TLDR: Twenty years ago, Macs won despite slower hardware because the experience was better. Now the same thing is happening with Linux — because AI loves open, text-based systems. And in an age of digital sovereignty, that matters more than ever.

I used to be an Apple fan boy. I've written about falling out of love — the point of diminishing returns, the subscription nudges, the feeling that my €3,000 laptop is also a storefront.

But something bigger is happening now.

I recently installed Omarchy (Arch Linux) on a new Lenovo X1 Carbon. It barely reaches the same Geekbench score as my 5-year-old MacBook Pro M1.

And it doesn't matter. Let me explain.

The Mac paradox, version 1.0

Back in the early 2000s, Macs were slow. A PowerPC G4 got demolished by a Pentium 4 in every benchmark. Steve Jobs himself admitted the PowerPC roadmap was a dead end.

And yet — I chose a Mac anyway. My beloved 12-inch PowerBook G4, 2003. 🍎

Why? Because OS X was Unix with a beautiful interface on top. You'd lose a benchmark and win the afternoon. Less crashes, less fiddling. It was the machine that "just works". The slower machine was the more productive one.

The Mac paradox, version 2.0

Now the tables have turned — and the reason is AI.

Apple Silicon is objectively fast. macOS is polished, refined — though the quality of the software is clearly going down. But the bottleneck isn't hardware anymore — it's how well your operating system cooperates with AI.

And here, Linux wins. Decisively.

AI loves Linux 🐧

LLMs can read the source code. All of it. Every kernel module, every config file. macOS is a black box by comparison.

Everything on Linux is a text file. /etc, dotfiles, systemd units, crontabs. Text is exactly what LLMs are built to read and write. Ask an AI to configure your firewall or set up a reverse proxy — it generates the exact file. On macOS, you're much more limited in what you can do. A graphical user interface reduces the possibilities.

"UI is becoming just a presentation layer for monitoring, not for interacting. Don't worry about UX, worry about AX."
— @xdamman, March 2026

The command line is the API. Every action can be scripted, piped, automated. An AI agent on Linux isn't just answering questions — it's doing things. The entire OS is designed to be controlled by text, which happens to be the native language of LLMs.

But what about running local LLMs?

Apple Silicon is great for running local LLMs. That unified memory architecture is genuinely impressive.

But it feels like driving an SUV for picking up bread. How often do you actually use it at full capacity? You're much better off spinning up a GPU instance in the cloud for the heavy lifting and keeping a lightweight, open machine for your daily work.

What excites me today? Repairable stuff. Modular stuff. Low energy stuff.

Tech sovereignty ⚡

There's another dimension that matters more than benchmarks.

"Why tech sovereignty matters. Trump will weaponize any US based company."
— @xdamman, March 2026

Your Mac calls home. Constantly. Telemetry, iCloud nudges, App Store prompts, subscription upsells. Your €3,000 laptop is also a storefront.

Linux doesn't phone home. No telemetry you didn't opt into. No App Store tax. No "sign in with your Apple ID to continue."

Your machine. Your data. Your rules.

In an age where AI assistants have deep access to your system — do you want that system to be transparent and auditable, or opaque and phoning home to Cupertino?

The irony 🔄

Apple bet that great UX could overcome a hardware deficit. They were right — and became the most valuable company on Earth.

Now the UX advantage has shifted. Not prettier buttons. Something deeper: how well can intelligence — human and artificial — operate your system?

For a long time, the Mac was the perfect machine for humans. A highly polished experience that just works. Really good defaults, not much to mess around with. A safe, beautiful computer to get work done.

But we are entering a new age of automation. The interface is shifting. It's less and less about the graphical user interface, and increasingly about the agent.

What you want now is a system that your AI agent can read, understand, and tweak at will. Don't worry about UX, worry about AX (Agent Experience).

macOS still has the best UI. But Linux has the best AX.

Sure, Linux may not be as polished as macOS out of the box. There are rough edges, and you definitely have to get your hands dirty sometimes.

But for now, I'm having so much fun being able to customize my machine, my main working tool, my own bicycle for my mind, to my will using AI.

To be entirely honest, while I don't miss much macOS, boy do I miss Apple hardware. They are annoyingly still so much ahead of the curve. I'd buy a MacBook Air M5 in a heartbeat if I could put Asahi Linux on it.

AI Counter-Arguments

Before publishing, I asked my AI agent to take an objective look and criticize this draft. Here is our exchange.

🤖 AI: The premise is that AI loves text, so Linux wins. But the latest AI models are becoming incredibly good at navigating graphical interfaces. They can "see" the screen, click buttons, and interact with macOS just like a human does. In a year or two, an AI might not need to edit a bash script; it will just navigate the UI for you.

Xavier: That's right, but interacting with a computer through a graphical user interface is greatly reducing the things that can be done. It's fantastic for humans, but a limiting intermediary for agents.

🤖 AI: You write about the importance of tech sovereignty (not phoning home to Cupertino). But a few paragraphs earlier, you suggest spinning up a GPU instance in the cloud for heavy AI lifting. If your AI agent lives on an AWS or Microsoft server, how sovereign are you, really? You've just traded hardware lock-in for API lock-in. Running local, uncensored LLMs on Apple Silicon is arguably more "sovereign" than running Linux but relying on OpenAI's API.

Xavier: That's right. That's the reason why I'm advocating for digital commons, in particular investing as a local community in a data center that can provide the compute that local citizens can tap into. I'm also interested in decentralized GPU resources such as nunet.io.

🤖 AI: Giving an AI raw access to edit /etc/ config files on Linux is actually incredibly dangerous without guardrails. A hallucination could brick your OS. macOS's closed APIs and permission models, while annoying, provide exactly those guardrails for AI agents.

Xavier: That's right. That's why it's not perfect yet and there is still a lot of work to do to make this safe enough for the mainstream. New systems like NixOS could be part of the solutions by offering easy ways to describe, change and revert the state of the system. See also the latest post from Vitalik Buterin on this topic of AI safety.

🤖 AI: You mention the Lenovo X1 Carbon vs the M1. But it's not just about Geekbench scores. It's about battery life, thermals, and fan noise. You can work on a Mac for 14 hours on a train without plugging it in. Most Linux laptops still struggle to sleep properly or last half a day under load. For a "bicycle for the mind," hardware reliability when disconnected still matters.

Xavier: You are so right. And that's why I still love Apple hardware. They are still the best. By far. No question. But if you want to live on the edge and already experience today the possibilities of a truly AI powered computer, you have to accept that compromise.

Originally published on LinkedIn, August 26th 2025

Coworking has been around for a while now. The concept started 20 years ago. Brad Neuberg founded the San Francisco Coworking Space. He wanted a place that combined the freedom of freelancing with the structure and community of traditional offices.

In Brussels, the first coworking started back in 2010 with the Betacowork collaborative working (started by Ramon Suarez). It’s still around today thanks to the stewardship of Toon Vanagt.

Fast forward to today, remote work has fundamentally changed the way we work. Employees can now experience coworking and meet new people outside of their company. But nobody is going to a coworking 5 days a week anymore.

This creates new challenges. If people only go 1, 2 or 3 days to the coworking, how do you make sure that you still get to bump into each other? After all, one of the key values of going to a coworking space is the community. Meeting your peers, exchanging tips and tricks, discovering new opportunities, etc.

This got us thinking. What if we could create an excuse for people working in the same industry to come cowork on the same day?

That's how we came up with the idea of Themed Coworking Days.

We are starting with the community of people working in crypto since they’ve already been meeting every first Wednesday of the month for "Crypto Wednesday".

Concretely, every first Wednesday of the month, people working in that industry can enjoy a free coworking day (tag the people you know could benefit from this\!). To facilitate connections, there will be an open schedule where anyone is invited to contribute or join a pod (a workshop, a conversation or a presentation), unconference style. 🔅

This is very much an experiment. That's what we do at the Commons Hub. We try, we get feedback, we iterate. With all the time the same mission: how do we nurture communities? How do we steward common resources?

If you would also love to bring your community together for a regular common coworking day, reach out to Cedric Sounard (also happening: AI on Mondays, wellbeing on Tuesdays, spirituality on Sundays, more info soon).

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7365779312223916033/

During our Solarpunk Roadtrip across Europe, we stopped by Panicale, a beautiful small medieval town in the heart of Umbria, Perugia, Italy.

The town has about 5,600 inhabitants, but only about 600 live in the old town (intra muros). As we were walking down the streets (you can pretty much go through all of them in an hour), we stumbled upon a celebration happening in the local church. You could feel the strong community feel of the town. A third of the village must have been there. It was beautiful to see.

In one of those streets, a house was for sale. I don’t remember all the details but it was something along the lines of €300k, half price for something twice the size of what you could buy in Brussels (which is itself, quite cheap compared to Paris or London).

The thought that I could buy it and turn it into an AirBnB and make good money with it puzzled me. What on earth gives me permission to just impose myself on that community? Just because I have euros?

Imagine being part of that local community and having to accept a new person whose interest is not aligned with the wellbeing of your community?

This situation is happening every day in our neighborhoods. As a result, we have lost the sense of community. No long term relationship between neighbors. It’s all transactional. Why should we spend time building relationship if tomorrow someone else could live next door that only cares about their own personal interests?

This is enabled by our economic model based on a single currency. It doesn’t matter how you earned it, be it by teaching at a local school, or by abusing human or natural resources. What matters is that you have that currency. If you do, you are free to impose yourself in any neighborhood and do whatever you feel like.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s about making sure that if you’ve contributed to grow the GDP, all the doors should be opened to you. Your money should give you access to everything.

What if it wouldn’t?

One way to change that game is to introduce another currency that stays in the hands of the local community. This currency could be earned by showing up at regular community meetings and contributing to the community in various different ways. It would be a way to reclaim what has value in the eyes of the local community.

This wouldn’t replace the euro. It’s not “or”, it’s “and”. Like in a video or board game where you need, and coins 🪙, and wood 🪵, and stones 🪨.

Of course people would still be able to exchange their coins for the local currency (like you can exchange wood for stones in a game), but this would mean that someone local, someone that is actively contributing to the local community, was ok with giving some of it to you.

That’s why we have introduced our own community currency at the Commons Hub Brussels. If you want to become a coworker and share that place with us, you have to pay not only with euros but also with Commons Hub Tokens (CHT). Those tokens cannot be bought, they have to be earned. You earn them by attending our community meetings and by contributing to maintaining our common space. It's proof that you are involved in the community, that you care, that you contribute.

Since we launched it in June 2024, we have issued a total of 2,921 CHT to 105 different accounts (https://txinfo.xyz/celo/token/cht). It’s an ongoing experiment but it has already been helping us better value and acknowledge all the various contributions to the community. It’s those contributions that give life to a community.

That’s why my goal now with Open Collective is to make it easy for any community to also issue their own currency. I believe it’s a missing piece of the puzzle to rebuild strong resilient communities.

Dear investors,

Quick update to start Spring 2025\.

- 🧹 Housekeeping (Cap table update, Asset Transfer Agreement)
- 🚀 Where are we going? Masterplan
- ⚒️ New tool released: TxInfo.xyz
- 💰 Fundraising: Gitcoin round \+ Octant round (help needed)

🧹 Housekeeping

Captable update: You’ll find on Carta the latest cap table that reflects all the changes that happened at the end of last year (if you can’t access it, let me know and I’ll send you a copy). TLDR, in terms of fully diluted ownership, I now personally have 26.8%, other common holders have 9.1%, Bloomberg Beta has 11.99%, other preferred have 19.5% and there is now 32.6% unallocated.

Asset Transfer Agreement: We will send in the coming days a docusign to sign the finalized Asset Transfer Agreement to officialize the transfer of the current version of Open Collective to OFiCO, the non-profit started by Pia Mancini (former CEO) and François Hodierne (former CTO). This transfer makes sure that our current user base gets to control the version of the platform that they depend on, while enabling Open Collective Inc. to develop a new web3 version (and keep the brand and domain name). OFiCo has already started ensuring the maintenance and continuity of the current version of the platform since October 2024 and it’s been going very well so far.

🚀 Where are we going?
Our mission is to make communities the new base economic unit for this new Age of Regeneration.

Companies were optimized for competition and performance, they served us well. They thrive in their Yang energy. They have a clear single focus, a single optimization function: growth. Like a road bike, they are fantastic, high tech, but fragile. They also tend to deplete their environment (natural and human resources).

Communities are a different animal. Communities thrive with a balance of both yin and yang. In a community, self-discovery \> self-improvement. Individuals need to complete each other, not compete with each other. They don’t pursue a single metric. Like a mountain bike with suspensions, they are much more adaptable to a changing environment. They offer a resilient and regenerative environment for \#DeepAdaptation.

The mission of Open Collective is to provide a home for those communities. Think GitHub for open communities that do more than just producing software.

The issues that we are trying to solve:
How can we help communities recognize yin contributions? (not only financial contributions)
How can we help surface everyone’s role, needs and requests? (to create more interactions within the community)

Those are the questions that we keep close as we are building the new version of Open Collective.
If you are part of a community and resonate with some of those issues, please share\!

Masterplan:

- Create a new web3 version on opencollective.xyz
- Create a DAO to manage it
- Issue a token (airdrop to past investors and contributors \+ continuously reward new contributors)
- Dissolve the company (replace it with a DUNA as a legal wrapper for the DAO – do you know anyone who could help us with that?)
- End goal: a community owned platform where all financial and non-financial contributors are properly rewarded and represented, with a board of stewards.

⚒️ New tool released:
We built this standalone tool to annotate any blockchain transaction: https://txinfo.xyz
It turns a cryptic etherscan transaction list into a human readable version.

https://x.com/xdamman/status/1902721790092222477

It’s a building block for the new Open Collective as our goal is to provide transparency around the funding and expenses of all those DAOs / collective that operate on-chain.

