The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Open Collective and funding open source (Interview)

Episode Date: January 9, 2017

Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.

Bandwidth for Changelog is provided by Fastly. Learn more at Fastly.com. Welcome back, everyone. This is the Changelog, and I'm your host, Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 234, and Jared and I talked to Pia Mancini, one of the co-founders of Open Collective. We talked about her background and where she came from, her passion around upgrading democracy, what Open Collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importantly, how you can take part and start your own collective. We had three sponsors today, GoCD from our friends at ThoughtWorks, TopTow, and also Rollbar. First sponsor of the show is our friends at ThoughtWorks, promoting their awesome

open-source continuous delivery service called GoCD. GoCD is an on-premise, open-source, continuous delivery server that lets you automate and streamline your build, test, release cycle for reliable continuous delivery. With GoCD's comprehensive pipeline modeling, you can model complex workflows for your team with ease, and the value stream map lets you track a change from commit to deploy at a glance. The real power is in the visibility it provides over your end-to-end workflow so you can get complete control of and visibility into your deployments across multiple teams. To learn more about GoCD, visit gocd.io slash changelog. Once again, gocd.io slash changelog for a free download.

It is open source. Commercial support is also available and enterprise add-ons as well, including disaster recovery. Once again, gocd.io slashio changelog and now on to the show so we are back it is the first show of the year jared man 2017 we're here 2017 can you believe it i can believe it. I'm excited. Nice break over the holidays, but back fresh talking to Pia Mancini from Open Collective. And we're huge fans of the work they're doing there, the great budget they've helped create for open source, a lot of the crowdfunding happening from communities and that transparency back.

So Pia, welcome to the show. Thank you for coming on. Hey, thank you for having me. This isn't, Open Collective is not your first thing. It's not where you began. And one of the things we need to figure out is to figure out where it came from. So how did you get involved with Open Collective? What's the backstory to you? It's pretty long, guys. I come from politics, which is probably not what you expected. I'm actually a political scientist by training. I worked in politics most of my life. I co-founded a political party in Argentina, ran for elections myself. I did civic technology for quite some time,

developed a platform that is being used by congresses around the world and other political parties called Democracy OS. Its second version is now Democracy Earth. And so that's where I've come from, from the political world. And all of my work has been trying to find ways of, this is going to sound a bit outrageous, maybe it is, but rendering governments and the nation state a bit obsolete in front of the internet. jurisdiction and we are organized very very territorially still all our political institutions are you know territorially based we are represented by the people that run in the place where we happen to be living in or or that we happen to be born at um and so most of my work was finding ways to sort of circumvent that and think of the Internet as a new political space. An open collective is actually CAMS also in that line. So governments are legacy institutions, they force us to fit into these boxes

that legal entities, right? In order for you to, for a group of people with a shared mission to receive the funding, you need to become what the government understands. It's a proper political entity, whether that's an LLC, a 501c3, a foundation, depends on the country, it doesn't matter.

But it's territorially based, right? An open source project. I mean, the internet in general, but open source projects, especially, they are run by people who might never meet and they're transnational. And the fact that they organize themselves in networks and basically online means that they can't receive money. Right. Because they are either they're not willing or they're not able to become these sort of legal entities that governments require to receive funding. And for us, for the founders of Open Collective, that's that's irrational. I think that online communities can thrive and need funding to do so, need funding to do what they love, to do what their mission is,

to accomplish what they set out to do. And so Open Collective was a way of creating some sort of, what in my mind is like a browser on top of governments for all of these online communities to be able to receive funding without having to create a legal entity and have a conversation about who's the owner of something. It's like asking who's the president of the internet. It's insane.

And so, yeah, that's sort of the path towards what I'm doing now. So back in 2014, you gave a talk. No, that wasn't too long. It just opens up, you open up so many cans of worms that I'm just not sure which one I'll bite into first. But I was thinking back to a little bit, a note we have about a TED Talk you gave in 2014, which was quite well received to the tune of a million plus views, how to upgrade democracy for the internet era. So what you just said there to us, is that kind of the nut of what this talk was about and kind of your mission to kind of recreate or replace governance for the internet? More than replace, I would say redesign.

Like the talk that I gave was about how we can use, the way I see it is that politics is trying to solve today's problems with yesterday's tools, which is not a phrase of mine, it's Marshall McLuhan's. But so that's pretty much what we are trying to do, right? We are trying to navigate a world with a very, very dated map. And so my proposal was how we can use technology to upgrade our political institutions, to redesign our political institutions in a way that are more in sync with how we organize today as a society. And so the fact that our representatives are, so what we do now is we essentially

sort of outsource our thinking, our decision making, our citizenship on a group of professional citizens for four years or six years or, you know, really long periods of time for every topic, for everything, and based on where you are living. And I think that that sort of kind of vertical representation needs to be redesigned. And what we propose with Democracy OS and now with Democracy Earth is sort of a horizontal kind of representation where you get to assign your trust on different people for different topics for different periods of time. So technology allows us to have a much more sophisticated, dynamic, fluid representation that emerges social leadership that, again, it's not territorial. It really blows my mind that I'm only represented by Argentina in sort of, you know, the world just because I was born there.

Maybe I'd rather have, I know you represent me on certain issues. And why can't you do it just because we weren't born in the same territory? That really blows my mind. I think that that needs to be redesigned urgently. And that was what the talk was about. So it's interesting because you're coming at this as a politician, or at least you, you know, as a political scientist and one who's ran for political office. So I would consider you a politician in that sense.

It seems like to upgrade the system, you have to engage the system. I don't know, it just seems like such a huge war to fight. Are you trying to upgrade? You said circumvent and then you said upgrade. I'm just trying to understand. No, thank you for that. And I, that's exactly what happened. That was exactly the path. So in 2014, the talk was about upgrading and the political party and the running for elections and all of that was about

engaging with the system and kind of hacking it, kind of rewiring, right? Like grabbing what was there. And that was Democracy OS, that was the first version of the platform. And that was like everything I've done until probably 2015. And then the second phase that we started with Democracy Earth is when we decided it was just too hard. It was almost impossible. We were trying to get a system that it's entrenched, that it's closed. And we were trying to get power to devolve power.

