PS - Mike Stenta from farmOS and Don Blair made some test pages on opencollective.org … I contributed some money and submitted an expense. Here’s some details on that experience:
- For open collective, you still need an organization to manage the transactions + cash (a non-profit, or something).
- Open Collective takes 5% of donations (which is actually pretty comparable to other platforms or non-profits who are fiscal sponsors and take overhead)
- Anyone can donate to the project ($X / month) similar to Patreon
- Anyone can submit an expense to the project. The maintainers of the open collective page then approve that expense… if you pay using paypal, it’s pretty seamless - you just click pay expense, put in their email address associated with a paypal account, and poof they are paid. However, if you are paying via check or some other method, basically you still need to do it through the non-profit however you would normally, and just manually maintain the record in open collective.
Summary
I think it’s an extremely transparent and flexible way to manage diverse groups. However, it add’s overhead in terms of cost (5%) and time as compared to just having a traditional fiscal sponsor. Overall, my feeling is IF you can manage all expenses via paypal (which is natively supported)… it’s probably worth it. We would need to maintain an internal governance structure for how decisions are made for spending the money within GOSH (which we’ve discussed), and probably it would still be up to a small group to actually push the ‘pay’ button on expenses within the software, according to the group’s approval.
Thoughts?