It’s using the Nostr protocol (the new decentralized social network supported by Jack Dorsey). No backend, anyone can use it, integrate it, or develop AI agents to automatically annotate transactions.

💰Fundraising:
We are raising funds with the crypto community with Octant and Gitcoin to fund the development of the new platform. If you are familiar with those fundraising platforms, please vote for Open Collective as every vote can make a difference. The more different people vote, the larger the allocation of the corresponding matching pool.

Gitcoin: you can vote till April 17th 2am CEST https://gitcoin.opencollective.xyz
Support also txinfo.xyz: https://explorer.gitcoin.co/\#/round/42161/867/129

Octant: you can vote from April 11th till April 25th (you must have some GLM tokens)
https://octant.app/project/7/0xae8c53e5f4375b114b669716B0B5FFC4f56F78d4

Current cash position
USD: \~$408k (including 25 ETH \~$40k)
Burn rate: \~$20k/month (including $12.5k/month for supporting the legacy version of opencollective.com)

Other updates
We did a great Open Collective Meetup during FOSDEM, the largest open source conference that happens every first weekend of February in Brussels. Recap on LinkedIn.

Working with Cuiki, the original designer of Open Collective, Kris, DAO expert and my partner Leen, facilitator and community weaver, on the new version.

🎙️ Did a podcast for the SuperNova conference where I shared about my entrepreneurial experience so far and what’s next: the need to rebuild communities and give them the tools to develop their own internal economy (Spotify, YouTube).

If you don’t already, follow Open Collective on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/opencollective
Or on Nostr: `nostr:npub1hsr6x2zhw3y6zzndcfel0xwcckkhf05w2ghnulelsppcruq4c3qqzv5whg`

As always, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

\- Xavier

I changed my mind on inequalities.

I realized that I was against inequalities because it is the politically correct thing to say.

How can you not be against inequalities when you see super rich people and people on the street?

But when I look at nature, inequality is everywhere. The footprint of an elephant can’t compare to the footprint of an ant 🐜 🐘. Even within the same species, not all individuals have the same access to resources. The trunk has access to more resources than the branches, but the leaves have more access to the sun. ☀️

There is so much wisdom in nature 🌱. It’s the result of millions of iterations to find the right balance ⚖️, and that keeps evolving all the time as the environment changes 🦕.

I want to learn more from nature and take inspiration from it. That’s why I’m now embracing inequalities.

Inequality can’t exist without the concept of quantity, which itself cannot exist without a common unit of measure 📏.

But nature cannot be measured with a single measuring stick. It has a multitude of dimensions. We are nature. We are multidimensional beings.

This made me realize that being against inequality only makes sense in a human society that has reduced everything to a single dimension, incapable of seeing and acknowledging the beauty of life in all its dimensions.

It’s only once you start reducing multiple dimensions into one, that you can start comparing, ranking, competing, and that inequalities emerge.

That’s why I’m not against inequalities anymore. I’m just against a world that has been reduced to a single measuring stick, a single currency, a single way to recognize everyone’s contribution.

Once you introduce other dimensions, inequalities become irrelevant. If you take into account someone’s time contribution to your community, then Elon Musk’s billions of dollars don’t matter anymore. He doesn’t have, for example, a single token of the Commons Hub Brussels and he won’t be able to come cowork there.

We all thrive in some dimensions and less so in others. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s what makes us all interdependent. That’s why we need to collaborate.

Your talent, your contribution is unique and sacred. It can’t be measured with a single measuring stick, it cannot be compared or ranked. Once you accept that, other people’s privileges and inequalities won’t matter as much anymore.

The key is to find the community that can recognize your contribution and that can fulfill your needs. A community that will not force everyone’s contribution to be measured with a single measuring stick as a condition to get access to shelter, food and care.

How can we open our minds and our hearts to many more dimensions? How can we properly recognize and value everyone’s sacred contribution?

Fighting inequalities means that we are de facto accepting to be reduced to a single currency. Let's start new ones and let's make inequalities and privileges obsolete\!

Dear investors, happy new year\! I wish you all the best for this year, and above all, that it will be filled with joy and community.

2025 will bring a lot of changes on many levels. To navigate them, community is immunity. It’s the best tool we have for deep adaptation. We can’t live alone in a bunker. We are going to need each other. Years ahead will test the strength and resilience of our relationships.

As I was reflecting on what could be a good picture to keep in our head in 2025, I drew this:

Healthy and resilient communities are the ones that have stewards that take responsibility, they are the ones that breathe, they inhale new community members and exhale others ready to leave. They optimize for connections within the collective to create stronger bonds. And they are driven by joy and purpose.

“We are offering people not a world of less, not a world of sacrifice, not a world where you are just going to have to enjoy less and suffer more \- no, we are offering a world of more beauty, more joy, more connection, more love, more fulfilment, …” — Charles Eisenstein

We are practicing with our own new HQ: the Commons Hub Brussels. A coworking and event space managed as a common. This is a fantastic testing ground for us. It gives us the opportunity to walk the walk and to experience along the way the tools that are deeply needed.

I’d love to challenge you to invest more in your local community in 2025\. Share with us the joy it brings, and the challenges. Our job at Open Collective is to give you the tools to support you and your community.

As always, feel free to book a time in my calendar to grab a virtual coffee. And if you are up for it, please respond with your calendar link and the reasons for which other people within this community of investors in Open Collective could book a time with you. This is also part of creating more opportunities for connections in 2025 within the Open Collective community.

With a lot of joy and love,

\- Xavier

Quick update on the transition

We are finalizing the legal documents for the transfer of assets of the current business to the “Open Finance Consortium”, aka OFiCO, the non-profit managed by the fiscal hosts that are providing a home for the existing 3722 collectives.

I reached out to the largest shareholders to give them a heads up and make sure that they were still engaged in the project (since it’s been almost 10 years since their initial investment). While my preference was to keep them engaged for this new chapter, a few of them decided to sell their shares back. Jim and Semil sold me their shares for a symbolic amount and General Catalyst returned their shares back to the company. While I’m sad to see them go, I’m thankful for their support during the first chapter and grateful for what their investment enabled us to do (Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst was our very first check back in October 2015).

I will provide an updated captable as soon as all of this is settled, but none of this is impacting your ownership. Please note however, that my intent is to eventually dissolve the company. Open Collective shouldn’t belong to me. It should belong to the community. That’s why my goal is to slowly transition to an DAO. But DAOs are still complicated and messy. They are still in their infancy. That’s why we are going step by step at our own pace.

I’m also glad that Pia is remaining on board and that Aseem came back. I’m also very grateful for Roy’s active participation in this process. Together, we will make sure that all contributions (financial and non financial) will be fairly compensated as part of the DAO.

That being said, none of this matters if we can’t create a meaningful platform that will create enough abundance for everyone. So that’s our number one priority for 2025\.

Onwards\! 🚀

Some numbers

- 3,256 collectives had at least one expense reimbursed in 2024 (+11% compared to 2023\)
(863 at least 12, compared to 859 in 2023\)
- 9,846 users have submitted at least one expense (10,627 in 2023\)
(727 at least 12, compared to 989 in 2023\)
- Burn rate: $33k/month (including $12.5k/month to OFiCO to support current version, $10k legal fees, only $3k in salaries, not paying myself atm)
- Treasury: $509k
- Runway: \~12 months

December 2023, originally published on dao.brussels/manifesto.

We, citizens of Brussels, are coming together to rebuild our city as a decentralised autonomous organisation. 🔅

We believe that the services offered by the city should belong to citizens. We want to have a say in how they are run, we want to have the opportunity to contribute, make proposals and be rewarded for our contributions.

The technology upon which existing institutions have been built —paper and bureaucracy— served us well, but it is too slow to adapt to the rapid unravelling of changes happening in the world today (see deep adaptation, metacrisis).

🗳️ For one, we can only vote every 5 years. That’s 8 bits of data per citizen per decade. Such a low bandwidth doesn’t enable rapid feedback loops and iteration cycles.

📰 Official communication is only in French and Dutch, despite Brussels being the most diverse city in the world (after Dubai). The numerous official websites and apps are not open source, citizens can’t inspect them and contribute. Its finances are not transparent. Subsidies given here and there cannot be inspected in open data.

📱 Today we have the technology to build a new generation of institutions whose ownership can be in the hands of all stakeholders, where all citizens can inspect in full transparency the decisions and the flows of public money.

🔅 We call them DAOs, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.

Unlike existing organisations (and institutions) that are built on a paper based official record (e.g. the Belgian Official Gazette), DAOs are organisations whose bylaws are deployed on a digital public blockchain.

This is a fundamental paradigm shift. It’s like moving from snail mail to email. 📮 👉 📧

⚡ Instead of having to pay hundreds of euros and wait days to publish amendments, additions to the blockchain take seconds for a fraction of the cost.

👮 Rules written in smart contracts don’t require an onerous and slow bureaucracy to enforce. They are enforced 100% of the time. Same rules apply to everyone. Everything can be inspected by anyone thanks to its open source and open data nature.

🛞 Like the wheel and the printing press, it is inevitable and it will profoundly reshape our society.

🏤 That being said, it would be naive to believe that smart contracts will replace all the rules, customs and agreements that make our city go round. Email hasn’t fully replaced the post office either.

☯️ That’s why we respect existing institutions. We are not here to compete with them, but to complete them.

🧩 Technology is only one piece of the puzzle. It is just a tool. It takes humans to make use of them to pursue whatever dream they have. And if we want a decentralised autonomous future where all citizens have the opportunity to participate, we also need new social technologies to organise ourselves. We draw inspiration from practices such as Liberating Structures, Non-Violent Communication, Deep Democracy and Sociocracy, as well as the Rochdale principles and Ostrom's principles.

🔥 In a time of profound change where we need to adapt to a changing climate, where citizens can’t accept anymore top down one-size-fits-all decisions (however well meaning), when citizens expect more transparency and more ways to participate in our institutions, it is our duty to explore how we can make use of all the new social and technical technologies at our disposal to offer alternative ways to coordinate and manage our city together.

🛡️ Brussels was built 1000 years ago. Over the centuries we have embraced different forms of governments, different ways to organise the economic life, education system and social care in our city. None of those systems can be seen as separate from the context and values of the times they were created in. Whether we use a belfry, an official gazette or a blockchain, we, citizens, use the knowledge and technology of our time to organise and steward the city.

That’s what we are here to do.

We are here to explore, learn, build and help each other through this great transition. We are here to take responsibility in stewarding Brussels in the 21st century.

We are explorers. We are pioneers.

Join us, citizen.

Here is to the next 1000 years 🍻

Ever since the movie Demain) (“Tomorrow”) came out in 2015, we’ve seen an explosion of local currencies in Europe. They enable citizens to support their local economy. When using a local currency, you create a natural barrier that incentivizes people to consume locally. If I give you a euro, you can go spend it on Amazon. If I give you a Zinne, the local currency in Brussels, you can only spend it in Brussels. In those times of polycrisis, where we need to pursue resilience over performance, it sounds like a fantastic idea.

My personal stash of local currencies

A local currency is a tool to weave a web of relationships between shops to rebuild the local economic tissue. It’s also about defending local employment, and making sure that fellow citizens that dream of opening their own shop can do it, instead of having to work for a company whose headquarter is not in the same city.

Sadly, despite the initial excitement and all those benefits, most of them have failed to gain any meaningful momentum. Why?

The poster child of them, the Bristol Pound, featured in that movie, sadly closed shop in 2021, 9 years after its introduction.

I got the chance to visit them in February 2023 to learn more about their story. What I’ve seen is something that I’ve also witnessed in other local currencies: those projects are led by activists, not by entrepreneurs. They have little to no resources, they usually don't have a tech person or designer in the team that takes care of the user experience. No chance to compete in a world where the large majority wants to pay electronically.

I like to compare them to couch surfing before AirBnB. A fantastic community of pioneers with great values, but incapable of reaching out outside of their community of activists. For them, the lack of user experience is not an issue. But as we’ve experienced in tech startups, every single extra screen, extra click, extra form, makes you lose people along the way. Then an entrepreneur like Brian Chesky comes along and makes hosting people in your house mainstream.

Last week, I got the chance to follow a training on local currencies by Dante Edme, cofounder of the Eusko, the local currency of the French Basque Country introduced in 2013 (thanks to Financité and the Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation for making that training possible). For more information on this training, see the website of the Bihar Institute (in French).

What sets the Eusko apart from all other local currencies is their business focus. Dante took a very entrepreneurial approach (even though he wasn’t an entrepreneur before). “Building a business, making profits, hiring people are not dirty words, if those are done for the profit of the community and not private interests”.

“Building a business, making profits, hiring people are not dirty words, if those are done for the profit of the community and not private interests” \- Dante Edme, Eusko

As an entrepreneur myself, this was refreshing to hear. I’ve been following the Zinne since its inception, and I’ve been volunteering for more than a year now. And I must admit that this has been quite a frustrating experience. Great people, great values, but a lack of business acumen, lack of strategy. So we do projects left and right thinking that one will magically change the game. Let’s redo the website. Let’s do another marketing campaign. And just like that, all the (public) money is gone. Who to blame? We can’t blame them, quite the opposite. They gave so much of their time and passion to give life to this project. We need to celebrate their work and accomplishments. They are the pioneers. So I can only blame myself for not having been there from the beginning and playing my role as an entrepreneur like Dante did in his region.

As Dante put it: “it takes activists and professionals, and being a citizen initiative with volunteers doesn’t mean that we cannot be pros”.

So here is an invitation to fellow entrepreneurs, please join those various citizen initiatives, they need you (and fellow activists, please welcome them, if you are serious about making a project that is sustainable over time, you are going to need their business acumen and leadership/guidance, we all have a different piece of the puzzle).

