What’s your Collective’s expense policy?

Make it easier for your community to know what they can expense to your collective!

Often contributors to a collective are unsure about what they can expense to their community. This might seem a trivial issue to some, but in distributed and loose organizations like open collectives it can be pretty daunting to navigate this.

Most contributors never meet each other in person, and while there’s always a core team that might be more connected and regularly in touch, the larger community has less visibility. We believe strongly that the path to growing open collectives and scaling resilient communities is by being transparent and clear about intentions, policies and norms.

To make this easier for collectives, we just released an expense policy feature.

Core contributors to a collective can clearly state what the community is ok with paying for and remove the barrier of uncertainty for their community.

And if things are still unclear, contributors can submit an expense and the core team can leave a public comment about it (pretty much how pull requests work for open source projects). Hosts can also leave public comments if an expense needs to be modified somehow.

** Please note**: the actual invoice/receipt is not public, only the core contributors and the host can see it.

Some collectives have defined expensepolicies: webpack’s vote app, CycleJS, Cloudflare Collective and this clarity makes it easier to grow their community as well as manage their budget.

Create yours! Go to your collective /edit#expenses and you’ll see it live in the submit expense page in your collective /expenses/new and grow your community with transparency and clarity!

With love, the Open Collective Team ❤