Right. Right. And so and so the next sort of stage is or or what we're thinking now, is how we can create an alternative system that renders the existing one obsolete. So democracy earth, that is the second version, and open collective, what I'm trying is to say, look, you know what, guys, we're not going to fight against government or nation states. We're just going to build on another level of the stock, on a level of top. And so Democracy Earth is a decision-making platform that runs on blockchain.

So you see Satoshi's for voting and liquid democracy protocols. And Open Collective, what it does is essentially we are creating a platform on top of which people around the world with a shared mission can do what they want and get funding to do it. And then there's a platform underneath that allows them to do that. And the platform connects with the government. So we do the bookkeeping. We do the taxes. We are sort of compliant, but we sort of the platform

not everyone else so it's like abstracting all of that friction for everyone else that's sort of our way of circumventing if you want gotcha rewiring i like that rewiring is a good concept because you know a lot of times you want to get in there and tinker and in many cases like in your ted talk you talked about how you had to work so hard to get to a certain level in politics or to be a politician you had to work so hard to get to a to the seat of the table basically to influence decisions and i can see where open collective rewires things to give the power back to the people to unite and organize while the platform itself engages as needed and is compliant with the necessary local governments. Exactly. It just doesn't make sense that if you have an open source project, you need to do all of that yourself.

You know, it just we need to be able to abstract all of that friction for communities around the world. And it's not only open source. I think about unions, for example. This is one of the things that I'm most passionate about and one of the reasons why I, you know, Open Collective is so important to me. Like now we have algorithmic companies like Uber, for example, right, that they, you know, they are at this transnational level. They are the same interface for everyone around the world. But then their contractors, their drivers, they are still siloed in the nation states. They're siloed in the governments.

And there's no reason why we can't have a union of drivers from Mexico, the United States and Canada, for example. And the power of these networks would be far larger than what it is now that they are sort of encapsulated in each kind of different governments or states or territorial sort of legislation. So Open Collective actually aims to do that. And so, for example, another example is like when I co-founded the Net Party in Argentina in 2013, we couldn't raise funds for our campaign until government approved our legal entity, our political party. And of course, the government wasn't very keen in approving a political party that was aiming, you know, at forcing this conversation between citizens and, you know, opening up Congress, et cetera. So we had to jump through some serious hoops to make it happen. And we got our party approved, I don't know, something like two weeks before or three weeks before election. So that's when we could start receiving money. And that's unfair.

That is very unfair because you depend on the same authority that you are trying to transform to receive money. Right? Yeah, you have to ask permission from the status quo if you can replace the status quo. There you go, exactly. It just doesn't make sense, right? And it's impossible. So now, for example, we have a political party on Open Collective

that it's a political party that was modeled after the Net Party in Uruguay, and they started raising funds on Open Collective. They're not waiting for the status quo to say the quo to say, the establishment to say, okay, you know, we are blessing you with your legal entity status and you can now collect money. Right. It's so wild to have done that like that. So let's, let's lay out Open Collective a little bit and put it on the table, talk about what it is and how it's designed.

And then, you know, we'll dig into the details and specifically how those details affect the greater open source community. That's the one that us and our audience are most concerned about. But obviously, there's a lot of different ways you can use Open Collective, like you just said, the political party. I know there's collectives for meetups, there's collectives for open source, there's probably collectives for all sorts of initiatives and things that you want to gather together around. But Open Collective as a thing calls itself a new form of association, transparent by design.

And it says a group of people with a shared mission that operates in full transparency. Can you take those two statements and kind of launch off and tell us more? I mean, essentially, Open Collective is a way to enable these new associations to become a collective that has funding and members and operates in full transparency. to bring it to the open source community, if you have an open source project for which you'd like to receive funding for, and you have maintainers from all around the world that they might or might not have met, they can now become a collective, become an entity without, again, without needing sort of any sort of government permission

and start raising funds on this platform. And it's transparent by design because the only way for this collective, for the collectives in general, to receive funding or get money out of the system is by doing it on the platform and everything gets recorded. And so it's transparent by design. We think that the conversation about money, especially in volunteer communities or open source communities, it's a very tricky issue. It's a very tricky issue.

It's a hairy issue. And our proposal is that the way of making that easier is by being transparent about it. It's by showing what it takes to create an amazing open source project, right? Laying out what your expenses are and laying out what you expect to get out of it and allowing for others to cover those expenses, like starting a conversation about money. It's where the transparent by design kind of element for us is core to what we do. So transparency in terms of the purpose of the collective, as well as the financial needs of the collective, and then all the way to the use of those. So the expenses paid or the labor, however you end up using the money is all publicly available information.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. And because we genuinely believe that a big part of why it's so hard to talk about money in these kind of communities is because it's always a bit hash hash. We're always a bit guilty of, you know, asking for money sort of bringing all of that in the open, we think it's a way of, um, of me, of having a healthier conversation about, about money and funding in open source. Yeah. It also removes any reasonable doubt or skepticism around organizations who are willing to do that. I know one of the, I've always been very skeptical of most charities, almost all of them. Like I'm de facto cynical on charities because I don't know where that money's going. I'm not sure what happens. And you see all this, especially when it's, uh, for some reason,

uh, when it's trying to get me to send money somewhere in Africa, I'm thinking it's never going to get to where it needs to go. Um, and, and because there's no transparency, I can continue to remain as skeptical and cynical as I want because they're not proving otherwise. One charity that I've embraced and really appreciate is Charity Water and one of the reasons why I think Charity Water is so cool is because they show exactly where the money goes

and they keep you in the loop and they show you like, here's how much money is going 100% to this particular well in this particular region. It's geo position. So you can see where it is in the world and they'll send you pictures throughout the process. And just this level of transparency removes all the skepticism doubt because you know exactly what's happening. And so I think building that in by design enables a lot more people and groups to be to follow that example

yeah so an open collective exactly no an open collective is an it's an association um it's a group of people with a shared mission that operate transparently by design there's no other way it's not like github that you can have closer open collectives. Like an open collective is this. It's showing who's giving you money, where the money is going, submitting expenses, you know, uploading. You know, there are collectives that even if they don't have any donations yet are already submitting expenses because they want to show what goes into building a community, building a project, building a meetup.