The recipe of the Eusko

Recruit volunteers

There are a lot of roles needed to create and manage a local currency: treasurer (keeping track of the collateral), accounting, bizdev (recruit shops), communication (website, flyers, …), fundraising (subsidies, grants, …), coordination / facilitation, database management, tech development and support, community / volunteers management, … While some people can fulfill many roles, it’s not sustainable to only do this with only a few volunteers. The Eusko started with 10 people that came together, but that number quickly went down to 4\. So they organized a recruitment campaign. They identified the roles that were missing and actively recruited some people that they thought would be perfect for the role. They also made a public role to try to reach out outside of their classic activist bubble. It was a clear invitation with a time limit: this would take you one hour per week and it’s just for a year. It’s a tour of duty to contribute to the general interest. People react positively to that. But it’s important to keep the commitment and start and end meetings on time.

First 2 hires pay themselves

“Do you know any lasting initiative that has an impact that doesn’t have employees?” asked Dante. If you are serious about your citizen initiative, you have to hire people and find the budget for it.

The first hire is the main coordinator. That person should go after subsidies and grants. The second hire is a bizdev, someone that will actually go recruit the shops. That role should eventually pay itself with the membership fees.

Ask for membership fees

From the get go, all participants had to pay a yearly membership fee (€24, €36 or €60/year, corresponding to €2, €3 or €5 per month, with the option to only pay €5/year for low income people; and for professionals: €60-€240/year). On top of that, there was also a 5% fee for converting the Eusko back to euros and a setup fee of €75 (for up to two employees, up to €240 from 10 employees). This covers the actual cost of having someone do the bizdev and, as a nice side effect, it makes sure that you think twice before not renewing. As joining again later will cost you.

The idea is that everyone should contribute. If you are convinced of the idea, if you want to support it, then everyone should contribute something, each according to their means.

This is out of fairness for everyone. Most local currencies led by activists have a very hard time to ask for money. They want to make things free to be inclusive. But if the users don’t pay, then someone else is paying (with their time and/or money). And when that 3rd party gets tired, the machine stops.

But how to ask for money? Dante had a great answer: “tell them that you are here because you want more people to spend their money at local independent shops like yours, instead of big international chains. This is our common goal, what unites us. We are an association for all the shops and we will all win if we give it the means to pursue this common mission. For that we need everyone to contribute their fair share”.

That’s why I believe in the power of open collectives, open source organizations that are transparent towards their members, so that they can all feel that it’s their “common” association. It’s not an opaque institution where they can’t see how their money is spent.

Go after the second line

The other thing that they did well was directly going after the second line, ie. making sure that the businesses that join the network would have a place to spend their Euskos. A key was not to look for the specific vendors they have, but to look instead at the general expenses that all local shops have: accounting, marketing, window / general cleaning, etc.).

As a result, 84% of professionals have never converted their Euskos back to euros. 56% of them have changed one of their vendors to favor another one in the network.

Get the support of local associations

Finally, to convince consumers, they did a sponsorship program. Any local association that would get at least 30 people would get 3% of their top ups. This is brilliant. Giving individual rewards (top up €50, get €55 Euskos) don’t really work. But this creates a collective challenge. Many of those associations are struggling to get donations. This gives them an easy way to tap into their respective community to challenge them. When they succeed, it creates a great feeling for everyone. It’s something that we have done together. This scheme enabled them to get the support of the local associative tissue.

Dante Edme sharing the sponsorship screen during the training: “it’s important that people see how much they contribute to their favorite local association when they login”

Publish a paper directory

Remember the yellow pages? Who doesn’t want to be part of a directory of the local independent shops. It’s concrete, it’s real and people are willing to pay to have a bigger space in it. It reminds me of my childhood where I was already scouting the local shops of my hometown Nivelles (south of Brussels) to sell advertising space in my homemade newspaper (video archive from 2002, in French).

Be pragmatic

Values are great, activism is great, but you have to be able to show some flexibility. For example, while they usually don’t accept supermarket chains, they made an exception in one village where it was the only grocery store (that used to be independent but who eventually joined a chain).

Quality of service

Not everyone can open a local currency exchange. They need to apply. The Eusko wanted to make sure that anytime someone would go to one of those places, they would offer a great quality of service. It’s better to have fewer of those places but making sure that people have a great first time experience. They also regularly go through the user experience of a shop or of a consumer to make sure that everything runs smoothly.

Some numbers

They started with a crowdfunding campaign that got them €30k, 800 members and 192 professionals. After the first year, they were 2200 (spoiler alert: it didn’t always go up and to the right and they had to face many setbacks).

Fast forward to today, 4000 members and 1400 professionals accept the Eusko. They have a yearly budget of €500k (10 FTE) and €1M worth of Eusko in circulation.

While they couldn’t have started without multiple subsidies from various different institutions (they got about €100k/year), today, they are 84% self-financed. Respect.

Today, their budget is roughly 25% membership fees from professionals, 18% collectivities (€0.10/inhabitant for communes up to 5,000 inhabitants, then €0.06), 18% membership fees from individuals, 12% coming from the 5% conversion fee, 12% ads in the directory they publish.

What’s next?

The Eusko started back in 2013\. Back then, the technical and political landscape was quite different. So while we can’t copy paste a recipe through time and space (every region is also quite different), we can learn a lot from it.

Dante’s recommendation is to take an honest hard look at the situation of our local currency. What are the key functions and roles? Do we have enough people to take care of them? How is the quality of service? Who are the shops that are still active in the network? Then go find the people and the talents that are missing and take it from there.

I find this space so interesting and so important for our generation. We need to rebuild local resilience, the local economic tissue and this is such a great tool for that. There are thousands of people around the world that start local currencies despite the lack of infrastructure to support it. It feels like creating your own local newspaper before Wordpress. They are patching together solutions using various tools that have not really been made for that (at the exception of Cyclos, which is a 19 year old platform and doesn’t offer what people can expect from a modern mobile app). Imagine if we could reduce the friction to enable every local community to start their own currency?

That’s why I started the Citizen Wallet in March 2023 with Kevin Sundar Raj, an open source project to enable communities to send and receive their community currency (using web3). It’s only a part of the puzzle, there is also the need to enable communities to actually issue their currency and manage it properly. Since I’m now back at Open Collective, I’m looking forward to adding such functionality to the platform so that every collective, every community can easily issue their own currency.

What about Brussels?

I offered the Zinne to experiment with the Citizen Wallet but I quickly realized that there was no appetite for trying something different than Cyclos since they already had signed a multiyear contract with them. So we tried a side experiment with DAO.Brussels (the local community of crypto citizens in Brussels). We opened an exchange bureau and tokenized 1000 zinnes. We played with it at our monthly Crypto Wednesday event (see also dao.brussels/zinne). We learned a lot but we didn’t get the support of the Zinne I was hoping for and we didn’t want to force my way. As my beloved partner loves to say: “you are a projector (in your human design), you need to wait for the invitation”. This led us to start a new project: “Brussels Pay” (now led by Jonas Boury and Kevin Sundar Raj, with the support of Innoviris.brussels).

Brussels Pay is a different iteration on the concept of local currency using the latest blockchain technology (aka web3). The goal is to create a new payment network, now that we have the technology to move money on the Internet without intermediaries and at a fraction of the cost. Savings could then be used to feed a citizen participatory budget (aka DAO).

📺 Watch: presentation of Brussels Pay at the Stable Summit, Brussels, July 2024

It’s a citizen initiative and citizen initiatives don't compete with each other, they are here to complete each other. A payment network is independent of the actual currency used (in the same way that you can use visa or mastercard to move euros or dollars). So my hope is that we can still eventually converge with the Zinne to create together a proper successful local currency for the capital of Europe.

Between the people at the Zinne, the talented tech people at Brussels PAY, DAO.Brussels, the Rebel Collective, the Commons Hub and other communities, I’m sure we can find all the talents to create a proper local currency to support the local economy in Brussels.

Onwards, citizen\! 🚀

Go further

📺 Watch: Shillings from Heaven / Wörgl’s Miracle, movie on the local currency that saved the city of Wörgl in Austria in 1923\.

📚 Read: the Future of Money, Bernard Lietaer

📚 Read: Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein

📖 Read: Les monnaies locales en France: un bilan de l’enquête nationale 2019-2020, Jérôme Blanc, Marie Fare, Oriane Lafuente-Sampietro

📖 Read: Monnaies locales: monnaies d’intérêt général, Étude sur l’utilité sociale des monnaies locales complémentaires, Mouvement Sol

Leen Schelfhout and Xavier Damman, May 2022

What happens when citizens do participate?
Story commissioned by the Green European Foundation

What can give us hope are small actions that we can take at our doorstep, a place where we can have an immediate impact. In a world that is globally connected, those small actions can have a ripple effect. It took one month for the Occupy Movement from occupying Zuccotti Park in NYC in 2011 to having more than 3000 occupations all around the world. That was 10 years ago. What if we could start a new movement to occupy the public space, not to protest, but to rebuild community, rebuild commons and start new institutions where citizens can participate and contribute?

In this article, we walk you through our journey as citizens who freshly moved to Brussels, the capital of Europe and the second most diverse city in the world (after Dubai) and started solving problems for the neighbourhood, one initiative at a time.

Start at your doorstep

In February 2020, just a month before the lockdown, we moved into a house in Schaarbeek, Brussels, that had a garage but no garden. Watching the empty 10 square metres of grey asphalt in front of our house, as we don’t have a car, and nobody is allowed to park in front of a garage, an idea emerged. Why not put a tiny community garden on that spot? Wood crates, some soil, flowers and a bench would create an incentive for us, newcomers in Brussels, to connect with the neighbourhood and keep some green fingers busy.

And so we did. In no time, the tiny garden attracted kids planting pumpkins and mysterious flowers, postcards and tiny gifts, bees and butterflies. The garden flourished and brought happiness while we had to stay at home during the pandemic. We had created a space for a mini commons in the street.

We found messages of strangers, tiny statues and gifts, bees, butterflies and bugs. Our daily lunch coffee outside invited people for some small talk and we integrated in the street. When the lockdown hit, we danced every night for 10 minutes outside with the whole street, blocking the traffic, taking the space to build a community feeling. We started a WhatsApp group for the street, we started sharing our empty garage with neighbours to safely store their bicycles. A community was born.

With the kind messages of neighbours, the messages of the commune started arriving via mail. “What you are doing is not allowed, you are privatising the public space.” Our attempts to prove otherwise, it was a community garden after all, one that had a positive impact on the street, were met with incomprehension and fines. The garden had to go. With support from the neighbours, we decided to keep it anyway.

On June 17th, the unthinkable happened. When we woke up in the morning the garden had simply disappeared. We put posters all around the neighbourhood: Nature Missing: have you seen the community garden?

Two days later we found out it had been taken by the commune and put at the waste disposal, 1,5 km away from our house. The reaction of the community was heartwarming. Neighbours brought new plants and flowers and soon enough, a new Citizen Garden emerged on the street within a week.

One bright citizen took another approach and turned to the law, discovering a loophole that would give the story an amazing twist. If we would put the garden on a handcart (not a trailer\!), and register it, it would be allowed to be parked in the street. And so we did. The garden is still there today, on a handcart, attracting butterflies and neighbours.

The mini garden project showed us the power generated by a community that gets behind an idea as small as a tiny community garden. We built connections, and we learnt how to work together on a project, sharing responsibilities and feeling the immediate impact. We were hungry for more. We wanted a real common in the street.

Starting to common

The small act of putting a garden in front of our house generated a public debate over the use of public space far beyond the city-borders of Brussels. The story was covered by many local and national newspapers, such as L’Avenir, BX1 and The Bulletin. The lovely act of civil disobedience challenged in a very effective way the rules and boundaries the current governments are putting on the use of the public space. These rules clearly favour cars over people, a legacy of decades of policies favouring economic benefits over building social foundations. Times have changed though, needs have shifted. The needs of the local street community, looking for social connections, are not met with these rules.

Three needs were very present in the street, and became clearer during the Covid-pandemic:

- space for kids to play safely: we experienced in the lockdown every day what it means to keep kids inside, not being allowed to play on the street because we have privatised it for car drivers.
- bike storage: there are more than 6000 people on the waiting list to get access to one of those “velo boxes” that replace one parking spot with a box that can securely fit 5 bikes. It’s safer to park a car on the street than a bike.
- and more community green in the street: we had experienced ourselves the immense positive effect of a tiny community garden in the street.

To address those needs, we started two new projects in the summer of 2020: a series of playstreets in the neighbourhood that required blocking the streets for cars and a ‘Citizen Bike Garden’, a shared bike shed with a garden on top that would be constructed on a parking spot in the street.

We focused on involving more people from the start, building a collective for each project and organising several open brainstorms to mine ideas and dreams. With a clear set of goals, we applied for funding with the regional government, hoping to work with the administration more constructively. Only then we started executing, defining clear roles, and rotating responsibilities. The funding we received, for both projects, gave us the opportunity to learn how to manage a budget transparently together, taking into account all needs, dreams and values.

The playstreets were an overall success, bringing joy and smiles to the streets in the neighbourhood, creating ample opportunities for kids and adults to meet and create new connections. Because blocking the streets was limited in time, and over the weekend, the impact on traffic was low. They showed neighbours how different the street could feel once we block transit traffic to give priority to the locals/residents. The funds we received made it possible to pay local artists to support them and we could buy some common furniture for the neighbourhood: a tent, picnic tables and a trampoline.

The Citizen Bike Garden on the other hand, was a more complex project. The construction itself could house 12 bikes, had a big garden on top, and had a blackboard for exchanging messages with passersby. The building process was an amazing example of spontaneous contributions, attracting creative and handy neighbours from the whole area. Once you create a canvas for citizens to contribute, they do. The Citizen Bike Garden was a clear example of that.

To gather feedback from the neighbours, involve them as much as possible in the project, and collect opinions and ideas, we distributed a feedback form. The results showed that while most people loved the project, they also found the construction to be too big. Only two people complained about having to give up a parking spot. We took that feedback into account and reduced the size by half. We called it the “Citizen Bike Garden Mini” and it could still house 6 bikes.

