Self-organizing through Open Collective

[fweilih]

Whether it is to support the continued development or continue the operation of Mainnet, at the moment there is a pressing need to self-organize to raise donations. This would require a certain minimum legal infrastructure including bank accounts and and reporting. Open Collective (https://opencollective.com/) seems to offer such infrastructure to self-organizing groups.

In particular Open Collective Europe (https://opencollective.com/europe), which is one of the 'fiscal hosts' which can support groups, does not require the group to have any pre-existing legal registration. However, Open Collective Europe can only host EU-based projects and fund EU-based activity.

The other fiscal host listed in the website is Open Source US, but that requires that the group have an existing registration as a not-for-profit association.

In other words, whilst donations can come from anywhere, there is a need for European based community members to set up a Collective with Open Collective Europe if we wish to continue to support development of Rchain.

[jimscarver]

Effective governance of the rchain community is essential and opencollective.com seems a good way to go. All the EU members here, in https://t.me/rchain_coop https://discord.gg/33x5eDk https://github.com/rchain-community/rgov/graphs/contributors and https://github.com/rchain-community/rchain/graphs/contributors can be invited initially. Then the rest of us can join. While officially EU, payments can be made to outside the EU, and it may have members outside the EU.

I suggest interested members join the defunct Rchain Europe discord https://discord.gg/33x5eDk Hopefully we can get control of the server. It would give us a long history.

@tgrospic can we set up a "governance" repo?

[peteratomic]

I'm in the EU and would join a group of other EU based members to do the application.

[fweilih]

I made contact with Open Source US and they clarified that a collective does not need to be a registered not-for-profit entity, and they will clarify the wording on their website going forward.

[fweilih]

As between Open Collective Europe and Open Source US, the former has requirements that activities be for charitable purposes, whereas the Open Source US does not. The latter requires alignment with its goal "to promote sustainable and healthy ecosystem to sustain open source technology for the future" and "open source digital infrastructure project’ is one category of projects which are accepted. Also Open Source US can be used to fund projects anywhere in the world.

[fweilih]

Hi, this is the draft/work-in-progress budget that Jim and I put together today (most of credit to Jim, I was just the scribe). Suggestions for improvement would be welcome.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17PQ-uPuy5MUqeykeajmN9Gf2NdJgyFSaMciMCDNZxow/edit?usp=sharing

[peteratomic]

Looks good so far! Maybe $10-$20K for the new org research?