And many of these things are taken for granted as well. And part of the problem, I think, before Open Collective appeared was that before the only way of managing money was either using someone's personal bank account, which is highly problematic, or, I don't know, a shoebox, or using cash. And so there was so much friction

going into funding a project like this. And our mission is to remove all of that friction and hopefully enable a lot more collaboration because all of this is in the open. Well, I think that sets the stage pretty well. We have a bunch of questions about Open Collective, how it works, the repercussions and what all the different details mean for us and for the open source community and anybody who's either engaging it as a collective or trying to join one. So let's take up our first break and we will talk about those things right after this.

I talked to Daniel Reed, Head of Design at TopTile about their new expansion into TopTile Designers, doing for designers what they've done for developers. We talked about why TopTile works for designers. And this is what she had to say. As a designer, the big or as any kind of creative person, the big overarching question is always like, how can you find inspiration? And for me personally and for a lot of creatives that I've spoken to,

it's really about traveling, exploring and being accountable for your own career. And I think as a TopTile designer or a remote designer in general the ability to be able to switch up your lifestyle, change contexts, meet new people, have new ideas sort of infiltrated into your life by having that freedom and flexibility is something that's absolutely fundamental to doing great work. That's the real power of TopTel I feel. You're not just stuck with one product, one company, or even one agency, but you can choose to work on multiple occasionally or a range of different clients. And I think that that keeps you fresh.

It gets you involved in new technologies, different people, and is really fundamental for being sort of switched on as a designer. All right, that was Daniel Reed, head of design for TopTile. To learn more, go to toptile.com slash designers. That's T-O-P-T-A-L dot com slash designers. Tell them Adam from the Changelog sent you. And now back to the show. All right, we are back with Pia Mancini talking about Open Collective. And before the break, you laid out Open Collective, what it is, its mission, and its design to a certain degree.

We'd like to understand how it works, I guess, on a practical sense for a hypothetical project and a new open collective being founded. Let's just say Adam and I have an open source project. It's getting popular, Project X. It's got a great name because it's Project X. And we've been putting time and effort into it. And we're starting to think if we're going to keep this going, you know, we might need a thousand bucks a month or some sort of income coming in. Let's start an open collective. How would the process work and what does open collective provide for our group and Project X? All right. So essentially, if Project X is an open source project, you would apply to create a collective.

The link is like open collective slash open source slash apply. And the reason why I'm mentioning that is because that connects to GitHub. So you would pick your repository and your contributors, your core contributors, and then we would create the Open Collective. And what that means has two different elements to it. So the first one is you will have your own public page on Open Collective. It's going to be opencollective.com slash project X. And there you will be able to state your mission, show your expenses and your donations, and show who your core contributors are.

And there's two buttons to receive donations. And now the second aspect of it is where the money goes. So once you guys have this set up and someone wants to come along and says like, oh, I love Project X, I want to give them $100 per month, they hit on your public page, give them $100 per month button, and then what happens?

So a Stripe model pops up, they use their credit card, and that money goes to your host organization. In this case, the host organization for open source projects at the moment is Open Collective. But it can be another organization that acts as the host. So, for example, the Ruby projects on Open Collective are not hosted by Open Collective. They are hosted by Ruby together. All the Docker meetups are hosted

on Docker themselves. What does the host do? Exactly. So the host role is to receive those supports earmarked for you, so in your name, and holds that money for you. And then when you, for example, submit an expense, say, for example, you have your hosting costs, you submit that expense on your open collective page, and the host organization reimburses you, pays that expense for you. That's the role of the host, of receiving funds for you and then paying for your expenses. Then what the host organization does as well, and this is the part that we were talking about of how we're removing friction for Project X in this case, is they keep the books on that money, they are compliant with regulations on that money, and they pay taxes if need be on those money. They are compliant with regulations on that money and they pay taxes

if need be on those funds. That's why they charge a fee for hosting you. So these are the two parts of Open Collective. The public page, that is where you can receive the funds. And then the host organization, that it's a legal entity that receives the funds and then the host organization that it's a legal entity that receives the funds in your name and manages it. So how can you trust the host? Well, the Open Collective is the host for all open source projects. So because this is all public information and it's transparent, everyone knows that Open Collective has X amount of money that belongs to Project X. And we then, when you submit an expense, we reimburse and that expense, we pay that expense from your pool of money. And because everything happens

on the Open Collective platform, it's very clear how much money each collective has, how much money is there left. And if you can, for example, pay or not for a certain expense, like the system, for example, won't let you submit an expense without an invoice. It won't let you pay for an expense if there are not sufficient funds in that collective. So that's how the system works. That's the setup that allows you to receive funding and use that money without needing to create a legal entity. Right. It's very much bring your own host kind of situation. So if I'm, if I have a relationship with a nonprofit or some sort of legal entity, I could have them host, you know, if I wanted to. So in case, in the case of the Ruby meetups or Ruby projects, they're using Ruby together

because they're a legal entity. I'm not sure if they're 5.1c3 or not, but for whatever reason, they could adopt them as their host or use a default of open collective. And that's the kind of default host, so to speak. So you can use the default or you can bring your own. That's correct. So for example, Women Who Code, it's a 501c3. It's a very large organization and they have local chapters like local women who code around the world and all of those sort of local networks are an open collective and the money is hosted by women who code 501c3 it's not hosted by us by open collective um docker did the same with their meetups so many meetups of docker around the world and the money goes to Docker.

And then they are in charge of paying those expenses. And we have collectives that are actually self-hosted as well, that they're using Open Collective as a transparent platform, crowdfunded platform, but they have their own legal entity. They have their own bank account, but they want to give that sort of provide that extra level of transparency. They want to use Open Collective as a way to receive money from backers and sponsors without worrying about setting this up. Right.

And so Democracy Earth is an example, for example. They are a foundation of 501c3, but they use Open Collective to receive funding as well. So it's bring your own host or find a host that you trust and that you have worked with or use Open Collective as a host. Is Open Collective as a host? Are the donations to those who use Open Collective as a host, are they a nonprofit donation? Are they tax-deductible donations? So not at this stage. We are still in the process of getting IRS approval for that.

But we are filing for F501c3 as well. So the idea is that the foundation, the Open Collective Foundation, is going to be the host organization for all open source projects and other kind of meetups and other kind of collectives that are non-for-profit or have charitable purposes or social impact. And that's going to be completely removed from Open Collective, the company that's managing the platform. Can we also break down the contributors portion of this, too?

