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Open Source Collective Community Call Oct' '21
Published on October 25, 2021 by Benjamin Nickolls

Thank you to everyone who joined our second community call. For those of you who couldn't attend a recording is available for the next 30 days.

I was really happy to see broad participation from a range of Collectives at various phases of development, from projects that are just getting started with Open Collective to those who have been with us for years.

In this conversation we covered:

- Open Collective's current experiments with public stock and crpyto' contributions, opening access to different economic tools. tldr: we hear your feedback, we are considering changes.
- Open Source Collective's emerging strategy, of which these discussions are a key part. We are gathering input from the team and the board and hope to have something to share publicly by our next call.
- Developing opportunities for Collectives to use the financial support they have today to put themselves in a stronger position tomorrow.
-  'Getting started' guides, and building better documentation together.

I introduced our first experiment with Sumana Harihareswara from Changeset: we are developing a program of group and 1:1 support for Collectives with Sumana to help projects work through some common challenges. Open Source Collective will cover the initial cost for a limited number of projects in the first instance. Look out for an announcement in the coming weeks.

We spoke about building a 'marketplace' for members of the community. Gus from OpenProducer, AzuraCast (and more besides) thought that people with fundraising skills would be great for their projects. Matt from Cucumber spoke about outreach, finding new contributors, and the challenge of finding suitable projects for potential contributors. Building a community of peer support and bringing more people into open source in a way that does not depend on individual privilege is another strategic goal for Open Source Collective. We'll continue to develop this idea. 

Sebastian from ProofingFuture spoke about their experiences as a new Collective looking to the community for what to do next. We agreed that collaborating on a set of guides on how to get started would be a good first step. I am going to build a space for us to begin developing this together. We'll continue this conversation in our #opensourse Slack channel.

Personally, I was lifted by this conversation. Having spent the last week or two working on our strategy it was great to get back to practical conversations about working better together.

Our next community call will take place on November 18th at 5pm UTC.

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Tomáš Janoušek

Posted on October 25, 2021

Hi Bejnamin, sorry I missed the call this month and thank you for posting the recording! It was reassuring to hear other projects are struggling with the same things: finding new contributors, not having a fundraising specialist, etc. We've made some progress since last month (primarily because a random person posted our website to HN and it got to the HN front page), but there's almost certainly a lot of potential that we haven't unlocked yet.

I'd love to chat with other collectives who are in a similar situation, so I wonder: am I supposed to be able to join the Slack? I got the impression other people are already there, but the link here looks like it only lets opencollective employees join.

Tomáš from xmonad

Benjamin Nickolls

Posted on October 26, 2021

No apologies necessary Tomáš! We'll be here hosting the space for those that can attend and being as open as possible about the conversations and work we're doing to keep everyone who can't up to date.

Thanks for the shout on the Slack link, I have updated it. Looking forward to continuing the conversation there. 

Gus Austin

Posted on October 27, 2021

Thanks again for coordinating these Ben! It was great to hear about and provide feedback on the marketplace as well as other ideas to help projects/collectives sustain and connect with contributors.

Centralizing and encouraging collaboration in #opensource Slack channel should really help engage and grow the community.

This thread might be a jumping-off point for those who missed the call but would like to provide input.