Sadly, once again the commune decided the construction had to leave the public space. In the beginning of February 2021, they removed it permanently from our street, replacing it three weeks later by a metal bike shed that can house 5 bikes, owned and managed by a private company. Their biggest argument was safety. They could not afford the risk of an experiential bottom-up project causing potential danger to passers-by and users. In Belgian law, the mayor has full responsibility when an issue arises.This very law prevents citizens from self organising around the needs and dreams of people in the street. We have built institutions to take care of our commons on our behalf. As a result we have lost the ability to care for our community.

The Citizen Bike Garden left us puzzled and disappointed, experiencing the value of the new connections it had built in the neighbourhood and working with direct feedback.
There is hardly any space for experimenting. Commons and community projects, especially when they suddenly emerge answering a need, physical or digital, are often perceived as a threat and treated as such. However, this experiment has shown that when one-size-fits-all official rules do not meet the needs of the people, local people can rise up, take responsibility and grow together through the process of building, whether concretely or metaphorically.

The Citizen Corner

At the end of our street is an empty building. When you are left with some common neighbourhood furniture like tables, pingpong tables and trampolines from previous initiatives, and there is an empty building, you put one and one together. What about we put this common furniture in that building, for everybody in the community to use? A post-it with our phone number on the door led us to the owner, a project developer who had bought the old warehouse to build lofts and apartments. It took us a couple of coffees and smiles, but after a few months, he gave us the key, promising us we could use it until he had permission to start with the construction works.

It was immediately clear that the building with its 1000m2 had a lot more to offer than storage space. We summoned the neighbourhood for a collective imagination exercise, we mined ideas and dreams and got ourselves organised. It was clear from the start: this building would be our common neighbourhood resource for anyone in need of space. If the future of this building was private, we better make use of it while we could to create some beautiful memories for everyone. A new common was born.

Having learnt from previous experiences we levelled up our organising.

Setting rules, values and boundaries

We created a participatory process to define values and principles for the building, on how to govern the space and on which events we wanted to attract. We held several meetings, before we drafted a framework that would guide us in governing and holding the space.

Key value for everyone was organising in a non-hierarchical, participatory way. Nobody would ‘run’ the building, we were a collective of citizens holding an open and welcoming space for running experiments, for building connections, for celebration, for art and last but not least, for kids. With that, bottom up self organising would be the default. The answer to any idea or question would be ‘yes’, if two more people agreed to help execute it. All ideas had to be self executed. Regular general assemblies would help us deal with conflicts and issues. And we also agreed that everyone could step out or take a break at any time, realising fully that we were all volunteers.

We set some clear boundaries as well. Being located in a residential area, we decided to not host noisy parties. Secondly, this project was not an act of civil disobedience, but a legal occupation of an empty building by and for citizens. We negotiated with the owner to only pay for the utilities and split the revenue if we get to subrent some of the space. We took a fire insurance policy, applied for subsidies and informed the commune about our activities.

Optimising for self organisation: picking the right tools

Accessibility and self organisation were highly valued by the collective. The tools we picked and the structure we set up were optimised for living these values. Our motto: what will you organise?

We set up a Discord server for two reasons. Discord is an application that is built for collaborating in communities. It enables you to create channels per topic, which keeps online communication tidy. It runs on your phone and laptop, which means that people without a smartphone would also be able to access it, whenever they wanted to and without continuous notifications. And it is friendly for people who do not like the mainstream social media platforms like Facebook groups. Discord was the most accessible tool to bridge people who are digitally hyperconnected and those who prefer to stay offline most of the time.

For external communication about events, we created a shared, public Google calendar for everyone to add their events, a website that was easy to edit, a Facebook page. A collective with the Open Collective platform took care of transparent bookkeeping and managing donations and expenses. Admin rights were given to everyone needing them, to avoid bottlenecks and to organise flows easily.

Dealing with money

Running a building like this comes with costs. When we started, we didn’t have any funding. We filed for subsidies but we had to deal with the uncertainty of when we might receive them, if at all. We experimented with various business plans to rent out the space and create membership fees to cover the general costs of water, electricity, wifi and heating.

To close the gap, we asked the people most engaged in the community if they would be willing to lend €100 to €500 to the collective to pay for the heating for the winter, with the promise that they will be reimbursed as soon as we have enough money. We defined a very basic rental plan for people who wanted to use the space and we created a membership fee for people using the space on a regular basis. Last not but least, we set up a bar to sell drinks at various events and we had a donation box at all times.

This basic business plan helped us to be financially sustainable within 6 months, only including the costs for running the building. It ruled out paying rent to the owner or paying people who put their time and energy in the project. When the subsidies arrived in January, those conversations caused trouble in the group dynamics (see chapter Common(s) challenges).

As we are writing this article, the building is still our common place of meeting. Numerous birthday parties, concerts, flea markets, cryptocurrency meetups, roller disco events for kids, and yoga classes have taken place in the building. A kitchen was installed and a neighbour started cooking weekly for homeless people, and another to house a few refugees from Ukraine. Our neighbourhood has a flourishing community building.

Common(s) challenges

Creating and maintaining a common like a community building is not without challenges. It takes time and a lot of continuous care and work. Here are some of the challenges that we face:

The place of community work in our society

A short reminder to the context we are working in: we are in the midst of an ecological and social crisis, and on the verge of collapse. While we might not have all the answers, experts such as Kate Raworth and her concept of doughnut economics as well as other researchers and indigenous cultures, have shown us some thriving models for commons, some of which have been working for centuries. Commoning needs to find back a central place in our lives and in society, to restore social foundations. Yet, we experience closely that many citizens find it hard to make different choices, to change careers, organise local solutions and rebuild commons. Most active citizens that put time into community work do this as volunteers. This is not enough for the crisis we are facing, and not sustainable for the people doing the work. We fall into the same trap of extracting people’s energy instead of integrating it into a regenerative economy.

The Citizen Corner is running into this problem in many ways. We are relying deeply on the energy of volunteering neighbours, and the coreteam is shrinking, tapping even more into the energy of a few people holding on strong. When the subsidies arrived in January, we had to reinvent ourselves. Who can be paid for running the place? And what does that mean for the dynamic of very bottom-up and non-hierarchical organising? We also ran into the simple fact that only two people in the team had the status of being self employed. The others had full time contracts or had an unemployment status, which simply blocked them from getting paid for their contributions. In short, even when you want to, the systems we are tight to, is holding us back in many ways to do what is needed to restore what is broken.

These issues show us the cracks in how our society is built up. We have outsourced taking care of public goods and the collective budget, and put it in the hands of institutions and governments, who often do not live in our neighbourhoods. We no longer have direct access to managing our commons, nor access to setting the values and defining the rules that impact us directly. With that we gave away our abilities to coordinate, stay on top of the needs and dreams of people in our streets, deal with conflict as humans and take responsibility. This system error blocks us from doing what is needed at this time in history: to turn citizens from consumers into creators and contributors.

How to reward people for contributing?

Each community, local or global, has commons and public goods. But not all communities have a currency and governing body that can allocate resources to maintain those commons, to create a resilient, democratic and proactive community around the common and to become sustainable.

In the everyday management in our commons, the Citizen Corner, we struggled with asking for money to locals, very often contributors, for using the community building place. Yet, we had to pay the bills for running the building. It is hard to make a community project sustainable, financially and also on the human level. How do you reward contributing citizens? How could we use the Citizen Corner as a place to experiment finding solutions for this?

Our first attempt was an experiment with developing our own currency, the Citizen Coin. You could earn the token in two ways: contributing to the project as part of the organising team, or paying with Euros. With this coin you were part of the community, and it could be used to pay for drinks and use of the space. For the first group, the contributors who gave their time and energy, we created a system to claim tokens whenever an hour of work was spent on the Citizen Corner. A simple spreadsheet helped us keep track of that. For the second group, contributors in Euros, we created a ‘Citizen Card’ to top up the personal Citizen Coin balance, that would then enable you to spend money in the Citizen Corner. Each paper card had a QR code that we could easily top up or charge.

While the concept sounded like it would create clarity around contributions, it added friction in the checkout process. Most visitors don’t come regularly enough to justify topping up such a card. It simply made no sense for visitors to buy citizen coins and we cancelled that part of the idea. We ended up using Sum Up devices so that people could use their phone or their credit card to pay at the bar. Then we add the proceeds to our open collective balance for transparency.

The other part, where contributors claim coins for contributions and pay with coins for a drink at the bar or use of the space, is still in place. We have enough money flowing in so contributors don’t have to pay for using the building, and at the same time it is clear who is part of the organisers’ community and who is not.

What is not that practical though is the spreadsheet to keep track of contributions and claim and pay for tokens. We had to look elsewhere for a solution to that problem.

Is the answer in web3 tools and DAO’s?

What is a DAO?

A DAO, short for ‘Decentralised Autonomous Organisation,’ is an internet native collective of people that organise around a common project without central leadership and often without legal structure. The common resource is a shared, crowdfunded, treasury that is managed and owned by all members of the community. Think of it as a shared bank account where adding and removing people only takes a few clicks instead of having to show up at a local bank branch. Now the community has an address where they can receive donations or raise money with crowdfunding. Unlike a bank account, such a crypto wallet is programmable, meaning that the community can set rules to approve transactions (e.g. every transaction needs to be approved by at least 3 people).

We shape tools then the tools shape us

When a community has to create a bank account or a non-profit, it has to nominate an administrator that has signature power and access to the account. It creates a hierarchy and a bottleneck, since not everyone has access and decisions always need to go through the same person.
By creating a crypto wallet that requires, for example, 2 out of 6 people to approve transactions, it creates de facto a flat organisation where any 2 of the 6 people can approve. Decisions become decentralised. Everyone now has access to the account and more than one leader can emerge. Everyone is invited to participate.

Beyond offering a shared and transparent crypto bank account (known as a wallet), a DAO also enables a community to issue its own token. You can think of it as shares of a company, or as a currency within the community. It’s a powerful tool to reward positive contributions to the community and decentralise the decision making process, as any holder of such a token is free to give them to anyone.

DAOs are like super cooperatives that use the full potential of the Internet. They open a new era of (digital) commons where, like on Wikipedia, everyone is invited to contribute, but where anybody can get rewarded for their contribution.

DAOs only exist on the blockchain, in the same way that a company or a cooperative only exists in the official book of your country. A new paradigm is emerging, a new Internet country, where we can not only cooperate to share knowledge, but where we can start working together and manage commons together, in a transparent and borderless way.

It’s still very much a mystery for a lot of people, exactly like the Internet in the 90’. But for the ones that spend time learning and practising, it’s already clear that this new Internet will change society like the first one did.

DAOs can take many shapes and forms. In their simplest form it’s a group of people in a Facebook or WhatsApp group that manage a pool of money together to achieve a common purpose. In their most complex form, it’s a community of thousands \-sometimes millions- of people that contribute to a common goal and receive tokens for their contribution.

The new tools DAOs and web3, the new rising version of the internet, enable us to start imagining a new generation of cooperatives that invite everyone to contribute in various ways. Once people have some tokens from a DAO, they are free to do whatever they want with them. They can hold on to them and participate in governance but they can also transfer them or sell them. The allocation of resources is now by design decentralised to the members of the community. There is no President, no hierarchy in charge of allocating resources. The age of free workers and creators is here.

In the same way that the invention of the LLC –privately owned companies with limited liability– contributed to the launch of the Industrial Era, the invention of DAOs could contribute to advancing humanity to a new era of cooperation where communities would be able to create and maintain new commons. It could become the new dominant form of organising, one where all stakeholders are shareholders. One that would enable us to grow from consumers to contributors and creators.

The Internet of commons

The Internet can enable communities to create their own media to tell their own story. A new version of the Internet is coming up, web3, and it could enable communities to now also have their own governance and their own economy. This has the potential to have a revolutionary impact, because it could mean that each community would be able to allocate resources to maintain their commons. Some governments may lose their monopoly on the management of the commons in the same way that mainstream media have lost their monopoly on the stories being told.

“The Internet enabled communities to have their own media
DAOs enable communities to have their own economy”

As a result, decision making will be less centralised, less top down and more decentralised and more bottom up. This means taking decisions closer to the reality on the ground of a given community. This means more opportunities for the members of a community to take ownership and participate in the decision making process.

Let’s not rush though, we are at a very early stage in web3 and DAOs in general. We first need to bridge the gap and show more citizens about this new Internet of DAOs. That’s why we created DAO.brussels

DAO.Brussels

DAO.brussels is the community of the crypto citizens of Brussels. We meet every first Wednesday of the month at the Citizen Corner for “Crypto Wednesday”. We start with conversation tables where people can chat about various topics related to the world of crypto: crypto 101 (how to get started?), why crypto?, DeFI (decentralised finance), ReFI (decentralised finance applied to projects to regenerate communities and the environment), NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens, digital assets that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos), cryptogames, DAOs, etc. What matters here is to make fellow citizens meet and build new relationships. It’s only once you’ve established trust that you can start talking about new ideas, new ways of doing things that at first take you out of your comfort zone.

Different people will resonate with different messages. Some are there to make money, others to trade art, others to rebuild communities. There is no right and wrong reason because they all eventually lead to the same outcome: they all contribute to bringing more people into this new decentralised world where more citizens can participate in the decision making process, where more citizens can reclaim ownership over the commons, where competition is outcompeted by collaboration. Yes, even the people there “just for the money” (we call them “Degens”): They help increase the security of the network, provide liquidity, develop new mechanisms that are all open source and that we can all learn from (for example to create new “ReFI” projects).