So once we're past that stage, we've got our collective page. We've got we've informed our, you know, small budding community. Jared and I were working really hard on Project X and we're telling people about it. They're going to open.com slash Project X. And there's two options there. You mentioned contributors, which is either a backer, which I think is a person and a sponsor, which typically might be an organization or, you know, a company out there in the community who cares about what we're doing and they want to help us get there.

Can you kind of break down how that works? Yep. works yep so um this is the the way we set it up is um and again this a collective can decide to do this differently um so backers start at two dollars per month and typically they are individuals that are supporting um an open so any any collective and sponsors can be individuals or companies, but start at $100 per month support. And they have like different kind of avatars. And they, both of them show up as backers and sponsors on the GitHub readme of the collectives.

And then each collective can decide to have other, we call them tiers. So you can decide, for example, so Mocha.js, for example, starts for their sponsors at $500 per month, right? And you can decide, for example, React Boilerplate, they have this setup where they have a gold sponsor or silver sponsor and they have this setup where they have a gold sponsor or silver sponsor,

and they have different tiers, and they give them different online real estate on their website or their REITME, depending on the support that they receive. We are working with... So Webpack, what they did is they give sponsors gold points for their decision-making tool, the app they use for features. We're also working on offering office hours for sponsors, again, above a certain sort of threshold. So if you support a project with, I don't know,

above whatever number, like $1,000 per month, and this is just a makeup number. So you get one hour, you know, of a call per month with a core contributor or every other month with a core team, or you get sort of, you know, some things like that, that encourage support. And also we move past the goodwill right the charity model yes we talked about that recently jared on the the ending show for the first season of request for commits where michael said that companies need to reassess their relationship with open source and their idea that it's supporting it is charity

yeah totally like so part of the of the reason why we're doing a 501c3 foundation of 501c3 as well is because we want we want to experiment with building some sort of membership um organization so we created this open source collective. It's essentially a super collective, we call it, but it's like a bundle of every open source project on our platform. And we have sponsors at the open collective, at the open source collective level.

So we are working very hard to strike a couple of deals with some companies to give sort of a larger donation to the open source collective. And then we either distribute that to the projects that they're most interested in, or we give the members of the open source collective certain perks and things like that. So what we would like to do is to create a whole community around this idea that open source is not just giving money. It's about being part and a member of this group, of this community and bringing the companies on board as members of the collectives. For us, it's like breaking that barrier that is oh we have you know two thousand dollars per budget for this year we'll just give it to watsi or open source you know what i mean like we we want to

break that yeah and and and what we're experimenting with is creating a community where everyone is a member and you know you have certain perks for belonging, essentially, whether that's access to the maintainers or access to office hours or, you know, a better say on features. It really is up to the collectives to decide. Like we don't have we are not forcing anything. but it's about how we can work together in, in creating an environment where it's not the company just, you know, giving money when they're lucky or, you know, things like that,

or sending them pizza for a meetup, you know, which is great, but you can't live on pizza. Or you can, it's just not extremely healthy. Yeah, exactly.

You can live for a little while. You can live. I like the idea of the super collective or the you know your open source which is a collective of collectives i could see that being as you branch out into you know other budding initiatives you could have collectives you could have like these groups where maybe it's the the internet freedom collective and you have an EFF collective and this collective and you have these other people that are doing different things supporting internet freedom or whatever the bigger mission happens to be. And you could just, you know,

Adam, maybe he loves EFF, so he's going to contribute directly to them. But I just love internet freedom in general. And so I'm just going to contribute at a higher level and let the money go where it needs to go. That's uncanny because we are actually building an internet-free super collective with OTF, with the Open Technology Fund. Absolutely. Wow. I did not know that. Yeah, I thought you had seen it. No, no, I just was thinking that would be a good use case.

So I guess I drilled it. Yeah, you just, that's exactly it. And so building these sort of super collectives and the Internet Freedom Collective, it's a great example. So all the projects that OTF funded or they can't fund for a certain reason, but they would love to fund um and so bundling all together means that they can give them for example um um i don't know they can give the the collectives um a workshop on how to apply to grants for example or like crypto kind of you know um teaching or of some um sort or um and others and kind of perks that that makes sense at that sort of level it's about sort of mutualizing resources for certain groups so yeah that's that's super interesting but when I think so I'm not sure if we put it out there yet but I know in the break

we did ask you how long open Collective has been in place. And you said this is 2017 now. So in 2016, you found it in February. Is that right? Or was it 2015? Yeah, no, no. 2016. Okay.

So we're not even a year into this thing. Yeah. So we started actually working, and I know this because my baby was two months old, on the 11th of January. We started sort of working and then we went live pretty much early February. And our first collectives were, or amongst our first collectives were Yeoman, for example, girls atlanta is kika's meetup um from atlanta and um so yeah we are super proud of them and then of course women who code came on board really really early on and it was a great learning curve um with them i think over the next little bit i'd like to break down kind of like not only how much

money you've enabled to be raised, but also how and what you've done to get it right. Because this isn't the first time something like this has come about. And you've got other platforms out there that kind of have not exactly the same mission, but the nuts and bolts and the way things work are very similar. So maybe we can start out with since last February, what the effort has done. So I think I'll put it in your hands to explain the details of it. Basically, we're looking at roughly $141,000 towards open source has been raised or what you call an annual budget, basically, for that across 100 collectives and more than 8,300 contributors. So let's break down kind of like what the effort has collected so far, the impact so far, and then what you've been doing right to get there.

So we didn't start with open source as our focus at the beginning. We experimented with many different collectives, but very soon we realized that open source, the open source community had a massive pain point there because meetups, whether you like it or not, they, they already were already dealing with money somehow. They, you know, like some way or another, they were managing to get some of their expenses paid. Yes, it's painful. And they had to match an expense with a donor. You know, someone paid for the place, someone paid for the pizzas.

But open source had absolutely nothing. And it really was a big pull for us instead of us pushing open collective. We started receiving a lot of inbound requests to create collectives. And it's been a very long learning curve. to realize that part of the problem was not the collectives or the open source collectives not knowing how to spend the money, wanting support but not being sure how to go about asking for money. And so talking through these issues with our community, with the open source collectives has been very helpful. And the latest result of that was that we completely, well, not completely, but we did a big redesign of the open collective, the collectives page, where now the expenses and the donations are at the very top above the fold.

