Open Source Collective Update #5
From our September 2019 board meeting.
From our September 2019 board meeting.
The Open Source Collective is a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization the serves as a fiscal sponsor to over 1,400 open source projects on Open Collective. We believe in transparency, so we’re publishing regular recaps of what happens in our board meetings.
Recent Financials
Balance: $158,180
Income
Aug+Sept: $23,094
(mainly from host fees)
Expenses
Aug+Sept: $3,723
- $2,500 Executive Director role (Alanna)
- $600 Accountants fees
- $350 Admin assistant
- $200 Maintainer Support Group facilitators
See our full transparent budget here.
Operational Update
- Our new admin assistant Alina is working out great. She's helping with processing expenses, user support, and projects like reorganising our document system.
- Maintainer Support Group continues and is going well. We're meeting every two weeks. The group is small but we're hoping to keep growing it through existing members inviting their friends. We're meeting every two weeks.
- The Back Your Stack update is nearly ready to release. It will enable one subscription for all your dependencies.
- New Collective page launching this week!
- Richard is working on a prototype to use GitHub stars as a way to determine which companies use which open source projects, to facilitate sponsorship relationships and help projects understand their users.
- Open Collective is hiring a new full time engineer.
Recruitment
We got a number of applications for the marketing role and have interviewed two people so far. We'll make decisions and offers in the coming weeks.
Joining OSI
The board has decided to join the Open Source Initiative as premium member. As we are small, the annual cost is only $1,000. We want to support their work and we think they could support our work by sharing our news and opportunities with their network. It's also good for building relationships and our brand.
New Board Members
We are acting to increase the size of our board, beginning with extending invitations to a few people already close to us. In the future, we'd like to have a more open process for accepting new board members from our wider community. We will aim to work on that in 2020.
Sustain
Sustain 2020 has been given the green light and the kickoff meeting with the organising team happened this week. We have a group of about six people from partner organisations committed to help, with Pia leading and Alanna supporting. That group will begin meeting every two weeks.
The aim is to hold a central event early next year, possibly in Europe around the time of FOSDEM but details to be determined. We also want to enable worldwide satellite events in local communities at the same time.
Supporting OSCA Fest
We have supported Open Source Community Africa through sponsoring their events. They are requesting us to sponsor their OSCA Fest event coming up in February.
We think this initiative is worth supporting, and can also help continue to build the Sustain brand, which is strategic for us. So the board agrees in principle.
We think it makes the most sense to coordinate it with the next Sustain event around the same time. Pia will bring this up with the Sustain organising team and figure out next steps.
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