Hi, OSC community! We hope September treated you well and your October is off to a fantastic start. Without further ado, let’s hop to it… 

Annual OSC retreat and 'Friends-of-OSC' meetup recap
The OSC team recently gathered in Germany for our annual retreat, and for the first time, all four of us were in the same room! 

The retreat spanned two weeks: the first week was spent collaborating with the Open Collective and Open Collective Europe teams, where we dove deep into the past, present, and future of all things Open Collective. The second week transitioned into an OSC-focused retreat in Berlin, where we co-worked, reflected on 2024, and planned for 2025. 

By the end of our time together, we came away feeling inspired and full of fresh energy! We’re excited to bring all the energy back to our work with you!
 
Photos of the retreat below:

 
While in Berlin, we held a ‘friends of OSC’ meetup. We’ve been part of other meetups before, but this was the first time it was explicitly for the OSC team, our hosted projects, and friends of OSC. The night started at a biergarten and ended at a pizzeria. The evening was filled with great conversations, new connections, and plenty of laughs. If you couldn’t make it because you’re in another part of the world, no worries – the meetup was so inspiring that we want to do it again whenever we can because there is power in community, online, and in person.
 
Thank you for coming to meet us. It was great to hear about your projects and community and learn more about how we can help each other moving forward. We hope to meet more of you in the future!
 
Photo from the meetup below…

Photo taken by jrf

 
Correction to bank transfer fees
As Lauren recently shared, some projects may have noticed a new transaction labeled “Wise Payment Processor Fee Compensation” on your ledger. Due to an issue with Wise, our payment processor, some projects were charged incorrect fees that were not updated correctly in our system. This affected 99 collectives, and they had less money on their balance. We’ve resolved the issue, and if your collective was impacted, you’d see a refund transaction on your ledger. These refunds are being covered by OSC’s operational funds, ensuring no reserved collective funds are affected.

Grants
If you're applying for grants to fund your projects, please check in with us as soon as you start working on the paperwork—but only if you want OSC to receive the funding on your behalf.

Also, if you're working on a proposal for any NSF grant, remember that OSC is a registered organization. We'd be happy to share our ID with you for your application.

This one caught our eye recently, and it might apply to many of our hosted projects:

Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE), Supports new managing organizations to catalyze distributed, community-driven development and growth of open-source ecosystems. https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/pose-pathways-enable-open-source-ecosystems

Do you or someone in the open source community you know create goods that would make awesome merch?
… If so, we’d love to hear from you! OSC is thinking about creating some swag, and we’d love to prioritize vendors in our community, when we can. We’re especially interested in fun and unique ideas – know of a project with an open source knitting machine? Some jumpers would be awesome! Or maybe you know of a project that crafts something else special. Let us know!

Discord reminder
As a reminder, Open Collective has transitioned from Slack to Discord https://discord.gg/AtKhYFgrgc, and we made the move with them! On the Discord, you’ll find a dedicated channel for the Open Source Collective as well as a broader open source community space. Please continue to direct all OSC-related support requests to us at [email protected], but the Discord is a great place to chat, share resources, stay connected with the community.

All Things Open 2024
Are you attending All Things Open this month in North Carolina? Some of our team will be there, and we’d love to connect! Let us know if you’re attending by emailing us at [email protected].
 

 
Open Source Pledge launches
Today, Sentry, in partnership with over twenty other organizations, launched the Open Source Pledge initiative. The pledge is simple: it asks organizations pledge $2,000 per developer to open source software. The Pledge is a commitment from member companies to pay Open Source maintainers meaningfully. The Pledge aims to prevent maintainer burnout and reduce flare-ups of high-profile security incidents.

In 2023, Open Source Collective saw a 20% reduction in contributions to our member projects, all of which came from a drop in corporate sponsorships. We’ve written a post about our findings and OSC’s support of the Open Source Pledge here: https://blog.opencollective.com/p/5a83080f-649b-4ce8-8fa7-d06c03778abf/

Newly accepted collectives
In September, we approved 24 projects. Welcome to Animata, CSSTree, Discovery.js projects, Doğu ve Batı Çerkes (East and West Circassian), Drupal AI, Exiftool Vendored.js, FluentCMS, gcsim, Hi.Events, HuLaSpark, Konsist LikeC4, Mission Center, NativePHP, Nova.js, PSQLPy, Puppeteer, Pygfx, React Input, RGeo, ScrapegraphAI, Spring Rs, The Busy Beaver Challenge, Twinny. Welcome!