And that was us saying we need to talk about money in these kind of communities instead of, you know, talking about what we do and what's great about the projects and the people. And then at the very last, you know, the issue that no one really wants to talk about, that it's money. So, you know, bringing that at the front of the design, your expenses and then asking for people to cover those expenses without being ashamed of that. And then talking about how's best to spend that money, whether it's, you know, paying for features or whether it's giving contributors X portion of those funds as rewards for their work, or paying infrastructure that everyone shared, like swag, or flying people to meetups, or conferences, or paying for someone to go speak about your project at a certain conference or things like that.

So I think that what we really learned, our biggest learning curve was not the fact that it was difficult to raise money, which it is, but what was more complicated was how to spend that money and how to have a conversation about how to spend that money. And that's super interesting. Something else that we learned as well was at the very beginning, we thought that companies would jump at the opportunity to give to open source. That is not the case. I love the dramatic pause.

It, you know, it was like we have some amazing sponsors that have been sponsors of the platform from the very, very, very first day. And, you know, we love them to bits for that. But there are very few like the rest. We really need to to to work to get them on board. And also part of our challenge and part of our role as Open Collective and sort of in a way of like stewards of these communities, like how do we help the communities deal with the fact that maybe they're going to have an Open Collective, but it's not like they're going to receive, you know, thousands of dollars from day one, right? And how to, what are the best strategies to find those funders or those donors and how to reach out to sponsors and companies. We did that a lot ourselves at the very beginning,

like really trying to understand what the value proposition is for sponsors. And I think that part of why we struggled so much at the beginning was because we were seeing it through the lens of charity yeah you give to open source because how are you not going to give to your netflix how are you not going to give to gulp.js for crying out loud it's like it's such a big part of of your you know and um and that's not the right focus. That's not the best approach. And we learned that the hard way. We learned that from really not being able to find sponsors or to help collectives get sponsors. focus has much more to do with um being as i was saying before like everyone being part of a

certain community and getting something in exchange for their support right like really getting what they need that it might be support might be access to information might be just you know the ability to reach out every now and then to a Sean of the, you know, the Sean Larkins of the world, and they're replying to an email, um, or things like that. And, um, and I think that there's a lot of companies out there that use these, um, projects that they're not the Netflix and Google and Yahoo's, but they are the a thousand and one pharmacies, you know, and they, they are willing to support the technology that they use, the softwares that they use, the open source softwares that they use. But because they need, they also need something in return.

They also want to be in the know. They also want to be part of this community. And we are working, like that's our, the framework that we've been've been i guess that's been guiding our actions one aspect of that which this may be getting too far into the weeds but uh i'll give it a shot anyways is you said that one of the major changes that helped um was to put money first whether it's in your design or the conversations you have and even your focus um One thing that you all do on the website is you reference everything in terms of annual budget. And that takes me aback every time I see it because I always think it's going to be monthly

budget because maybe that's just how my brain works. And then I realize it's annual. And so I get very excited and then I get like a little bit depressed. I'm like, oh, I look at CycleJS. I'm like, wow, six grand a month. And then I see it like, oh, that's annual. And then I have like a little bit depressed. I'm like, oh, because I look at CycleJS. I'm like, wow, six grand a month. And then I see it like, oh, that's annual. And then I have like a sad emoji face. I'm curious why you focus on annual budget and what the implications of that have been.

That's a very fair point. And because most of the donations are recurring, we project those donations to a year. And I think that organizations need that sort of previsibility of where we're going to be a couple of months down the track. What do we have to work with during a whole year? And I think that's very healthy to start thinking about these groups as organizations, as collectives that have, you know, like a proper, they can, exactly. They know sort of what they're going to have in four months down the track. So what features can they build now, et cetera, et cetera.

So that was the goal of having the annual budget. When we redesigned the page, we put the monthly budget as well, the available budget there as well, for that number to be sort of readily available. So you can see how much they have to spend for the year, but they also see how much they have right now. And so that's a way of, for you know what we're trying to do is to incentivize um more backers and sponsors for these collectives and and it's um i think design i mean behavioral wise it's it's a tough call like on the one hand you want to show that a collective is successful because you know that brings more donations but at the same time you don't want to show like you have too much money because then they're like oh i'm not

going to give to these guys they already have you know all of this money um so i mean it's we should probably do more testing on on um how are you know the backers or potential backers or sponsors feel when they see one number or the other one. You know, if you see that a collective has $400, you might not be very inclined to support because you think that, you know, whatever you have to give might not really, you know, make a difference or they're not going to be sustainable anyway, kind of thing. And so we were also trying to avoid that.

The bigger number is always uh more exciting as jared has clearly stated that he gets really excited with the bigger number and the smaller number could uh you know he gets the sad face emoji whenever he sees a smaller number as opposed to the original bigger number maybe i missed it but what exactly what does the annual budget number consist of is it the expected donations or is it actually something where the team behind project x or webpack or whatever has gone and said okay we have these expenses now let's raise towards those expenses no it's projected donations okay and then you also show funds available which means that they're going to potentially they're projecting 33.

I'm just using Webpack as an example, 33, you know, $34,000 a year in annual budget. And right now they've got just a little under $14,000 of funds available. Correct. So that's what they have to spend right now. Right. OK. Yeah. And so they can submit expense. I mean, they can submit any expense that they want. And we actually encourage them to submit all their expenses regardless of whether they have the funds to cover them or not. We're soon going to get we're going to do this feature where I can say, you know, we we are spending I'm paying out of my own pocket for Project X. You know, a hundred dollars per month for whatever service

um please help us cover it and so someone can choose to either make a donation to the sort of larger pot or can decide okay i'm gonna just cover your hosting costs or i'm gonna cover your you know rental of the mic or your podcast or whatever whatever it is almost give them like certain things that's what i was thinking like is the is the budget based on like, as Jared said, it's kind of weird why why use an annual budgetup. We've got a swag order going in place. We got this person going here to spread the news and evangelize. We've got this person going there to give a talk at their local meetup. There's expenses associated there. They kind of add all those up and make a budget.

But it seems it's the opposite, which is. It's like a double entry. Like sometimes, you know, you know that you have some, a grant, for example. And so you decide how you, you better allocate those resources or you have,

this is how much I have to be, because if you don't know, if you have more money than you thought, or if you got less money than you thought, you might sort of allocate your resources differently. So what we want to give the collectives is an idea of how much money they're going to have for the year so they can plan better and create a better roadmap.

