Development - Cycle One Reflection and Cycle Two Overview
Published on March 28, 2025 by Shannon Wray
Here is a reflection of Cycle One, the first cycle of 2025, and an overview of Cycle Two.
Providing insight into our product roadmap and, subsequently, the projects being worked on in our six-week cycles.
Providing insight into our product roadmap and, subsequently, the projects being worked on in our six-week cycles.
Cycle One Reflection
During Cycle One of 2025, we:
- Deprecated the old host reports and replaced them with the new transaction statements (they’ve been in beta testing for a while). The new transaction statements prioritize ledger legibility by enabling host admins to trace the numbers to the underlying ledger transactions.
- Improved contributor address collection. Hosts can now set a threshold above which contributors will be prompted to provide their address information. The threshold is checked both against single and accumulated contributions. If, for example, a host sets a $500 threshold and a contributor makes a recurring $50 contribution in January, the contributor will be prompted to enter a legal address because their contribution has the potential to add up to $600 in the fiscal year. This can be found in the Policies section in your Fiscal Host Settings.
- Continued development and redesign of Connected Bank Accounts. We enhanced its functionality with additional matching capabilities, an ability to associate an account to one or more collectives and we’ve added the matched and reconciled transaction information to the ledger exports. We also conducted a few redesign workshops which led to major design improvements. The redesign effort will continue during cycle 2.
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- We went through a long list of tweaks, fixes and improvements to the new expense submission flow and are excited to finally have it out in public beta. If you haven’t already, please give it a try and let us know what you think about it (activateable in preview features). Once it's been activated you'll find it in all the usual places you submit expenses + in your Personal Dashboard > Expenses > New Expense.
- The Payment Method settings screen has been revised. You can now see and manage your payment methods for both contributing and getting paid.
- We experimented with a reorganization of the sidebar in host dashboards. We wanted to both better showcase platform features for new organizations and to make it easier for new hots organizations to discern between their activities as organizations and the activities of their hosted collectives. This was tested internally and though the change was rejected it surfaced plenty of valuable feedback we will likely be engaging with in coming cycles.
Cycle Two Overview
During this Second Cycle of 2025, we are tackling the following projects:
We are engaging in some work related to the organizational change that took place last year (the transition from Open Collective Inc to the non-profit - Open Finance Consortium).
The platform must find a new business model to ensure long-term sustainability.
For this:
- We are prototyping a new business model that we can communicate to both existing host organizations and new organizations inquiring about the platform.
- We are prototyping a new marketing page to communicate the platform's benefits for organizations and hosts. We’ve always focused on the ecosystem as a whole. However, the recent organizational changes have made it clear that our job, as Open Finance Consortium, is to steward the platform as a transparent and collaborative money management tool. So for the first time, we will prioritize presenting the platform and what it can do for organizations and fiscal hosts.
- We are also prototyping a white-labeling solution that will enable host organizations to redirect the platform's public-facing pages to their own domains.
We are also going to create a new user experience for grant applications. In the past, grant requests were submitted within the expense flow. However, when we took on the redesign of the expense flow (now in public beta; please give it a try!), we decided to treat grants separately (referring to grants as expenses was creating all kinds of confusion). We will adopt the design language of the new expense submission flow and apply it to a simplified and separate grant request flow.
Finally, we will release an accounts tool (primarily) for collectives. We’ve been building an accounts tool in the background (as part of the crowdfunding redesign campaign), and everyone who has seen it has had positive responses. It enables collective admins to view their collective, projects, and events as a list of accounts with the ability to transfer money between accounts quickly. We will complete the tool as an independent feature and release it.
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