Through this, we have already onboarded 5 neighbours to crypto. They now have their wallet and they start receiving universal basic income (UBI) tokens every hour, which would come from the Proof of Humanity DAO. We also organised an NFT contest to invite local artists to reimagine the streets of Brussels (https://imagine.brussels) and in the process, we helped 25 local artists create a crypto wallet and mint their first NFT on the blockchain (i.e. create a certificate of authenticity that can be traded online). The contest was inspired by an art and literary movement called solarpunk, in which artists envision a future where all major contemporary challenges have been faced. We raised €5000 in crypto currencies to buy the newly created NFTs by local artists in Brussels. The Citizen Corner served as a beautiful space to expose all the artwork and make visitors dream about a solarpunk city (https://dao.brussels/solarpunk-nft-contest).

![By Tavub and Philip Stessens (NFT on OpenSea).][image15]
Winner of the Solarpunk NFT contest to reimagine the streets of Brussels.
By Tavub and Philip Stessens (NFT on OpenSea).

Rooted locally, connected globally

DAOs share infrastructure globally and they are all open source and open data by design, unlike many institutions. This new way of organising is like the difference between locking software on a CD-ROM and a website in the Web Browser where anyone can look at the source code. Open and transparent organising enables a Cambrian explosion of innovation. Whether you are in Cape Town, Taiwan or Brussels, if you work for a DAO, identify a pain point, and start building a solution for it, that solution can be reused anywhere in the world. By design, by virtue of sharing the same global infrastructure, we are all collaborating to make better human organisations.

That’s what happens with Fabien, a French developer that used to work for the Balancer DAO. They needed a web interface to make it easy for people to vote on proposals. So he built one and made it available for any other DAO to use. Today there are more than 6800 DAOs around the world that use his tool Snapshot.

Another example: Trach worked for the Yearn Finance DAO (a community owned platform to automate cryptocurrency investments) and they ran into the issue of how can we compensate all the people working for the community without a hierarchy? He went on to develop Coordinape, an intersubjective coordination tool for decentralised worker compensation, also now used by thousands of DAOs (including DAO Brussels). It enables anyone in the community to allocate tokens to the people they’ve worked with in a given period (called epoch). You don’t have anymore one boss that you need to please, you are working for the community and rewarded by the community. If your boss cannot see or cannot fully appreciate your contributions, you are out of luck to get a bonus. Not in a DAO.

For all those reasons, we decided to transition the non-profit we started in november 2019, All for Climate ASBL to a DAO. All for Climate started as an answer to a shared pain many grassroots collectives working on climate and social justice run into: administration and accounting. Being part of Extinction Rebellion and connected to a lot of other social movements, we experienced the administration pain very often. By nature, collectives of active citizens are dynamic and often temporary. Citizens organise around a project, need to raise some money to make it happen, but after that, the collective disappears or attracts other people. It makes no sense to start a legal entity or to even open up a bank account, simply because of the burden of adminstration.

With these problems in mind, we created a fiscal host for all active citizens working on projects within the climate and social justice framework. With the help of the platform Open Collective, we provide a virtual non profit, a legal entity and a shared bank account for citizens to remove any blocks that prevent them from getting started as soon as possible. Being in the middle of a climate emergency and social crisis, we need all hands on deck. Removing roadblocks from citizens to get active is where all our efforts should go.

At this moment, we host more than 150 smaller and bigger collectives all over Europe. The transition to a DAO-way of organising, with our own token as a tool to build community, reward systems and democratic governance structures, will enable us to grow into a citizen movement of the 21st century. A movement that is:

1. decentralised and rooted in the local reality, with collectives and citizens operating autonomously on projects that matter for them and make sense in their local context.
2. Connected globally to create a common infrastructure, connections, funding and tools to support those local actions.

Onboarding grassroots collectives in the Web3 space is definitely part of the work we will focus on. Ayowecca, a collective that we host in Uganda, took part in a crowdfunding via Gitcoin, a web3 project on public goods. They raised €25000 for executing their dream: planting dozens and dozens of fruit trees in schools and hospitals. By successfully connecting them to funders in the global regenerative finance space, they can now answer to a local reality in their neighbourhoods. And it is just the beginning of what is possible, bridging worlds and people globally, so they can be active locally.

Although we launched our own token in the mean time to start building a stronger community, our journey has only just begun. Our guides in the process are clear:

- Elinor Ostrom, American political economist, first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, and her eight design principles to manage commons. Those principles include setting clear boundaries, conflict resolution mechanisms, procedures for making participatory rules, monitoring conditions of resources etc.
- Kate Raworth, English economist, and her theory of the Doughnut economy), an economic model that balances between essential human needs, creating social foundations and planetary boundaries.
- Sociocracy and Frederic Laloux “Reinventing organisations” for creating collective governance structures that promote collaboration, transparency, self organising and ownership.
- Deep democracy, non violent communication, liberating structures and other human centred conversation tools to embrace conflict as an opportunity to grow and create healthy human connections
- the creative force that is hiding in all citizens, in and out of web3 to build a vibrant new society of contributors.

The next chapter in human history might just as well be summarised as a time of networked localisation (...) remembering and desiring the benefits of community and local, while recognising the importance of cooperation, interrelationship, and shared information pathways at regional and global levels (Swan, 2021). Who do we choose to be in this troubled time, what do we choose to spend our time on, what do we want to create to enter that new chapter?

The positive, global breakthrough we need to face the crisis, requires us to create alternatives, support, solutions and opportunities so millions of citizens can reorganise. We need to reclaim ownership over these solutions and the responsibility that comes with that. We need to free ourselves from the existing systems and create new ones that know no borders and that invite everyone to contribute. And we need to turn to each other, regenerate our communities.

Works Cited

Fritsch, Felix, and Jeff Emmett. Challenges and Approaches to Scaling the Global Commons. 1 April 2021\. Frontiers in Blockchain.
Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons. The evolution of Institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, 2015\.
Seba, Tony, and James Arbib. Rethinking Humanity Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom. June 2020, (PDF).
Swan, Anna-Marie. Commons: The Heart of the Creation Era. 24 August 2021\. (Medium).
Wheatley, Margaret J. Who do we choose to be? Facing reality, claiming leadership, restoring sanity. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, 2017\.

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 🔅

October 5 2024

I used to be an apple fan boy. My first Mac was the apple 2 that my Canadian neighbors gave me for free when I was 10\. That's how I learned how to code with Basic.

Then we finally got our first proper modern PC at home. It was a Pentium 120mhz running windows 3.11 that I ended up upgrading to Windows 95\. I came back to the Mac ecosystem when I entered university. I bought the MacBook 12 G4 titanium. I loved that machine. Perfect size though quite bulky when you look at it.

I remember getting my hands on the first iPhone and upgrading every other release.

I had the chance to attend WWDC in San Francisco in 2011 while I was living there. It was the last one of Steve Jobs.

Today, my apple watch series 2 is dusting. My iPhone 13 pro is good enough and I don't feel the need to upgrade.

I'm writing those lines while waiting for the screen to be repaired at the apple store. I used to be excited to play with all the new devices on display. But today, none of them excite me. I'm falling out of love.

We reached a point of diminishing return. Instead of accepting that and starting growing in other dimensions, Apple can't resist the temptation of adding stuff that is just crippling the user experience. What is this new button Apple?

To be fair, they've also been refining their product and growing in other dimensions (using recycled material, commitment to being carbon neutral by 2030, ...). Their stance on sustainability prolonged the love I had for them. It's the primary reason I'd still recommend their product today. They are still by far the most usable and most sustainable out there. My 2018 iPad pro is still working like a charm. I only wish it was possible to fix the cracked screen without paying an arm for it.

I want to love fairphones but they are still too far behind in terms of overall quality and user experience.

What excites me today?

I'd love to see the Apple of repairable stuff. Make me pay a subscription and make it your problem to make devices that can be recycled, reused, repaired.

Repairable stuff. Modular stuff. Low energy stuff. Useful things that are at our service, not at the service of corporations trying to grab our attention all the time.

I was really tempted to buy the new Remarkable Paper Pro. But the blinking colors make me hesitate. I'd love to be able to play with it first. So I settled on the most recommended one: the Boox Go 10.3. Stay tuned for a review.

A new watch? Maybe I should get the Garmin one. No notification. No distraction.
But somehow, I don’t feel like it. I’m done with all those gadgets. I don’t really need them. I want to simplify my life.

I’d love to see Apple (and other brands) focus on simpler and more durable dedicated products. When an e-ink iPad? Bonus, it’s apparently excellent for your brain:
https://x.com/NTFabiano/status/1864285897572675868

May 7 2017, originally published on Medium.

I lived in San Francisco for 7 years then moved last year to NYC. I was back there for a week pitching investors. The distance helps me better understand the blind spot that Silicon Valley has developed and that may very well cost them to miss the next big wave.

You are what you eat

Silicon Valley companies are funded by VCs. Their model hasn’t changed much in the past few decades. By design, the companies that they invest in have to capture the value they create at their center (making the rich richer). As a result, their cap table is somewhat rigid. VC need to have a certain level of ownership to make it worthwhile for them.

That all worked great for a while. Especially at a time where money could pretty much buy you anything.

The age of networks

But in this new age of networks, money doesn’t buy everything anymore as it used to be. It’s the Hillary Clinton / Bernie Sanders paradigm. Before, your strategy revolved around raising big money from the big guys then spread it on airwaves to reach your public. Except today, nobody watches TV anymore. Today, to reach people, they need to “like” you.

Captable-rigid startups can’t build an army to win.
They won’t be able to compete in this new world, by design.

Your marketing team is not limited to the people on your payroll anymore. They also include all your fans who share your stuff on social media. And this pattern does not only apply to your marketing team, other departments will follow. Most of the resources that you need to create economic value will be sourced on the network, in a decentralized fashion.

In that world, a rigid captable works against you. It cannot provide all the people who contribute to your success their fair share.

Compare that to token based companies (ICO — Initial Coin Offering), where their captable is effectively totally fluid and scalable. This gives them an unfair competitive advantage compared to captable rigid SV companies. Why would I support and promote Dropbox if I have “shares” (tokens) in the competitor IPFS?

Issuing tokens is effectively a way to liquify your captable. It’s a way to enable anyone to contribute and get their fair share without having to ask for permission.

It’s still very early days but those new startups are on a different trajectory. By design, classic VC funded companies with rigid captables won’t be able to compete, in the same way that Microsoft with their 4-year release schedule was unable to compete with Google that was pushing code every week. It’s a different paradigm. The most exciting thing is that everyone will be able to participate in the value created this way. Shifting power away from capital and towards people who contribute.

What about Open Collective?

Our goal has always been to reduce the friction for people to contribute (that’s why we released our code base in open source). Finding a scheme to compensate fairly people who do seems like a very natural thing to do. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it makes total business sense. The only way this will become big and have a massive impact is because a lot of people will contribute to its success.

That’s why we are thinking deeply about all of this. We don’t have anything to announce yet but this is definitely something that we are very excited about — not only for ourselves but also for all the communities already operating on opencollective.com. Many would greatly benefit from such a mechanism that will make sure everyone gets their fair share when they contribute to their community.

If you are interested in these topics, join the conversation on our slack\! https://slack.opencollective.org

February 16 2017, originally published on Medium.

As nation states are increasingly disconnected from reality, how can we enable citizens to reclaim their cities? In Brussels, we are turning our city into a platform on top of which citizens can create collectives, raise money transparently and contribute to make the capital of Europe a better city to live and work.

I have a love/hate relationship with my city, Brussels.

Hate: Nothing changes. We’re stuck in the 20th century, with the worst traffic, and a justice palace that has been under renovation for 30 years. Our schools haven’t changed in a century.

\\Love: the people. \\ Our 163 different nationalities in the capital of Europe are well traveled, speak many languages, and don’t take themselves too seriously. They stay connected with fast trains to London, Amsterdam and Paris. There is so much diversity, and so much potential.

So the question is:

How can we unlock our potential?

A bunch of friends met to talk about this. What can we do about things that are broken? Should we first tackle mobility, or education or inclusiveness? How?

There were already numerous initiatives to improve Brussels, but they weren’t connected. Each initiative was operating in a silo, without much collaboration, reinventing the wheel and wasting energy. None had achieved critical mass. Why?

![Very first \#BrusselsTogether meetup in November 2016][image2]Very first \#BrusselsTogether meetup in November 2016

We decided not to create yet another initiative, but instead change the underlying framework. How could we federate? Imagine if instead of all racing each other, we could be a relay team. We would go so much further\!

Genesis of \#BrusselsTogether

We started with a monthly meetup on the first Wednesday of the month. We give the floor to 3 great initiatives and get to know them. It’s so refreshing and inspiring to see that there are already plenty of citizens doing amazing things in your city. The feedback has been phenomenal.

![February 2017 \#BrusselsTogether Meetup at Co.station][image3]February 2017 \#BrusselsTogether Meetup at Co.station

We identify common problems different initiatives struggle with. There are 3 that kept appearing:

Visibility

Volunteers

Funding

Tools and support for any of the above means more time and energy spent on the core mission, and a larger impact in the community. Helping initiatives directly learn from each other enables exponential improvements.

How? We’re doing it already, in a different city called the Internet.

The City Called the Internet

A city is public infrastructure on top of which citizens can build and contribute. The Internet is the same. Without the content citizens create, it has no value.

In the 90s, if you wanted to contribute content as a citizen of the Internet you needed technical skills. Each website needed a web server, and operated in a silo. There was a lot of reinventing the wheel.

The same is happening with citizen initiatives. As soon as they need to collect money and pay expenses, they need their own “server”: a legal entity. That’s a lot of overhead.

We have improved how websites are made by using servers that host multiple sites. Access to shared infrastructure reduces friction and lets more people make websites than before. One technical person can maintain many websites, lowering costs for everyone. And since anyone can “View Source”, we can learn from each other without asking permission. All this adds up to more energy spent on creating content.

We need to do the same for citizen initiatives. Right now, each one operates in a silo like a 90s website. Usually, only one person has access to the bank account, and other initiatives cannot see inside to learn from what they are doing. Every new event, school, or association starts from scratch.

If we want to unlock the potential of citizens in our cities, we need a framework on top of which they can easily create initiatives and learn from each other.