But they can also list all their expenses and encourage people to support, to cover each of those expenses in particular. Because if you only take the, these are my expenses approach then um i think that you'll tend to be you know there are things that you might not include because you'll never think you get the money right to do right it doesn't like to dream bigger either i wasn't advocating one way or another i was just trying to figure out how it broke down because on one side of my brain i'm thinking okay it'd be nice to actually set a budget because it's it's true. It's what I it's what I or the organization needs to do what we're trying to do.

And on the other side, it's like, well, if we dream a little bit bigger, maybe we can do a bit more and fly somebody somewhere versus do a teleconference, for example. You know, so gives them a bit more legs there. And what I think is beautiful about what this conversation is that now open source projects can do that. And that's where I feel like this sort of warm, fuzzy feeling of we're doing a great thing for this community because you can now plan like that. You can have your budget. You can dream bigger.

You can stop worrying about other things. Maybe we're definitely not at a point where maintainers can get fully paid for open source, for their open source work. I would absolutely love to take Open Collective there. And that's what I work for. But at least we are now having a conversation about, all right, we have this money, how are we going to use it, you know, better, what are our costs? And that that sort of that keeps open source sort of more sustainable for the future because these conversations is how you build stable long-lasting organization but it goes back to what jared said earlier how he's um just naturally cynical towards

towards a situation like this where if you open the transparency up like that you remove the assumptions and like you said also that this is something that the open source community hadn't really had at their fingertips to have a decentralized way of basically collecting money and not having jared or me be the caretaker that money it's it's removed from us so there's a lack or a potential hopefully a lack of uh of a foul play i guess or what do you call that the word friction i was thinking more like uh corruption corruption that's the word i was thinking of and i lost it so the lack of corruption on on how the money because that's the biggest problem is that, is that you come in with this lack of trust. And then the other side of that is that open source hasn't had this.

You haven't been able to collectively organize a group without having a political or legal entity. As I mentioned earlier, now you have a way where you can and you can be transparent about it. So there's trust. That's, that's like a new foundation to build upon that hasn't been there before so the overarching point we're trying to all get here

i think was like figuring out what you had done well versus other platforms i think that's clearly a good example of you know getting to a realization of how important transparency is especially especially in a world where you might not know, ever meet the person you're working with, right? Maybe we have collectives that they've never seen each other. And so getting to trust each other, as you say, it's very difficult. And being transparent about it,

it's as important towards the backers and the sponsors as it is towards your own community and the members, your fellow core contributors. Well, that's a good spot to take our next break. This is our final break for the show, but when we come back, we're going to dive deep into what the future might hold for Open Collective and those trusting this awesome platform to to empower them to to unite and form,

you know, international communities that are not bound by their birthplace or origin. It's you're breaking down barriers. So let's take this break. When we come back, we'll dive a bit into where the future is going. So we'll be right back. Rollbar puts errors in their place, full stack error tracking for all applications in any language. And I talked to Brian Rood, the CEO and co-founder of Rollbar, deeply about what Rollbar is, what problem it solves, and why you should use it.

Take a listen. How do you build software faster? Like, how do you build better software faster? And there are tons and tons of aspects to that. Like, in Ruby, you can have a better language, you can have better frameworks that help you be more expressive and more productive. So the flip side of that is, like,

after you've built something that works, or at least mostly works, how do you go about getting it from working to, like, in production and actually working? How do you cover the edge cases? How do you find things you missed? How do you iterate on it quickly? And that's kind of where what we're trying to do comes in. So we're trying to say after you've shipped

your software, you're not done. You know, you still have, there's still work to do. And we want to help make that process of maintaining and polishing and keeping things running smoothly be really, really, really easy. So like developers spend roughly half their time debugging, right? So anything we can do to make that process better is going to have a huge impact. All right. That was Brian Ruse, CEO and co-founder of rollbar sharing with you exactly why it fits why it works for you head to rollbar.com change law you get the bootstrap plan for free for 90 days that's basically 300 000 errors tracked totally for free give rollbar a try today again head over to rollbar.com slash changelog.

All right, we're in the last segment with Pia Mancini talking about just in general funding open source through Open Collective, a lot of different ways to decentralize how you give to an organization that doesn't need a political backing or a legal entity. And Pia, we talked about a lot of fun stuff in this conversation,

but to wrap it up, let's talk about portions of this blog post you wrote recently on medium. It's titled 2016 on open collective and what's in the works for 2017. I'm more interested in the 2017 part because we've kind of covered 2016 so far in this conversation, but what happened, what's coming up that people may not be aware of um so i mean we're going to be experimenting with a couple of things that are all going towards our goal of enabling communities to be financially sustainable so um the first feature that it's going to be, um, live super soon to put some pressure there, um, it's going to be, it's going to be, um, being able to sell tickets for

events or, um, for, you know, any sort of conference that you're doing. Um, and, um, and so there's in that blog post that you mentioned, there is a link to the feature where we're having that discussion. We have a lot of meetups on Open Collective. And so we're trying to help them, you know, use Open Collective not only to receive donations, but also to sell tickets or swag or things like that for specific events. So the other sort of things that we're going to be exploring is with our common friend,

Justin, for example, Dofman from Stickermule. If we can allow for people to buy stickers from open source projects and then that money going to their open collective, like that sort of marketplace. The same with Teespring. So projects can have like a campaign where they are promoting, they have t-shirts with the project's logo. Then someone can go buy, purchase that on Teespring

and that money, you know, above the cost, whatever goes to their open collective. So finding these ways of integrating with other services that will help them be more sustainable. And also part of this effort is something that we touched upon before, this idea of office hours. So if you have sponsors that you're offering them, you know, five hours per month with the core team to go through their pains and issues they're having

using your software, then managing all of that can be very stressful, obviously, for the maintainers, and it shouldn't be their job. So how do we make that very, very easy for them where they, you know, a ticket can be a slot for an office hours as well, right, for an hour of a call. So everything that goes towards helping them manage the way they are sustainable and the way they receive more funding. And that's going to be our focus for 2017, which brings me to the second issue there in the blog post that is the sustain and come that we were just talking about. So what we'd like to do, and this is together with other organizations, again, StickerMule

and GitHub and Gratipay. How can we, and ChangeLog, how can we... Yay! So having like a day-long meetup of maintainers and sponsors and a mix of people talking about open source for the future, how we can make this last in the future.

