'm B. Exactly'm b exactly funny well that's cool we gotta report back your findings i will report back that'll be fun anything else we haven't talked about that's fresh and new your mission you've talked about it anything else ben nichols new executive director

shout out to ben of course anything else you're open to talk about that we haven't asked you no i think you know maybe just to mention that the Sustained community, even if we don't have live events, is still like live and thriving in Discord. And also our fabulous working groups that come out of Sustained events are still ticking along. We are hoping we're able to do face-to-face event next year or early next year, hopefully. Yeah. But yeah, that's still happening. We have our own podcast, which we should totally invite you guys on.

Totally. A Sustain podcast that is hosted by Richard Vittauer and a heap of panelists that rotate. So yeah. Cool. That's good. What's the touch point for that community? What's a URL or a place to go sustainoss.org is the website and hello at sustainoss.org for i want to be on the podcast awesome we'll link that up in our show notes for

folks who want to click through well pia thanks so much for coming on the show coming back on the show all the hard work you're putting into open collective and all the greasing of the skids that you're doing to help get more money into the hands of maintainers. Obviously an effort that we are proponents of and advocates for. So we'll continue to point people to Open Collective as they look for ways of sustaining their open source work and you keep doing what you're doing and making it easy and enabling folks to give and to get and to do awesome stuff. Yeah. Thank you for having me again. It's been great. I had a really good time and also I'm going back with good business ideas. So there you go. There you go. Good to have you, Pia. Thank you. Thank you.

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