Open Collective Update — January 2019

Transparent Grants, Open Source Gift Cards, & Reimagining Money

Gift cards are live! See how TripleByte, Digital Ocean, and Airbnb are decentralizing sponsorship by enabling their employees, ambassadors, or candidates to donate to their favorite open source projects.


Samsung Next is collaborating with Open Collective for the first cohort of the Stack Zero Decentralization Grant, which is supporting open source and research teams that further the decentralization space, to create transparent budgets and track grant progress.

The Samsung NEXT Stack Zero Grant Program supports early stage teams that build the decentralized infrastructure, tools and applications for the future web to be open, interoperable and transparent.


What can money be with a different set of values, based on trust, community, and transparency? Open Collective team member Alanna Irving spoke at the New Frontiers conference in New Zealand.

Stay calm, untangle your GitHub notifications.
Octobox.io: how to tame those garden fairies.

“Octobox is built for anyone struggling under the weight of notifications they receive, or for those who use a workflow centerd on issues, PRs, comments and commits.”

JHipster’s Bounty System and how it saved the project.
The back story.

“Every month we assign a budget and select and tag bounty issues. People can submit pull requests and claim the bounty on Open Collective.”

News & Inspiration

Eventbot is giving 3% of revenue to open source: “We think it’s critically important to support open source and, more specifically, the people who make it all possible.

The Webform module for Drupal joins Open Collective: “Open source software is typically created using full transparency. The problem of open source sustainability may be best solved using full transparency.”

Henry Zhu has some great ideas for 2019: a podcast about maintainers and a game that helps people experience what a maintainer does and empathize.

Why PDF Analytics is backing Allure Framework, a flexible lightweight multi-language test report tool, on Open Collective.

Matz getting real about what it’s like being an open source maintainer and leading the Ruby project.

This deep and detailed post about Organizational Debt in the Rust Project, speaks to the real challenges of running an open source community at scale.

AMPhtml sums up a Year of Open Source Funding: “Relying on people’s volunteered free time to drive mission critical open source software is not a sustainable mode of operation. As a community we need to find new ways to fund the valuable work on such projects."

Tweets that made us proud