And sort of the idea of the sustain and conf is going to be quite flexible. But what we know we don't want is like having speakers or, you know, having keynotes. We want to talk about it face to face, you know, in real life about what are we doing, how we where we want to go, where how can we help the open source community reach the places they want to reach and, you know, make these amazing softwares last and be well maintained and keep growing. So it's going to be like a large conversation about that. And that's coming up in May 2017. So very soon. Yeah. Yeah. Very soon. We are. Yeah. Soon. Don't say that. If someone's listening, where would they go to find out more? How can they submit their name to an email list or just kind of be informed?'s the best way to keep up on that okay thank you for that so um in our open collective slack so slack.opencollective.com um there's a channel sustain and conf everyone's talking there like that's the place where we gather so just join

slack.opencollective.com and in there the sustain and channel. It's a very agile unconference moving very quickly, coming soon. I know Justin Dortman from Sticker Mule is working on a website, so there'll be more information coming out soon. That should be a lot of fun and a lot of good conversations will be had around sustaining open source there. You mentioned Gratapay as another person involved or another group that's involved in that. One thing we haven't done,

and Gratapay is probably the other platform that I think about when it comes to this kind of funding for projects. Just briefly, could you give us a quick compare and contrast? What are the things where Gratapay and Open Collective are the same and how are they different? Just for reference. Sure.

I think the main difference is like our aim, if you want our goal in life is the same. We want to make open source sustainable for the future. What the main difference is that we don't require a bank account or a legal entity to receive the funding. And we have an element of transparency about who's funding the project and where that money is going. I think that's sort of the biggest difference.

Yeah. Very cool. One thing that I've been thinking this whole conversation and haven't quite asked yet, so I'm going to just lay it out there now is you mentioned that it's in the works and perhaps in the near future, you're, you're separating open collective, the host, the open source host, which is the legal entity that has to, has to be coming in on nonprofit from open collective,

the company that runs the platform. First of all, did I understand that correctly? And then secondly, if I did, how does Open Collective, the company, make money and what's its plan for sustainability? Yeah, you got that exactly right. So the company had some early investors early on, they're all listed in opencollective.com slash, I think, FAQ in the, I think in the FAQs or in the about. So all our investors are there. Most of them are friends, co-founders, entrepreneurs from other companies that are just supporting this. We decided a couple of months ago

not to raise a traditional sort of seat round, if you wish. We are trying to bootstrap as much as we can. It's a big challenge. It's hard. But the goal is to try and keep this project as lean as possible until we can live out of the fees we charge.

And so at the moment, Open Collective keeps 5% of the donations that are coming through the platform. And the host organization that until now is still Open Coll collective is going to be separated very soon keeps another five percent or hosts can choose to have a different percentage but the platform is going to survive with um survive sustain itself with five percent of the donations that go into the platform so five percent goes to the company and then another percentage, 5% if you're on the open source or the open collective. Correct. But if you're on a different host like Docker, they could take 3% or 5%. It's up to them.

Exactly. So collectives that are joining, they know up front that, hey, I'm going to, you know, between 5% and 10% of our donations are going to go to the platform slash host. Yeah, absolutely. Gotcha. There's a lot of sort of work involved. When we don't sort of administrate tasks of reviewing the expenses and making sure that, you know, the invoices are correct and paying, reimbursing everyone every Friday and dealing with the bookkeeping and taxes and all of that, then the platform fees are 5%.

When we do all of that, which means when we're a host, then the sort of whole fee is 10%. Maybe we can also mention too the extra effort you put into actually helping collectives succeed. I know when we talked to Sean, Jared, I don't know if we got too deep into it, but I think maybe in some of the breaks or post conversations after the actual show, we talked a bit about their involvement with open collective and their success

there, which I don't think we covered too deeply on the show, just enough, maybe towards the end, but he was very thankful for the loads of help that he had gotten from you all. And I'm not sure what that meant or what the details were, but maybe that's something you could touch on too, is the not just the bookkeeping side and the, you know, platform side, but the actual human element that you bring to say, how can we help collectors be successful?

Yeah. I mean, and I think that that's part of the, you know, if you want, you know, moderate initial success that we've had is that our interests are very much aligned. Like the better the open source community does, the better Open Collective does. And then we have more spare, you know, money to build in features that are going to help the open source community have more funding and better funding and better access. So it's this sort of, you know, help them through how they're going to spend the money, help them sort through some of the conflicts that might bring suddenly having funding or helping them with ideas like writing blog posts with them, like reviewing their blog posts or, you know, anything that we can do to help them have more sponsors and have a healthier relationship with their funding and get the word out there, for us, it's a win-win situation.

So we do help them a lot. Initially, what I was doing was just reaching out to sponsors myself, saying, this is an amazing open source project. You guys should give money to, or I know that Netflix uses this, or I know that Yahoo uses this or, you know, Spotify uses this, you know,

you should support them. Um, so, and I think that it was a really good effort, but, um, it felt a bit, a bit less legit.

So we, you know, because I'm not part of that community or that project in particular. So now what we're doing is, you know, they write an initial blog post launching their open collective and then we share it among, you know, the companies that we know and our contacts among the sponsors

and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I'm, you know you know i try to i chase them a lot so poor sean like i i you know i think him every now and then about a blog post that i really want him to do or um um yeah the the pre-act team you know they still i i would love them to do their blog post to launch their open collective. That is doing great. And I want them to harness this momentum and really get more funding. So I've been pestering them a fair bit. helping the collectives that are on our platform be the best that they can

and have the best possible funding and best relationship with their sponsors and in general have a healthy ecosystem for supporting open source long-term. A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source long-term. That sounds like a pretty good thing to me. What do you think, Adam? That's the best direct, whether it's not a tagline or not, I don't know.