A New Framework , Transparent by Design

The shared infrastructure we’ve set up is a non-profit (BrusselsTogether ASBL/VZW — equivalent of a 501c3 in the US). It functions as a host organization for local initiatives, like a shared server hosting many websites.

Using Open Collective (which I co-founded), we enable any group of citizens to create a virtual association — a collective — in a few clicks (and in English, whereas creating a old fashion non profit in Brussels requires you to do it in French or Dutch). They can be up and running in no time, collecting money online from supporters, with no need for their own lawyers or accountants. Instead, these “technical” people are shared across all the initiatives hosted on the same “server”.

Everything happens with full transparency, so we can learn from each other. How much did it cost to run this event? How much can I ask a sponsor to contribute for this activity? It’s the equivalent of “View Source”.

Building a Database Together

Besides making it easier for citizen initiatives to get up and running, we also want to help them find volunteers and potential backers. So we’re building a database of people interested in improving the city.

If every event uses their own account on Meetup or EventBrite, there’s no way to reach out to everyone. Maintaining a spreadsheet manually is impractical. If we use a shared platform instead, then every time someone registers the database can grow automatically.

That’s why we developed a new tool for events on Open Collective. From now on, every time a collective organizes an event in Brussels, everyone can benefit from building the common database of like-minded participants. The funds from tickets go straight to their collective, which everyone can transparently see.

Join us\!

If you’re in Brussels, here are some ways to get involved.

Like our Facebook Page or join our Slack.

Become a member of BrusselsTogether for €10/month ($10.50) or make a one time donation to our collective.

Print this poster and display it at your work place or in public.

![Spot the BrusselsTogether posters\!][image5]Spot the BrusselsTogether posters\!

Manage your events and tickets with a page on BrusselsTogether (you can still use your own branding — contact us (info@brusselstogether.org).

Instead of creating your own non profit (ASBL/VZW), create a collective on top of BrusselsTogether. It’s easier, and allows us to mutualize more costs for the benefit of all.

Volunteer to write blog posts about the great initiatives that are happening in Brussels, in English, French, Arabic, Dutch, or another language.

Come to our monthly meetup the first Wednesday of every month.

* Subscribe to our Podcast (iTunes, SoundCloud).

If you are not in Brussels, get together in your own city and start your own movement. We can learn from each other\!

February 11 2017, originally published on Medium.

The problem with Trump is not that he is president. The problem with Trump is that he is the president of all of us in the United States.

It’s easy to forget that reality is relative. My reality in NYC is very different from the reality of people living in a small town in the Midwest. Whereas a big city needs to attract the best talents from all around the world, a small town needs to protect the fragile equilibrium of their local community. Is there anything wrong with that? It’s just a different reality and different needs.

The problem comes when we try to impose our reality on others. There is a mismatch. It doesn’t feel right. It creates frustration and suffering.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

We need to free ourselves from the old thinking that there is only one universal reality. We can’t impose on anyone our view of the world. We can’t force people to change.

The only sustainable way to make change happen is to show people another way of doing things and let them choose to embrace it or not, at their own pace.

That’s exactly what we do with Startups. We create new ways of doing things. We don’t force anyone to use our products. Some early adopters give them a try and if they like them they start spreading the word that a new solution exists to solve a particular problem. Then other people freely join at their own pace. If you do not agree –and you think you can come up with a better solution– you are free to bring your own solution to the world. And if people like it better, they will eventually –at their own pace– embrace the new solution.

Our ability as a society to thrive and adapt to an ever changing environment is related to our ability to let people run new experiments and our ability to let people freely join those movements. Whenever we spend time imposing a view, we force an equilibrium that is not natural. It can only last for as long as we can put an artificial pressure to maintain this equilibrium. Not sustainable.

When I look around me, I see a lot of energy spent to fight reality and to try to convince others.

The problem lies in our institutions. They force us to look at the world from their (old) perspective. They force us to believe that we have to have one president for the United States. And therefore, they force us to enter into an endless fight to try to convince other people who live in a different reality that our reality is better. That our candidate should be the president.

The institution “United States” is not a law of the universe. It has not always been there and it will not always be there. It has been invented to address the needs of a very different world.

We should ask ourselves: Is the United States still the best way to organize our society?

What if we could live in a world where we wouldn’t have to convince others? Where we wouldn’t have to fight Trump’s supporters? Where we could let them vote for him as long as he wouldn’t force decisions on all of us?

What would we do if we had to create the United States today? Would it still have the same values and one President? Would it still have the same borders? If the goal is to unite all the people who believe in the idea of freedom, why should it stop at geographic borders? Why couldn’t it include people from other regions?

I lived in Madrid, London, San Francisco, NYC, Brussels and I traveled the world a lot. People underestimate how much alike people are in all those cities. Much more so than between those cities and their countryside. But our current operating system –nations– forces us to impose our view of the world to the country side and vice versa. Recipe for disaster.

Existing bundles of cities and small towns based on geographic proximity and language don’t make sense anymore. They did make sense before the Internet because it was the only way we could bundle people together. But today, all cities are connected and speak the same language (English has become de facto the universal language in international cities).

We need new bundles of people based on communities that share the same values and goals. Those communities may or may not be geographically based.

We need to give the freedom to each community to choose how they want to live, how they want to address the challenges that they have to face in their own reality. And only then we can start thinking of new ways to unite them based on common values and on a voluntary basis. People should be free to form the communities that they need and try new ways of doing things as long as they don’t impose on anyone their view of the world.

So this is my invitation. Let’s embrace the reality that there are many realities out there. Let’s use our energy not to convince others but to show them that there is another way to unite people that respects our differences.

We can create a better society that embraces diversity and that gives everyone the opportunity to learn and contribute to the world.

Let’s move beyond the old framework of nation states. We all belong to the United People Of Earth first, then to our respective communities second. Let’s build new institutions –a new operating system– that embrace that reality. That’s the world I want to leave to future generations.

🙏

January 30 2017, originally published on Medium.

Moving beyond the old model of private firms to create economic value together.

Until now, private firms have been the primary way to bring people together to create economic value. Firms gather people in a physical space and enable them to closely collaborate. They are tightly managed by executives, a board and ultimately investors. By design, the profits of those private firms are unevenly distributed to the people who own and control them, accentuating a major issue in our society: inequality.

By design, the profits of those private firms are unevenly distributed to the people who own and control them, accentuating a major issue in our society: inequality.

As Ronald Coase originally described in his seminal paper The Nature of Firm, those private companies are needed to minimize the transaction costs between participants. They provide an environment within which it’s easy to collaborate with other people.

![Alexandru Ioan Very Old Factory, Oslo 2009][image1]Alexandru Ioan Very Old Factory, Oslo 2009

But today, the Internet — with all its online tools; email, skype, slack, hangout, … — does provide an environment within which it’s easier and easier to collaborate with other people.

The question therefore is: what is a firm in this age of networks? Does it still need to be privately owned? How can we use the network to form more fluid groups of people to create economic value?

A Collective of people

Take Webpack, a popular open source project with more than 230 contributors around the world. It’s an open collective of people. No one owns it. It’s controlled by whoever happens to be contributing the most. It’s fluid. It’s open. Anyone can join.

They just started to offer paid services to the external world. Companies can now book office hours with the core contributors. And it’s just a start.

In the future, any contributor could also offer paid services to local companies: workshops, presentations, consulting, … leveraging this way the reputation and the endorsement of the collective.

In this model, there is no boss, no hierarchy. Decisions and initiatives are distributed to the edge of the network. Everyone is empowered to reach out to the companies they know in their personal network to find new business opportunities, or to reach out to anyone else in the community to find help or join forces on a project.

Transparency ensures trusts. Before a company hires someone from a collective for a particular job, they can easily verify that that person is indeed an active member of the community. They can look at their previous projects and they can see that the community is available to help that person.

When you hire someone from that community, you are hiring much more than one particular individual. You also benefit from the collective intelligence of the community they belong to. The healthier the collective, the higher the collective reputation, the easier it will be for its members to find business opportunities and the more value external businesses will get out of that community. That’s what incentivizes everyone in this loop to give a commission on every transaction to finance the collective.

When you hire someone from a collective, you are hiring much more than one particular individual, you also benefit from the collective intelligence of the community they belong to.

This model is not limited to open source communities. Any community that has a shared mission and shared values could leverage this model. From topic based communities such as Women Who Code, Hacks/Hackers, Open Source Designers, … to geographic based communities such as coworking spaces and other city based communities (e.g. StartupYogaNYC, BrusselsTogether).

The key is to develop a collective reputation. Make it easy to recognize your members as being part of your community. Show in full transparency how the community is helping them. Offer trainings or forums where members can learn from each other and start developing a collective intelligence. Ask them what services they could provide to external companies and advertise those services at the collective level.

In this world, the profits are not anymore amassed at the top of the pyramid. Most of the profit is going to the edge of the network of the collective, to the individuals who actually do the work. Part of the profit goes to the collective for the purpose of improving the work environment for everybody and for improving the collective reputation.

To sustain itself over time, the collective also has to make sure that it can attract new people and train them properly so that they can, in turn, also create economic value for themselves and for the collective. Rinse. Repeat.

In this way, the collective becomes a living organism. It has a purpose and a positive impact on its environment. Independent people — cells — join the collective to help it fulfill its purpose.

We are incredibly excited by this future. That’s why we are building Open Collective, a platform to enable communities to collect and disburse money in full transparency. If you are also excited by this future, create or join a collective and start experimenting with those ideas. We need more experiments. That’s how we learn best. And join us on https://slack.opencollective.org.

June 29 2016, originally published on Medium.

Ever since we announced our new service to enable open source communities to collect money from backers and sponsors, the same question came up again and again: why would an open source project need money?

It’s a fair question to ask. After all, so many open source projects have been thriving without money. Not to mention that adding money into a volunteer based community can have a negative effect.

At the moment, we have 35 open source projects representing 12k+ contributors. We are still learning with our community but this is what we’ve learned so far.

Don’t pay for what you could get for free

This is an important one that is counter intuitive for most people (for ourselves as well\!). While paying for contributions may accelerate the development of certain features in the short term (get things done), in the long run it will have a negative impact on the community.

Contributors will start wondering: why should I contribute for free if others got paid? Why should I continue to contribute if I used to be paid for this and now I’m not? Before contributing this feature or solving that bug that I care about, I should check with the maintainers to see if I could get paid for this.

All of those questions will start happening in the head of the existing and potential new contributors. This is adding friction in the process of contributing. That’s the last thing that you want to do.

Invest in the context

If paying for contributions doesn’t increase them in the long term, what will?

Turns out there are a lot of things that can be done to foster contributions. You can make it easier to submit pull requests, make sure that they get reviewed in a timely fashion with proper comments, create tutorials on how to make your first pull request, triage issues and document them properly, etc. All of those tasks are not directly contributing to the code. But they create a safe and welcoming space to get more contributions. Like house cleaning it’s a necessary work that requires a regular commitment. It benefits the entire community, not only the subset of people who care about a given bug or feature. And that’s why it’s ok to pay someone to do all this work.

This is what Hoodie has been doing extensively. Check out their onboarding process for new contributors: Hoodie Camp, it’s stellar.

I like to use the analogy of a public place. It’s not the role of the city to pay artists to come contribute and create activity. Their role is to invest in the context. They need to make sure that there is a clean and safe space with a lot of passage and where artists can come. Each with their own personal interests. Some will come perform for free to make a name for themselves, others will be paid by sponsors, etc.

Meetups

Communities are stronger when they have the opportunity to meet AFK (Away From Keyboard). Use the money to cover travel expenses for your top contributors. Invite your community to create local meetups. You can cover the catering (pizzas/drinks) in full or in part. You can also send them swag.

Thank contributors

At the end of the year, send post cards, stickers or t-shirts to all your contributors as a sign of gesture. This will go very long way. Keep it simple though. For example you could send a post card to all contributors, add a pins and/or stickers to the more regular ones, and a t-shirt or a gift card to biggest contributors. It’s about being grateful that all those people spent time of their life to contribute to your project. Acknowledge that.

This is what CocoaPods did last year. They created physical coins “Core Contributor”.

“I love it because it becomes a physical representation of an abstract bit of community work. Eventually you forget about a few PRs, but having something there on your desk so you and others can talk about it is really gratifying. I found out that a few people had them framed this year.” — orta.

Operating expenses

This one is the easiest category of expenses to justify. You may need to pay for a hosting provider, or if your open source project is hardware related, you may actually need a couple of devices for testing. Covering travel expenses for one of your top contributors (or yourself) to give a talk at a conference could also fall into this category as this is about building the community.

Conclusion

Introducing money in a volunteer based community is a double edge sword. Done badly, it can harm it. But done mindfully, it can really help the community thrive and be self sustainable.

This is still a work in progress. We are eager to work with more open source communities to identify best practices and learn together. If you are a core maintainer of such community, please reach out. You can apply to create an open collective for your community here: https://opencollective.com/opensource/apply

February 21 2016, originally published on Medium.com.

Goodwill only takes you so far. Here is a new way to fund open source projects that aligns the interests of companies with open source communities.

There have been more and more talks recently about the lack of funding for open source projects. Nadia Eghbal even started a list of Open Source Projects who need support. Yet, there is no good solution today to fund them.

When I built the first version of Storify back in 2010, I used NodeJS which was at its very infancy. We were one of the first large scale consumer website built entirely in javascript. Node was at version 0.1, and NPM was just getting started. Fun times.

Once we got funding, I wanted to financially give back to the community. We couldn’t pay someone’s salary, but we could have easily given a few hundred dollars per year. Multiply that by the number of startups who have funding and who are using the same open source projects, that could have totally paid for at least one part time if not a full time salary.

But there was no easy way to do it. There is no “Back This Project” button on the github page of those open source projects.

Why there is no “Back This Project” button on Github?

It’s not that easy. An Open Source Project is a community. It doesn’t have a legal entity. It doesn’t have a bank account. They can’t collect money under their name.

