On August 23, 2023, the co-founder and CEO of Open Collective, Pia Mancini presented as part of the Accelerating Makers community event series. Pia's talk, titled Making Your Community Project Sustainable, covered the origin story of Open Collective, a transparent money management platform for communities.
Pia's background is as a democracy activist in her home country of Argentina. There, she co-founded a political party, the Partido de la Red (the Net Party), which proposes a liquid democracy through internet participation. Fundraising for the party was very challenging because the Argentinian government would not allow them to receive any campaign money until they could validate themselves through signatures and printed ballots.
Once they were eventually accepted, they realized their organization's governance structure was untraditional. They didn't want to start a foundation or nonprofit and instead wanted to grant themselves the freedom to be more decentralized — horizontal and circular rather than hierarchical and triangular. The challenge was that little infrastructure existed to support this type of organization, and this eventually became the founding impetus of Open Collective.
Pia's presentation went on to draw parallels between the needs of her grassroots political party and those of many modern digital communities or collectives defined by
- Peer production
- Global nonterritorial communities
- Low trust-building opportunities
- Need-transparent money flows
- Obsolescence of hierarchy
Open Collective tries to solve some of the challenges associated with these characteristics by using technology to unlock the movement of money to people and communities who need it, no strings attached, while letting them decide for themselves how to spend this money. Open Collective's has two parts:
- The technology platform that enables fundraising and money management
- A fiscal hosting service through the Open Collective Foundation,
lends out its nonprofit status to groups that might not have access to the
legal or infrastructural tools necessary to carry out their missions
Today, Open Collective is used by over 15,000 groups from all around the world with over 30 fiscal hosts. The platform has facilitated the movement of $105 million into the hands of communities working on public goods and commons, grassroots communities, mutual aid, climate activism, open-source software projects, and social and political movements. Open Collective is also working towards an Exit to Community, where its platform would — rather than undergo an acquisition by a larger company or public stock offering — transition from ownership by private investors to their larger community of stakeholders.
In a follow-on event, Pia's colleague at Open Collective, operations strategist Nathan Hewitt, hosted an office hours session titled Unlocking Community Empowerment. In the session, Nathan got into the weeds with a demo of Open Collective and its various features, including community profile pages, search for collectives or fiscal hosts, the transparency of accounting for expenses, and even a simple events feature.
Nathan also takes us on a virtual tour of three profile pages of collectives actively using the platform including Babel, an open-source software project; Bushwick Ayuda Mutua (Mutual Aid); and 1k Project for Ukraine. where people could send $1K directly to families impacted by the war with Russia. These projects demonstrate the breadth of usability of the Open Collective platform and fiscal host matching services.
Many of us view our work in support of collective organizing and decentralized governance as an alternative to rigid corporate hierarchies and inequitable social stratifications. Open Collective is a technology platform supporting this work as well as serving as a model for socially responsible technology businesses with its dedication to its values of impact, collectivity, inclusivity, honesty, transparency, privacy, dignity, sustainability, and resilience. Learn more at https://opencollective.com/ and reach out to Pia and Nathan with any questions you might have.