September 2017 News: Webpack Webinar, New Help Forum, Ads for OSS + more

Webinar: How Webpack Reached $400K+/year in Sponsorship & Crowdfunding

Join us online Oct 9 at 5PM PST / 8PM EST.

Sean Larkin will share Webpack’s experiences growing their Open Collective budget, and answer your questions. Learn about attracting backers, sponsor relationships, grant searching, vendor partnerships, revenue through support/training, and more.

Get your ticket now.

Our New Help Forum

Got questions? Want to share knowledge with other users? Check it out!

Using Ads to Sustain Open Source

We’re running several experiments exploring the use of ethical advertising to create new revenue streams for collectives. You can participate! Find out more.

Using Ads to Sustain Open Source

Why someone who loves Privacy Badger, uses a non-tracking browser, and never cared for ads, is advocating their ethical…

We also love this introduction to one of our advertising partners, Code Sponsor:

Fighting for Open Source Sustainability: Introducing Code Sponsor

tl;dr: Two-thirds of the top OSS projects are maintained by one or two people. This is not sustainable. We can help.

Featured Collectives

Cycle.js: A Unified Theory of Everything for JavaScript

Nick Johnstone on what makes Cycle special, the two-year long ‘weekend project’, great community engagement, and the…

“We need to shift users of open source from consumers to contributors. It’s not somebody else’s code, it’s our code.”

Social.coop: A Cooperative Decentralized Social Network

Social.coop is a cooperatively run instance of Mastodon, a decentralized social network based on open protocols and…

“We’re poised to build a more transparent, equitable, up-front economic layer for the open-source ecosystem.”

Vue is now on OpenCollective!

Today we are happy to announce that we have started to accept financial contributions to the Vue project via…

Why Evan You is raising funds for the Vue community on Open Collective, even though he already had a successful Patreon.

Talks & Podcasts

Watch Pia Mancini’s fascinating talk from OuiShare Fest.

“The internet has been great at bringing people together to imagine new ideas. But when it comes to building a sustainable way of implementing them we’re back to talking with lawyers and accountants. We need to define a new social and economic unit to enable us, as networked communities, to operate.”

• Cucumber Podcast: Funding Open Source
  Pia talks crowdfunding and supporting the open source community.
• Nadia Eghbal: Where Money Meets Open Source
  What money can buy, what it can’t buy, and its role in open source.
• Jerod Santo on the Bike Shed Podcast
  Finding time for, sustaining, and funding open source development.
• The HanselMinutes Podcast
  Pia talks liquid democracy and Open Collective

We’re building Open Collective because we’re passionate about transparency.

This thread on Twitter by ProPublica about the Red Cross and hurricane Harvey reminded us of the deeper purpose of Open Collective. It highlights the need for a new generation of non-profit organizations that are much more transparent and accountable.

We’re on it.