Some repositories ask for donations that go directly to the personal paypal account of the primary owner of the project. But then the money ends up in a blackbox and the community doesn’t have any visibility on the funds raised under their name. It doesn’t feel right. We could count on the primary owner to be transparent and report all transactions to the community, but it’s a pain to manage. So much so that most chose to simply not accept money for the project. People would rather focus on their craft, their code.

Why current solutions don’t work?

A few solutions have emerged over the last few years, such as Gittip (now Gratipay), BountyCode, and others. They work around the issue by targeting individual contributors. isaacs has a very good critic of them in his blog post “Money and Open Source”.

The problem is that incentives are not aligned. While it makes sense for contributors to get people to pay them a weekly salary, there is no real benefit for the donor. As a result, none of them have really taken off.

We should take a step back and start with what people are willing to pay for.

As a company I don’t want to attach my name to a person, I want to attach my name to a project or a community. And I want to get something out of it. I need to justify my investment: “what’s in there for me?”. Goodwill only gets you so far.

I don’t need the software since by definition I already have access to it (it’s open source). I’d love more support but I understand that no one wants to guarantee that. People who contribute to open source project don’t want it to be a job. They want to pick the issues that they want and they don’t want to be told what to do. But there is something else that is valuable to a company that doesn’t require anyone in the community to do any work: visibility.

I would have paid to have our Storify logo on the README.md file of node modules that we were using. Not only it would show our support (good karma), but it would also help us get in front of developers who are using the same technologies that we are using. Those are the people we actually want to hire\!

For developers, it is also useful to see which companies are using this code and — if you are looking — where you could apply for a job. Everyone wins. No strings attached. This wouldn’t give me any privilege over anyone else posting feature requests or issues. Just visiblity.

But to whom should I give money for the project to have my logo on their github page and/or website? It doesn’t have a bank account.

One open source project, one collective

We can’t expect open source projects to start creating legal entities. Way too much overhead. And only a limited number of people would have visibility on the account of the entity. Not the right tool for the job.

We need a new form of association to enable those open source communities to collect money. It should be as easy to create as creating a Github repository, it should be transparent (everyone should be able to see the full ledger), and it should be linked to the project, not to the individuals behind that could change over time.

We call those new entities “open collectives”. They are not real legal entities per se; they are “virtual entities” that are created on top of an existing legal entity. It’s using the concept of Fiscal Sponsorship (or umbrella organizations). See A New Form of Association for the Internet Generation.

Private beta

We started our private beta in February. We already have a couple of super interesting and popular open source projects such as Yeoman, MochaJS, Apex and a few others.

We are basically hosting them on our own bank account and legal entity for now, and whenever we can, we are moving them to dedicated organizations such as Ruby Together (if you have such umbrella organization, please reach out as we would love to send projects your way\!).

Our platform streamlines the process of Fiscal Sponsorship. We generate a dedicated page for each collective from which they can collect money from backers and sponsors. We keep track of each budget independently and we provide an interface to the host organization (the fiscal sponsor) to easily approve their expenses and make sure they never get over their limit.

MochaJS already secured a sponsorship from SauceLabs and AuthO for $500/month each. They each have their logo automatically showing up on Mocha’s website (40k unique visitors/month) and on their Github page (9k stars and 7.5k unique visitors per month) with a link back to the sponsor’s website. That’s already a $10k+ yearly budget (compared to nothing just a few weeks ago). PubNub is sponsoring Apex for $100/month. Yeoman has already 11 backers, DigitalOcean is sponsoring Readline for $50/month, React-Static-Boilerplate and Babel-Starter-Kit for $100/month each… And it’s just the beginning.

![The open collective page of MochaJS (https://opencollective.com/mochajs)][image1]The open collective page of MochaJS (https://opencollective.com/mochajs)

We are looking forward to working with more companies who want to show their support to the open source community without which they wouldn’t be able to build all the awesome products that they are building. If that sounds like your company, shoot us an email\!

And we are also looking forward to working with more open source communities to help them get funding. If you are part of such community, start a conversation with a github issue like this one and ping us on Twitter or Slack and we will get in touch.

![Integration of Open Collective in the README.md of the MochaJS repository (https://github.com/mochajs/mocha). It automatically acknowledges the backers and sponsors of the project.][image2]Integration of Open Collective in the README.md of the MochaJS repository (https://github.com/mochajs/mocha). It automatically acknowledges the backers and sponsors of the project.

![README.md of Yeoman (https://github.com/yeoman/yo). Backers show up automatically with a link to their website.][image3]README.md of Yeoman (https://github.com/yeoman/yo). Backers show up automatically with a link to their website.

The future

It’s an ongoing experiment. And we are looking forward to working with more open source projects and host organizations to figure this out together.

We believe in a future where open source projects could be well funded. All our companies use open source projects. We need people to maintain them. It’s work. We will all benefit from a thriving open source community.

We dream of a future where people can choose what they want to work on. Which open source projects they would love to contribute to, or start. And be paid for it.

Let’s make this happen, together.

About the author: Xavier Damman is a contributor to the Open Collective project. He was before the cofounder of Storify.com, a tool to publish social media. Find him on Twitter: @xdamman

January 26 2016, originally published on Medium.

Our goal with OpenCollective is to build a global infrastructure on top of which anyone can start an association anywhere in the world as easily as creating a Facebook group. To achieve that, we are building a network of host organizations that will act as an abstraction layer between the complexity of the pre-digital world, and the new bottom up economy of the 21st century. One single interface to start your association, collect and disburse money transparently (read more: A New Form of Association for the Internet Generation).

This won’t happen overnight. It will take time. To reflect that, we, the founders, are committing to a 10 year vesting, instead of the usual 4 years.

There is something to be said about setting the right expectation from the beginning. When you start a 4-month journey, you start getting tired after 3 and a half months. Whereas if you’d have started a 12-month journey, you’d only feel tired at month 11\. That’s a bit what happened with my previous company Storify. 4 years in (the regular vesting schedule), it felt like the end of the journey. I was tired. Selling felt like the right thing to do. But the reality is that every single big company had their very tough moments and with only a few exceptions it took them more than 4 years to really become big and significant.

That’s why we agreed to ditch the classic 4-year vesting and take instead a 10-year vesting for the 3 founders. It sets the right expectation for ourselves, our team, our investors and our users. We are in this for the long run. We aren’t going to make short-term decisions that trade off long-term benefits.

Our goal is to enable you to build meaningful associations that will have a lasting impact. We need to rethink the NGOs, unions, political parties and other institutions for our generation. If that’s your goal as well, please reach out. We will go out of our way to help you collect the funds to sustain your collective. This is why we do what we do. We can do great things together, and we will.

We can’t wait to share this journey with you.

December 30 2015, originally published on Medium.

How can we do things together that require money without having to worry about the complexity of creating and maintaining legal entities?

In part 1, I covered a few situations where we need to collect money to do things together. In each of those cases, the last thing we want to do is to deal with the complexity of creating and maintaining a legal entity. It’s too much overhead, too early.

I’ve also covered why the current system requires us to create those entities and why it doesn’t make as much sense as it used to before the Internet.

In this second and last part, I want to share with you how we could abstract the complexity of the current system to create entities with much less friction.

The way it should work

Picture this: you want to create a parents association for your school or you want to collect money to organize events for your community. This is the way it should work:

1. Create a group online. Give it a name and explain its purpose. Define the administrators.

2. Get a page where you can collect money by credit card.

3. On that page, any member can see how the money is used and how much is left at any time. Any member is also able to submit expenses for reimbursement.

That’s it. It shouldn’t be any more complicated than that. No need to create a bank account, no need to deal with lawyers. And because all transactions are transparent, you shouldn’t be required to submit financial reports.

The best user interface is an interface that gets out of the way. An interface that disappears, that doesn’t distract you, that lets you focus on your work. The same applies to a legal framework.

This would be ideal for all our side projects such as open source projects, meetups, sport clubs, parent or neighborhood associations, boy scouts, unions, movements, or even starting a new startup before reaching “Product Market Fit” or raising a significant amount of money.

How to make this work?

Unfortunately today you cannot collect money without a bank account and you cannot create a bank account without a legal entity.

Changing the law is not an option. There are too many governments around the world that we would have to convince. Plus they also have good reasons to keep the system as is. They need to protect themselves from money laundering (AML) and other abuse (KYC).

But there is another way.

We could piggy back on existing bank accounts and create a virtual layer on top of them. Read on.

Mutualized resources

When you start a new website, you should first use a mutualized server like Dreamhost or Heroku. That way you can get up and running in no time and move on. It’s only once you get enough traction that you should consider upgrading to a dedicated server.

The same should apply to the creation of an entity for your side project or association. You should be able to rent a virtual instance of an existing entity with its bank account. It’s only once your project reaches a certain size that you should consider upgrading to your own dedicated entity with all the stability, legal protection and overhead that come with it.

A network of hosts

For this to work, we need a network of host organizations; legal entities that will host virtual organizations under their umbrella. They will shield end users from the complexity of creating and managing a 20th century entity. Each of those hosts will empower people in their community to create or terminate associations without friction.

If we can do this, we will foster an explosion of bottom up initiatives that will not be limited to activities that don’t require money. Those initiatives will finally be able to collect money, have a budget and have a larger impact.

How can we build such network globally?

We can get inspiration from the way we built data centers around the world to power what we refer to today as “the cloud”.

We basically created software that anyone could deploy in their own country to create and manage local data centers. It didn’t matter that the local regulations in Belgium or the United States were different. That complexity was dealt with locally by each data center. What mattered was that once set up, all those servers could speak the same language and offer a unified interface to all, globally.

That’s what we need to do. We need to build software to enable any organization to easily host a new ligthweight form of association for the Internet generation: open collectives.

Definition of an Open Collective

I define an Open Collective as a lightweight association that can collect and disperse money transparently without creating a legal entity. Because it operates in full transparency, it can safely be hosted by an existing legal entity (an organization or an individual) that will in practice collect the money on behalf of the collective and report its activities in accordance to local legislations.

Incentives for the host

What will be the incentive for the host? It will depend. For some like Women Who Code, the incentive would simply be to grow their movement. They want anyone in the world to be able to start a local chapter, raise money and organize events without having the burden to create a legal entity.

For others, the incentive would be the business opportunity to make money. In the same way that people are willing to pay more for the convenience to use Dreamhost or Heroku to host their website, people will be willing to pay a fee to host their collective.

What about abuses?

How do we make sure that terrorists organizations and scammers don’t abuse the system to quickly collect money, disband and disappear? After all, the complexity imposed by governments also had the purpose of avoiding those abuses.

It’s important to understand that through this concept of virtualization we are not avoiding existing legislations. We are just moving the burden of compliance away from the end user and towards a distributed network of “host organizations” who are familiar with local legislations.

Because those hosts are distributed, they are closer to the real activities of the open collectives that they host. As such, they can do a better job at controlling those activities than what a centralized government could possibly do. And most importantly, with much less bureaucracy.

And because all transactions are recorded and visible by a larger group of people, it’s also a safer framework than the current one to quickly identify and report abuse. Governments should welcome this as a much more efficient way to track the activities of all those associations, levy taxes automatically and avoid abuse. All that while at the same time empowering their citizens to create many more associations and more economic activity.

There are still many open questions that we will have to figure out along the way: “How can you trust a host organization?” and “How — as a host — can you trust an open collective?” Those questions are very similar to the ones we had in 1994: “how can I trust a web host to host my content?”, “how can I trust a customer that they won’t put inappropriate content on my servers?”, “who is responsible? The content creator or the web host?”, “As a host, how quickly am I supposed to take a piece of content down?”. We eventually figured out answers to those questions over time, so I’m confident we will also eventually find answers to those questions.

Moving forward

We already built a first prototype of that software. It basically allows an organization (or an individual) to create virtual collectives, each with their own budget, their own interface to submit expenses and their own public page to collect money. Right now, it only works on top of PayPal for reimbursements and Stripe for credit card processing. Our goal is to eventually support other means of payment, including Bitcoin.

We already have a few private beta testers (including Women Who Code, see part 1, and Yeoman, a popular open source project). We already have some Angel Investors (including Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, see part 1). But this is still very early days.

We need more groups to join our private beta. We also need more organizations to host open collectives in their country and/or communities. We need engineers to adapt the software to local payment systems (we love bitcoin but we need to support first and foremost local currencies). And we also need lawyers to help the community navigate through existing financial regulations, risks, etc.

We hope that this will help our communities collect the money that they need to be stronger while at the same time being more accountable to the people who finance them. We also hope that this will empower anyone to build the movements, unions, political parties, lobbying groups, NGO and communities — large or small — of tomorrow, wherever they are.

We can do this.

Together.

If this resonates with you please get in touch (xdamman@opencollective.com). Feel also free to share publicly your own personal stories or feedback with the \#OpenCollective hashtag. We are interested in hearing more about those times when you needed to collect money for a project, a group or an association. What were the pain points? How did you make it work? What could be improved? What tools are missing?

Visit our website, follow us on Twitter @OpenCollect or join our Slack https://slack.opencollective.com

Thanks to Aseem Sood, pia mancini and Burt Herman for having read and contributed to drafts of this post.

September 2015, originally published on Medium.

So far, the Internet has been very good at helping people do things together. But once it involves money, there is no good solution. Creating a new legal entity is too much overhead, too early. What if we could create a virtual entity that can collect money as easily as creating a Facebook Group?

No legal entity, no bank account, no budget

After selling Storify, I spent some time in Belgium to help the local startup community come up with a Startup Manifesto. The goal was to provide the Belgian government and society at large with recommendations to “make it suck less” for startups.

It was a grassroots effort that gathered 100+ contributions from the local community of entrepreneurs. At some point we decided to print stickers. But who would pay for them? Many were willing to donate money to help the movement, but how can we collect that money? Where?

