2016 on Open Collective

And what’s in the works for 2017!

And what’s in the works for 2017!

2016 is finally ending and let’s be frank, we can’t wait for this year to be over!😱😱

It’s been a heck of a year all over the world, but as we say: “never let a good crisis go to waste”. Crisis are opportunities 🌱 to change, opportunities to reinvent the way we live and work together, for the better.

We believe in communities. We believe that they are the best positioned to give everyone the opportunity to learn and give back to the world.

To enable those communities to sustain themselves and thrive, we need a new form of association open and transparent by design. We call them “open collectives”. In 2016 we’ve created 156 active open collectives and together they already have a yearly budget of more than $350k from over 1000 backers!

We support a wide variety of collectives including open source projects, meetup groups like Rails Girls Atlanta, SF Data Science, and Consciousness Hacking, collectives developing civic technology like DemocracyEarth and Tabula, teaching groups like CodeBuddies, a Universal Basic Income Europe initiative and even an amazing film and art collective!

We also created the Open Source Collective to find a way to sustain open source software and we raised over $120k across 100 collectives!

On the Move

We traveled to Mexico, Barcelona, Australia, Berlin, Brussels, NYC and DC to talk about Open Collective. Read, see, hear about them.

If you are organizing a conference that touches upon finding ways to make communities more sustainable, please reach out to us or directly to any collective so that they can share their experience with you. (They can all be reached out at info@[collectivename].opencollective.com, ex: info@railsgirlsatl.opencollective.com)

Coming up in 2017

We want to experiment, together with our community, to find new ways for collectives to get funding. The first obvious one is events. We’d like to enable collectives to organize events and sell tickets for them. (There’s a open issue about this feature 👉 here.) But it shouldn’t stop there. Collectives could also offer slots for office hours, speaking opportunities at companies or conferences, or organize campaigns for special projects. Our goal remains the same: to enable communities to be financially sustainable.

Stay tuned for news about >$ustain an unconference in early 2017 entirely about sustaining open source for the future!

Thank you all for helping us make the communities that we love more sustainable, open and inclusive!!

We picked a few random tweets to honor our community, please know that we are super grateful for **all** your mentions, comments and feedback!

🔔 🔔 Don’t forget:

- You can discover other great collectives to support on https://opencollective.com/discover

- You can manage your subscriptions on https://opencollective.com/subscriptions

- We are an open collective ourselves and our code is available on Github under MIT license. We welcome contributions of any kind!

With lots of ❤️, the Open Collective core contributors

Aseem, Pia and Xavier