We're organizing a long-term fundraising for GoToSocial, here on Open Collective! Some of you may have already supported us over on Liberapay, which we're incredibly grateful for, and it has helped us jumpstart some of this process (and to pay for our cute sloth logo!). In future, we want to use Open Collective. There will be an FAQ at the end, but first let's focus on why we're doing this! 

Our short-term goals are simple.

Firstly, we want to be able to pay people for code contributions to the project, when they need it.

Secondly, we're looking for contributions to help us cover basic costs like hosting fees for our automated build system.

Finally, we also want to be able to put money forward for translation work, graphic design, accessibility audits, security audits, or any other small pieces of work that GoToSocial might require.

Eventually, we want to be able to hire developers, either salaried or freelance. As a milestone on the way to this goal, we're looking to make SuperSeriousBusiness into a non-profit organization by the end of 2022.

A: We chose Open Collective because we appreciate the transparency of the platform. OpenCollective allows our contributors to see how much money is coming in, and where it goes.

OpenCollective now supports having more than one person to approve an expense, which gives us a more communal control of funds from the entire team, rather than having one person be in control of all expenses.

It also takes off some of the administration load off of us, by allowing us to offload banking issues and tax worries etc to a third party, giving us more time to focus on writing GoToSocial.

For our Open Collective fiscal host, we chose Open Collective Europe (https://opencollective.com/europe), which already hosts hundreds of other open source projects.

Basically we want to keep our finances organized in one place. We will be leaving the Liberapay up for legacy contributions, and won't force anyone to move their donations, but we will prefer them to go through Open Collective going forward.

A: No, is the short answer. The long answer is: we don't want to be beholden to big sponsors, and we will not advertise bigger sponsors or give them any preferential treatment at all. Everyone who donates money will be shown as a contributor, so if a company wants to sponsor us, they are welcome to donate on this Open Collective, but they will not get anything extra from us for it. We also reserve the right to reject/return donations if a donator gives us icky vibes.

A: To give an as accurate overview of finances we've tried to leave a buffer to account for stuff like taxes and other unexpected costs. Luckily for us, using Open Collective helps handle a lot of the financial overhead, which is why their 6-8% cut is us paying for a service.

Some of the goals are also dream numbers, like the highest one. At the same time, we want to be realistic about at which levels we can hire people for ongoing work, so you get a fair chance to support us with what we need.