How Open Collective is Redefining Open Organizations
An example of the benefits of being an Open Collective for a charitable organisation like Ersilia.
In the last 20 years, community-based organizations, non-profit initiatives, associations… or, in other words, collectives of people working towards a common goal, have flourished worldwide. Perhaps the first example that comes to mind are open source projects, maintained by a network of developers that do not belong to a particular organization. Today, thanks to Open Collective (OC), a project can be incorporated as a Collective and access the essential infrastructure to manage their finances. The Collective acts as a platform for fundraising, sponsorship and expenses pay-out, and, most importantly, a transparent budget.
The Ersilia Open Source Initiative is a charity whose mission is to strengthen the research capacity against infectious and neglected diseases in Low and Middle Income Countries, via the deployment of state-of-the-art AI/ML tools. One of core mandates is working in the Open, and this means not only open-sourcing the software we produce but also all other kinds of information, such as the strategic plans, the grant applications we have submitted and the projects we are participating in. According to this, we also wanted to operate our finances fully in the open domain, so transparency and accountability were the first keywords that raised our interest in OC, only to discover a much broader range of benefits.
At first, we explored the possibility of becoming a Collective fiscally sponsored by the Open Source Collective. For those not familiar with fiscal hosting, it basically means an organization can use the legal structure and accounting of an incorporated company, thus avoiding the hassle of setting up a bank account, dealing with taxes and complying with other administrative requirements, all of which is provided by your host. This can be very convenient for short-term projects, unincorporated groups or even individuals who have been selected for sponsorship and need to legally vehiculate these. As Ersilia is an incorporated charity in the UK, we finally opted for becoming a independent Collective meaning we deal with all administrative paperwork, pay taxes and hold the money in our own bank account. Even though we do not require fiscal hosting, we have found many advantages in being part of OC, and Ersilia is using many cool OC features. Hopefully you can get inspired, or inspire others, to try it out!
As a charity, donations are an important part of our revenue, but, when it comes to fundraising, you easily get overwhelmed by the number of platforms to set up campaigns. Well, OC solved this problem for us. Collectives accept financial contributions either as a one-off or a recurrent membership, with conveniently tiered options for all audiences. The platform caters both to the general public whom might want to support our mission, and to more specialized contributors, for example individual users or companies that benefit from the tools we produce and freely donate as open-source software, and who wish to support their maintenance. Moreover, Collectives can donate to each other, stimulating cross-project support and creating a sense of community. For example, Ersilia was chosen to participate in the first round of FundOSS, a campaign where open source projects get their donations matched from a funding pool. We successfully raised around 13.000 USD, which makes all the difference for a small organisation like ours (you can read more about our FundOSS experience).
To encourage financial contributions, OC has the best strategy: fully transparent budgeting. Money doesn’t just disappear into a black box — the budget shows exactly when and how it’s used. We have found this to be the best way to demonstrate our impact and increase trust.
We can download our financial reports from OC in one click and submit them to the Charity Commission or other authorities as required. This is what convinced us to move all our finances to OC. As an example, we received two donations from grant making organizations in the UK, totalling $3,367. This money, supplemented by the FundOSS campaign, enabled Ersilia to acquire a GPU Workstation for $4,812, a key component for parallelizing calculations (basically, reducing time and speeding up processes), which is essential for artificial intelligence and machine learning. We expect this workstation to cover our GPU requirements until 2023, saving Ersilia $15,000 per year on cloud computing services.
OC is continuously evolving, responding to the needs of Collectives. Among many cool new features, we are particularly enthusiastic about “Projects”, which will enable us to fundraise for each of our different projects specifically and keep its budget and expenses separated. If you are an open-source contributor, you can have a look at OC’s source code and help them improve!
We would really like to thank the Open Collective team for the amazing work they are doing, and encourage you to stay tuned to the evolution of our Collective! Help us spread the word, and contribute to furthering our mission. We are always open to volunteers!