That's the easiest, concise way to say it. All right. Me too. Maybe that's a new tagline. There you go. At least for the open source section. Well, you mentioned the 5% and the 10%. And, you know, despite how much

success you've had in the first year, which is admirable, and it's been a lot, I mean, annual budget across the whole system, I think you said was around 393,000. And so if we just do a little bit of math on that 5% of that, well, 10% would be 39 grand. So you're making, you know, as a team, the platform slash open collective host is made less than, you know, 40,000. Of course, your boots, you know, you're, you have some money. Thankfully right now you're trying to stay bootstrapped, but where do you have to get in terms of like, do you guys have a goal for, you know, here's our sustain, our sustainability point for, Open Collective, the team. We need to get to a million dollars per year so that we can get 8% of that. What's your goals in terms of... I mean, we know obviously our burn rate

and how much runway we have left. And our burn rate currently is under... It would be around 30K a month, a bit under that maybe. But so we know we need to hit that mark before our current funding runs out. Or we need to bring more investors on board or, you know, we need to, um, to build something that we, we, we really like to experiment with maybe, I mean, open collective being an open collective, which it is, but, but to its full extent, right. So having members and saying like what these guys are doing are, it's really important

for online communities across the board. So yes, i'm going to give to webpack but i'm also going to give to open collective um so we are running a very very lean operation at the moment where there's three of us a designer that we that's a contractor um and so we're we're trying to really be very careful with how we spend, but we are also very, you know, trying to be very bold in how we experiment with funding. That's something that we struggle a lot with. We do not want to go through the traditional path. And so how, you know, whether we end up being ourselves an organization that, you know, you could give $10 per month, right?

Because you believe in Open Collective as a platform. And so that might be very doable for us. So like we'd really prefer that model. So if we can live on that, that's definitely what we will try to do. And experimenting is fun. You know, we are trying to really think outside of the box in terms of new organizational structures for open collective so it's it's fun a lot of fun it's scary but a lot of fun so just some quick math here based on jared's estimate of just under

40 000 your burn rate roughly being 30K a month. You pretty much need to add current burn rate 10X annual budgets to get close to meeting your burn rate. Yeah. To break even. Yes. Absolutely. So like 4 million-ish. Yeah.

Yeah. Would get you break even. Mm-hmm if i mean if it if this doesn't happen so something that i didn't mention that i think is interesting as well is we the three of us took a 10-year vesting on open collective so we are like a traditional sort of c corp c corp um but instead of having a four-year vesting, that is the average sort of time in which your, you know, equity sort of. So we took a 10-year one because we think that this is long-term. And so if we have to, you know, find creative ways of supporting Open Collective throughout

the first couple of years until we are sort of at that point i think we you know we would we would experiment with that we are really here for the sort of long haul um and so that's that's also a signal that we want we wanted to give to everyone in the community like we're not building something that we're not building a company that you would flip and sell in four years this is really for us it's like you know 10 years of our life that we decided that we want to do this at least um because this will take time and we are more than okay with that um so if we don't meet that next year it's going to be the next one and we'll find ways of you know crossing the desert wow that's really that's pretty cool yeah definitely i think the next one and we'll find ways of, you know, crossing the desert. Wow. That's really, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, definitely. I think the next thing I'll say is thank you for, uh, for stepping out like that. I mean, not many people are doing that and it takes a lot of courage to and commitment giving that, uh, you know, you have family, you have people you love, you have things you can do, but to commit yourself like that to such a great cause is awesome. And to do it well. I mean, year one, this is year one. I mean, not even year one. It's still under year one.

And even during that year, you, to your own words, weren't getting it right, so to speak. You learned the lesson of transparency first and making the communication between funding and the community and that kind of thing be a bit more transparent and be a bit more clear and so this is what you did year one i can't wait to see the i can't wait to talk to you next year and be like bam this, this is what happened. I know. How exciting, right? Well, Pia, anything else you want to cover? I know Jared and I had a lot of questions here, but we're getting ready to wrap up. So I want to give you a chance to cover anything that we may have not talked about that you

wanted to cover. Anything, any closing thoughts, any welcoming invitation to the community, to Open Collective, whatever you want to share here is really what this is about. So anything else you want to share before we wrap up? No, you guys been super thorough. Thank you very, very, very much for, for having me and just to your audience in general, I really love you to go to open source to open collective.com slash open source, let's apply and,

you know, join this community. I think that, as I said, the more amazing projects we have, the better we're going to get at having better sponsors, more backers. And,

you know, we would love to have everyone on board. As long as you're not like web back that you're breaking. But no, I'm kidding. Right. Pretty much. That's the success story there. But pretty much. Right. Yeah. So no, we love Webpack. They've been amazing. And it's such a great example of how this can work when everyone's interest is aligned and we are talking about the topics that we need to talk and dealing with the issues that you know we need to deal and such a great project that uh yeah we love them anyway i also

want to direct people for you uh since open collective is open source go to github.com slash open collective you'll see uh some various projects there. I believe, uh, your website, I believe is just slash open collective and there's a bunch of issues there. So to the community out there listening, if you want to step in and help, uh, triage issues, documentation, things like that, that's probably a great place to get started to reach out to the team behind Open Collective. Yeah, absolutely. We welcome every PR and support and issues and feedback. We really thrive on feedback. And so, yeah, just jump in there. And even the issue you mentioned earlier,

issue 177 was support for paid events. A lot of communication going on there from the team, everything from the details on the API to some of the design pieces there so we'll link that up in the show notes listeners so just go to the show notes and check out that the notes and obviously links there so we'll link it off to that and I think this is really

interesting how you're sharing all this there and inviting people to come in and participate it's like Jerry we're not even doing this level of like sharing your design and issues we need to do this more man we need well i mean we do have the slack we're opening that up that's that's something happening soon but this is definitely leading in a good way i like that well pia thank you so much for joining us and to the listeners out there thank you for tuning in

and um i'm sure if you're listening to this you love open source as much as we do. We wrap a great big green heart around open source and the communities around it. So thank you for listening to the show. And if you don't subscribe to our weekly email, Jared, is this is a good email or is it a bad email? What kind of email is it? What is wrong with you if you don't subscribe to this email? Come on. changelog.com weekly you've listened this far into this episode and you're not subscribed to changelog weekly what is wrong what's wrong here adam fix the problem go to changelog.com weekly put your email in no spam the best email

ever overarching all of open source all of the community It's language agnostic. We share lots of great stuff in there. Our favorites, everything from best projects to videos we find on YouTube and elsewhere to some of the best articles out there covering what's happening in open source today. So that's it for this show. So let's say goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks again, Pia.

Bye, guys. Thank you.