A new chapter for Open Collective: digital cooperatives

October 12th 2024

Organizing ourselves as LLC or corporations doesn’t feel right in this Internet Age. We need new vehicles to embrace the collaborative nature of the Internet.

I started Open Collective back in 2015 (9 years ago already, time flies!) to solve a simple problem: how do we enable communities to receive and spend money transparently and effortlessly?

📖 Read: We need a new form of association for the Internet generation (2015)

The Internet gave us the ability to collaborate (e.g. to build open source projects) and to come together in real life (by organizing local meetups). But we don’t have an Internet solution to receive money as a community.

Collectives as virtual entities

My first idea was to apply what we had learned with the development of the world wide web. In the early days, every website had to have their own web server. Then we realized that it’s a bit of a waste of time to require everyone to learn about web hosting. So we started sharing. If I know how to host a website, I may as well host yours. This greatly reduced the friction to start websites and the web started growing exponentially 🕸️

The first version of Open Collective was exactly that; a software platform to share existing non-profits so that you don’t have to create one for every single project / collective in your community.

We ended up creating 3 non-profits to showcase the platform: Open Source Collective 501c6 for open source communities around the world, Open Collective Foundation 501c3 for charitable projects in the US and Open Collective Europe ASBL.

Fast forward to 2024, more than 3,500 collectives are using the platform. Collectively, they have raised more than $100M (discover them).

The initial business model was to share the revenue with the non-profits that provide that service to collectives for a fee (we call them fiscal hosts). It was a great way to start as you align incentives, but as fiscal hosts started growing, it became unsustainable. It didn’t make sense for them to share 50/50 their income to a for-profit entity where they don’t have a seat.

So we decided to move the current version of Open Collective to a new non-profit, spearheaded by the team that lead Open Collective in the past few years (Pia Mancini, François Hodierne and Ben Nickolls). That way, fiscal hosts can collectively own the software that they depend on.

📖 Read: The Open Collective Platform is Moving to a Community Governed Non-profit

But the original mission of Open Collective is not over. We haven’t figured out yet how to create organizations for the Internet Age. There cannot just be 3,500 collectives. Organizing ourselves as LLCs, corporations or event non-profits doesn’t feel right. Those were the vehicles for the Industrial Age. They were meant for a different terrain. They are built around hierarchies and competition, in a world with infinite resources and unlimited growth. Their bookkeeping –their dashboard– only measures a single currency, their “bottom line”. We need new vehicles. We say that “we cannot discover a new world with an old map”, I’d add: “we cannot move to the new world with old vehicles” 🚗💨.

Real life experiences

When Pia replaced me as CEO back in 2018, I ended up moving back to Brussels and getting myself quite involved with climate movements. With my partner Leen Schelfhout, we created a new fiscal host for climate projects: allforclimate.earth. We worked with Gitcoin to create a climate round and help many of those projects raise money with crypto. Today allforclimate is hosting more than 270+ projects around Europe.

We also created numerous collectives ourselves: the Citizen Garden (guerilla garden in front of our garage door), Citizen Corner (temporary occupation at the corner of our street), DAO.brussels (web3 community in Brussels), Regens Unite (bringing together climate activists, tech people, healers, working on regeneration) and more recently Citizen Wallet (open source wallet for community currencies) and the Commons Hub Brussels (a common for the commons).

📖 Read: When citizens spring

📺 Watch: Greenpill podcast on Regens Unite

📺 Watch: Regen Village at the Commons Hub Brussels

Through all of those projects (all on open collective), I experienced the limitation of human organizations that only accounts for a single scarce currency (euros or dollars).

Turns out enabling collectives to receive and spend money was only one part of the problem. The latest saga with Wordpress illustrates this perfectly. Communities need more than just money to sustain themselves. They also need contributors and a way to balance “Makers and Takers” (see this excellent blog post of Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal and one of our angel investors, on the topic: Solving the Maker-Taker problem).

Next iteration

So we need a new form of organization that will take into account more than one currency, more than one way to contribute. We already have some examples around us. Supermarket cooperatives such as Park Slope in Brooklyn or the Bees Coop in Brussels show us a future where you need more than dollars or euros to have access to what the community has to offer. Online, we see the emergence of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, I like to refer to them as digital cooperatives). As they say: “the future is already present, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”.

I’m excited to be back to explore how we can bring that future closer to the present. That’s my role as an entrepreneur. That’s my contribution to this global movement –this murmuration– to find a new way to organize and coordinate human society in this Internet Age.

How can we enable collectives to embrace more than one currency? How can we enable collectives to take into account more than one way to contribute? How can we change the incentives to better balance “Makers and Takers”? How can we build organizations that regenerate our human & natural resources instead of depleting them? What are the tools that they need? Those are the main questions that we will be living with in this next chapter of Open Collective.

Those are also the questions that we are living with every day at the Commons Hub Brussels. It will be our testing ground to experiment and iterate quickly to build a great platform to support online and offline communities that manage common resources.

How could Open Collective be useful for your project and for your community? I’m interested to hear your story, your needs and your perspective on what Internet native organizations should look like. Share your thoughts in this form.

Competition was the game of the Industrial Age. Corporations were our vehicles. Cooperation is the game of the Internet Age. Cooperatives will be our vehicles.

But not the old dusty ones based on bureaucracy that are hard to set up and manage. We need a new generation of cooperatives, Internet native ones. It’s time to make cooperatives great again[1]. And I’m here for it.

[1] Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz were onto something with their idea of “Platform Cooperativism” (see my thread on their first conference in NYC in 2015). A great idea whose time has (finally) come, now that we have a shared global infrastructure to share ownership.

Special thanks 🙏

Thank you Roy Bahat for your precious help throughout this exit-to-community process.

Thank you to Pia Mancini, François Hodierne, Ben Nickolls for stewarding the new non-profit and making sure that the current community of open collectives is well taken care of.

Thank you Babette De Fauw, Marco Gerletti for stewarding allforclimate.earth, can’t wait to work with you to support more regenerative collectives.

Thank you Albert Wenger and Susan Gigi Danziger for your support in the past few years to develop open source tools for climate projects and local communities 🌍

Thank you Leen Schelfhout for completing me so well. You opened my world in the past 5 years to new dimensions 💗

Thank you Kevin Sundar Raj, Jonas Boury for your work on the Citizen Wallet. It’s another piece of the puzzle 🧩

Thank you Aseem Sood for coming back to Open Collective as a board member. It fills me with joy to work again with you on what is a journey of a lifetime.

Thank you Charles Eisenstein, Bernard Lietaer, Elinor Ostrom, Kate Raworth, Margaret Wheatley for inspiring me through your books 📚

Thank you everyone who has been contributing to the various collectives we started over the years. Your contributions mattered in ways that you cannot imagine (our neighbors in Schaerbeek, DAO.Brussels, Regens Unite community). Community is immunity 🔅