Open Collective Community

Our goal is to give communities all the tools they need to get started (onboard members, keep a directory of people and invite everyone to contribute). All of that in a single easy to use open platform. Think of it as a mix between the Wordpress of community management and the GitHub of non open source projects.

Open Collective is a platform to enable communities to collect and disburse money transparently. But we realized that communities need much more than just money to thrive. They need above all people that can contribute time and energy. GitHub is already providing a great platform to developers to join open source projects and quickly identify where and how they can contribute. But outside of open source communities, there is still to this day no good enough platform. We want to change that. We believe that discovering and contributing to communities in your city should be as easy as contributing to any open source project.

That's our goal and we want to do it together as a community, as a collective. We will focus on creating a great space where developers and agencies around the world can develop features, new integrations, plugins, etc that can fulfill the needs of the communities they work with using Open Collective as the base so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel again and again.

Become a backer and follow along the development of this project.
If you are interested to contribute to this project, join our collective! Introduce yourself in this conversation.

Can I install Open Collective on my own server?
Open Collective is already Open Source (MIT License), so in theory, you already can. But in practice, it's quite difficult. Our goal is to make it much easier.

Can I deploy my new feature on opencollective.com?
That's the goal. But we need to figure out a process to make it easy for you to develop new features and deploy them at least for your own collective on opencollective.com (as you can imagine, there is a bunch of security issues that we need to take into consideration).

How can I contribute?
Please join or create a working group by posting a new conversation on this collective. You can also make a financial contribution to support our collective or to support directly the development of a particular feature that will be posted on this collective.

How can I stay in the loop of your progress?
Become a backer and you will receive our regular updates (and support our efforts in the process!) ❤️

Ask your community! It's easy to imagine cool features but it's the best recipe to build solutions looking for problems. We need to build the best platform to enable our communities to thrive, one at a time. Cool new features or integrations could then be embraced by other open collectives.

Why will you succeed where others have failed?
There has been many attempts at building the ultimate community tool. It's a tough problem. It's not enough to build a great user experience. You need to create something that is a real pain killer, not just a vitamin and you need to make it super easy for the community of developers to customize it, augment it and maintain it so that it can truly meet the needs of all communities.

However, we believe that it's an idea whose time has come (and there is nothing more powerful than that). Meetup.com is pretty much dead, people are increasingly leaving Facebook and looking for alternatives and there is no decent open source solution with a bit of design thinking to address this yet.

We are not starting from scratch. Open Collective is already used by 1700+ open source communities. Fridays For Future already has local chapters in 7k cities around the world and the movement is already using open collective. As soon as we can start adding features to not only manage financial contributions but all types of contributions, it will spread.

The core team is made of people who have been very active in various citizen initiatives and movements for the climate. They've experienced the different pain points and how software can help those communities.