It turns out that to create a bank account, you first need to create a legal entity. Too much overhead for such a grassroots movement. So we ended up using an existing organization (Startups.be) who paid the bill for us.

Fiscal Sponsorship

I got a similar situation with Tipbox, an Open Source project that I created with my friend Mark.

We received a $35k grant from the Knight Foundation, but we didn’t have a legal entity and a bank account to receive that donation. So we had to use their foundation as a Fiscal Sponsor. They kept the money on our behalf and we had to submit our bills and expenses. They would then process them and reimburse us. They are manually processing “hundred+ requests per week”. There’s got to be a better way.

Chapters

I asked around to see if other people were facing similar situations. My friend Alaina Percival is the CEO of Women Who Code. It took her almost 2 years to get her 501(c)(3) status (a non-profit status in the US). Now, they have 50+ chapters around the world. Each of those chapters don’t have a legal entity on their own. As a result, they can’t raise money and they can’t have a budget. That’s a real limiting factor to scale the movement.

They work around this through the concept of Fiscal Sponsorship. Donors donate to the main organization online and specify the chapter they are supporting. The main organization keeps track of the budget for each chapter and processes their expenses, manually.

I also talked to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal. They have hundreds of Drupal related meetups and conferences around the world that have spun up organically. Same deal. Most of those local groups don’t have a legal entity and are limited in what they can do.

Finally, I talked directly to meetup organizers, leaders of open source projects, sport clubs and other small associations. They either avoid money altogether and solely rely on individuals or sponsors to directly pay for their expenses, or they collect money on their personal PayPal account and take the burden to provide some level of visibility to the group.

There are plenty of situations like these where we should be able to quickly spawn a lightweight organization with a dedicated bank account for a side project or a group. But we don’t want to encumber ourselves with the creation of a legal entity.

If you recognize yourself in one of those situations — if you have problems collecting money and dispersing it for a side project or an association of any kind — please get in touch or share your story publicly with the \#OpenCollective hashtag. That way we can all learn from the issues on the ground and contribute to the solutions.

Why existing legal entities don’t work anymore?

Before the Internet became a commodity, creating an organization required a lot of capital and planning (remember those business plans with a 5-year financial projection?). There wasn’t much room for uncertainty. Governments put in place a rigid framework to provide stability for companies to blossom. They needed to make sure that the companies with whom you may do business wouldn’t die the next day. And since they cannot have a controller in every business, they required each of them to send consolidated reports of their activities every quarter or every year, adding a fair amount of bureaucracy in the process.

![In the Internet era, it should take minutes — not days — to start an activity that requires money. Source: Economist.com][image1]In the Internet era, it should take minutes — not days — to start an activity that requires money. Source: Economist.com

Rigidity was a feature, today it’s a bug

Requiring all those small projects to create a legal entity as soon as they need a bank account is unnecessary overhead. When you don’t know yet if your project will succeed, how long it will last, or whether you would still be an active contributor a year from now, you don’t want to bind yourself to a rigid legal entity. You don’t need rigidity, you need flexibility.

Redefining the concept of association for the 21st century

Creating an association should be as easy as creating a Facebook Group. For most cases, we shouldn’t have to worry about creating and maintaining a legal entity. Yet those associations should be able to collect money and disperse it for their activities.

Instead of creating these associations using a 20th century framework\ that assumes that the money collected goes into a blackbox and therefore requires reporting to avoid abuse, what if we could create new associations on a more open and transparent model, where the collected money wouldn’t go into a blackbox, where we wouldn’t need to file annual reports with consolidated numbers, and where corruption would be impossible by design?

\\ The equivalent in France of a 501(c)(3) is called “Association de loi de 1901”, it cannot be more clear about how outdated that framework is\!\

Why does it matter?

Movements like Women Who Code, new political parties like Podemos), new unions, citizen initatives to help refugees, etc. start and grow with bottom up initiatives; local groups who decide to do something in their city to contribute to a larger movement. If those groups can’t raise money locally, they can’t sustain themselves. Remember \#OccupyWallStreet?

That’s why we need a new lightweight type of entity for our generation. We need to remove the friction that exists today to collect money for an association of people. So that we can do more, together.

That’s how we will empower people in a bottom-up fashion to fuel those movements and operate the necessary changes to improve our societies all around the world.

How can we do that?

We can lobby our governments to update the legal framework. That’s what we tried to do with the Startup Manifesto in Belgium (the number one recommendation to the government was the creation of a new legal entity “Startup, Inc.”). But it will take years, if it ever happens. Plus, the problem is not limited to one country. It’s a global issue.

If you can’t fix a layer down the stack, abstract it and move on

We have seen that movie before. We couldn’t fix Microsoft Windows, so we built web browsers on top of it. They allowed anyone to innovate by building new web services without having to worry about the underlying complexity (and bugs) of the operating system.

Governments are also operating systems. Instead of managing hardware, interruptions and other bits, they manage a territory, natural resources and citizens. It’s a geographically constrained operating system engineered hundreds of years ago, way before people could communicate in real time across the globe.

All around the world, those operating systems are overdue for an upgrade. So what’s the equivalent of the browser for our outdated and geographically constrained operating systems?

The emergence of cross-governments global services

Today, it doesn’t matter if you have an apartment in London and one in San Francisco where local regulations are different. You have one single interface to manage them: AirBnB. They even withhold taxes for you.

Same with Uber. Whether you are in Beijing, Cape Town or San Francisco, the same app with the same interface will bring you a car and drive you where you need to be. The local currency might be different, the local rules might be different, but the experience for you (as well as for the driver) is shielded from all that complexity.

Through those new global services, we see emerging a new layer on top of local governments. This layer provides a unified and streamlined interface that empowers people to focus on what they need to do.

Creating an organization is another of those situations where local governments expose a lot of complexity to the end user. We need to abstract that complexity so that people can focus on the primary goal of their organization.

In part 2 next week (next year\!), we will explore how we could build such a new layer to empower people to create associations with much less friction. Stay tuned. UPDATE: Here is part 2.

Thanks to Aseem Sood, pia mancini, Burt Herman and Lionel Dricot for having read and contributed to drafts of this post (and Pierre Wolff who read the very first version back in September\! Note to myself: don’t wait 3 months before publishing a blog post)

May 4 2015, originally published on Medium.com.

A mind opening experience

I’ve always been interested in meditation but I’ve never practiced it. I’m just too lazy. I bought the book “Search Inside Yourself” (by Chade-Meng Tan, a Google engineer), read the first chapter and stopped (like I do with most books). I knew that if I wanted to be serious about this I should put myself in a situation where I wouldn’t have any other alternative than to just do it. That’s how I work. So I signed up for 10-day Vipassana Meditation Retreat in Dhamma Manda, 3 hours north of San Francisco, April 15th 2015\.

TL;DR;

I absolutely recommend it
Great way to get into meditation and directly start seeing the benefits
You’ll learn to be more in control of your mind and of your reactions
You’ll learn to have a more balanced mind (equanimity)
Food is excellent and it will make you want to become vegetarian

I’ve been running all around for the past 7 years, moving from Belgium to San Francisco to create a startup (Storify). I never spent more than a day away from my iPhone since the first version came out. I was always “connected”. I needed to take a break, to think about things. I wanted to take the time to better understand life and its purpose.

As I’m now “in between startups”, I wanted to make sure that whatever I will end up doing next will be something meaningful, which will contribute in a positive way to humanity. Something that will move the needle, something that will be worth devoting so much time of my life.

The Vipassana 10-day Meditation Retreat is like a bootcamp. We were about 50 people, more or less equally split between genders but we were segregated at all times. The rule of noble silence applies throughout the course. No talk, except to ask questions at 9pm to the teacher on an individual basis. No book, no notes, no mobile phone, no Internet, nothing. The goal is to disconnect completely from the outside world and focus on your meditation and on yourself.

Daily schedule

4am
Wake up bell (I would take my shower then to wake me up)
4:30am-6:30am
Meditation
6:30am
Breakfast (I would always take oatmeal with a warm sauce with plums, peaches, raisins, etc. and granola with half banana and a quarter of an apple)
7am-8am
Nap
8am-11am
Meditation (with one 10mn break)
11am
Lunch (Vegetarian, delicious food)
12pm-1pm
Nap
1pm-5pm
Meditation (with two 10mn break)
5pm
Fruits and tea (I would prepare a fruit salad with one banana, one apple and one orange)
6pm-7pm
Meditation
7pm-8:15pm
Discourse (video by SN. Goenka, meditation teacher from Burma/India)
8:20pm-9pm
Meditation
10pm
Lights off

The first 3 days: Anapana

The first 3 days were probably the most difficult ones. Change of rythm, change of diet, change of behavior, etc. It takes a bit of time for your mind to get used to it.

The first meditations are all about being aware of your breath (Anapana means “Mindfulness of Breathing”). Breathing is the only body function that works both in a conscious and an unconscious way. When you don’t think about it, you are still breathing. But when you do, you can control it. That’s why it’s a really good bridge to connect with your subconscious.

At first, it’s quite difficult to get your mind to shut up. You can’t help but thinking about memories or things that you would like to do in the future. You need to learn to tame your mind and bring it back whenever you can to your breath. Easier said than done. It takes practice and dedication.

Every evening at 7pm, there was a 1h15 discourse given by SN. Goenka. That was by far the highlight of the day. This guy is so inspiring. What he was saying was music to my ears.

I’ve had a Catholic education back in Europe and I’ve always had a problem with it. As an engineer, I have a logical mind and I always push back on anything that people would tell me without proper explanation. If I can’t understand something, I won’t remember it and I won’t believe it.

Here, the teaching was very different. Instead of saying “Here is the holy bible, you’ve got to believe it”, they say “here is a path, we can’t walk on it for you, you’ve got to do it. You don’t have to believe anything we say, experience it and understand for yourself”.

This really resonated with me. In a way, the Christian education I got was pretty much a top to bottom education. The truth comes from above and you need to accept it. Here, it’s a bottom up process. While you are being given some guidance, you need to come up with your own truth. You need to experience it yourself. That’s a bit like being a parent or being an entrepreneur. You can ask as many advice from people who’ve done it before, but it will never replace the experience of actually living it yourself.

It also occurred to me that this bottom up nature of this teaching makes it particularly well suited for the 21st century where bottom up is increasingly replacing top to bottom hierarchies of the previous centuries. Coincidentally, Buddha predicted that it would take 2,500 years for Buddhism to take over the West (and that was… 2,559 years ago).

The benefit of doing such retreat is that you get to cover not only the theory through those daily discourses, but you also get to practice it. And that makes a massive difference. A lot of the things that you start experiencing don’t happen over night. It takes a few days. That’s why it’s so important to be in the right environment for 10 days to give this technique a fair try.

You are not only a body, you are also a mind. The two work like the wings of a butterfly. You need to master both to be able to fly.

We are all made of subatomic particles that vibrate continuously (Buddhists call them Kalapas). Nothing is solid. Everything is a vibration. Those vibrations happen so quickly that we don’t realize them. It’s a bit like the light of a bulb, it may seem fixed and constant, but in reality there is a continuous flow — an electric current — going through it.

Our body is constantly producing Kalapas. They are arising and passing away in a continuous flow. With enough practice and concentration of your mind, you can start experiencing this process.

You first learn to sharpen your mind and to be aware of things that happen throughout your body without you noticing. You start with the breath and you start with a small triangle area between the upper lip and the top of your nose. By focusing on a small area you train your mind to become sharper and sharper. It’s like if you would slowly increase the resolution of a picture so that you can see more and more details.

After a few days, you start experiencing new sensations in that small area. The goal is to experience first hand that everything in your body is constantly arising and passing away. And because of that, there is no point to feel aversion. There is also no point to crave for something. Everything is changing all the time. Don’t get attached to things, they will pass. Likewise, there is no such thing as “I” or “mine”. If you can detach yourself from your sensations (like pain), and if they keep arising and passing away, then they are never really “yours”. If you accept that nothing is ever yours, you will also feel much less pain whenever it’s gone, which will help you maintain your equanimity (the balance of your mind). The concept of no “I” is harder to grasp and I still have a hard time with it to be honest. I didn’t reach that far in my understanding in my meditation. It’s not with a 10-day course that you become enlightened. That would have been too easy :-)

The 4 main ingredients of Kalapas

Those Kalapas are the products of 4 elements. 2 physical elements and 2 mental ones.

The first one is food. That’s why it’s important to eat healthy. During those 10 days we only had vegetarian food (one of the rules we had to follow is to not kill any living being, and by eating meat you actually indirectly kill an animal). That was the first time for me that I would follow such strict diet for so long. And I have to say that I felt really, really good. My body just feels so much better. I’m not tired anymore after eating, I have much more energy throughout the day and I stopped drinking coffee.

The second one is everything else that your body captures on the physical level. The air you breath, the sun you get, etc. So it’s important to not live in a place where there is a lot of pollution.

The third one and the first on the mental side is how you currently feel. If you feel angry you will produce a different type of hormone, your body temperature may raise, etc. Likewise if you are stressed or if you are scared, your body will start generating different type of particles that will go throughout your body.

The fourth and last one is your history. How did you react previously in similar situations? That’s why if you see a spider and are afraid of spiders, independently of how you feel right now, you will automatically develop a reaction of fear.

The mind has a very important role to play in all this, in fact a role as important as the food and the physical environment in which we live in.

Despite that, in the West, we don’t get much opportunity to learn much about how our mind works, yet alone how to master it. We train our body, we train our intellect, but not our mind.

So this was for me my first crash course “mastering your mind 101” to get up to speed.

Day 4 to Day 10: Vipassana

Vipassana means “Insight into the True Nature of Reality”.

\Thanks to Wolf Berg (who was my roommate during this course but I had to wait the last day to finally talk to him\!) for proof reading it. Thanks also to my friends Aseem Sood, Brian Noguchi and Tatsiana Degaugue who did this retreat before me and recommended it to me. Thank you\!\*