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**Adam Stacoviak:** The details of the transparency; not so much who it goes to, but the details of it... |
**Pia Mancini:** Absolutely. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...and I guess in some cases the actual name... Because you've got to, for necessary reasons of clarity. |
**Pia Mancini:** Absolutely. We have for example an internet freedom technology fund under the OpenCollective Foundation where we are supporting a whole group of projects working with privacy, anti-surveillance protecting tools for human right activists, VPNs that are being deployed in countries like Myanmar, for examp... |
\[20:00\] I think transparency is interesting, and it's fantastic, but also you sometimes obviously run into this clash between transparency and privacy and identity protection that you need to navigate. And normally, the ones that are hurt the most or those protections are not in place are folks that are more exposed,... |
**Break:** \[20:20\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So you have a brand new initiative as of March, the Funds for Open Source project on Open Collective... And it's all about getting corporations better involved, more involved, bringing more corporate money into open source maintainers' hands, making that easy and accessible. Do you wanna tell us where ... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, so Funds for Open Source came from our awful, daily, soulless relation with corporations purchasing order process... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, yeah... |
**Pia Mancini:** Their financial systems and onboarding as a vendor and getting them to get their financial departments to approve payments is just bad, and it's difficult. We want to make that very easy. And it's bad for everyone; you have to use SAP, you know what I mean? It's like, it's bad. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Pia Mancini:** SAP!! |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:22:13.27\] Yes, it's terrible. |
**Pia Mancini:** It looks like Coupa, exactly. \[unintelligible 00:22:18.29\] with all the love in the world. And it's bad for everyone. Okay, so for the projects it's impossible; if you don't have a not-for-profit or a legal entity with the right checks and EIN's and things like that, it's a non-starter. But that's mo... |
So what we did was this Funds for Open Source proposal, where companies have one payment, one purchasing order, a large tech... It's not surprising, but it's far easier to get $100,000 from a company than to get $10,000. A lot easier to get $100,000, because they understand that. The $10,000 raises a ton of flags. But ... |
We have, for example, a CMS, the Google CMS fund. They gave us their whole budget, and then they wanted to give money to the Drupal Association. But instead of getting the Drupal Association that is now a very small organization in terms of staff to go through all the process of procurement with Google, we just sent th... |
Funds for Open Source also has a grant-making feature built-in. So projects can apply to get funding from this grant. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's cool. |
**Pia Mancini:** And again, instead of that being one project's storybook, trying to get into Google to get the funds, they just draw an application through the Open Source Collective to the fund, and everything is a lot easier, because the money already left the corporation. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's been allocated to the cause of open source, essentially, through a trusted resource, which is their fund on Open Collective. |
**Pia Mancini:** Correct, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And they can disburse in there. Does the same radical transparency participate there, too? So money in, money out - it's the same on these funds as well? |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's beneficial for those organizations too, because it's like "Well, you can see how much we're participating", which has been a challenge. You can see some organizations taking advantage, or some organizations giving a lot, and it's all behind the scenes, and the only way to really do it is mayb... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. And also, I think it gives another entity if you want, in a way; another kind of seniority. It's like, this is Airbnb's open source fund, and from here, we're gonna do a ton of things, most of which would be very difficult to do if the money was in pieces coming out of Airbnb. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Does it mean that the endpoint that gets funded has to be involved in Open Collective? Or it's just their fund, and you can issue checks to somebody outside of Collective. |
**Pia Mancini:** Absolutely, you can issue checks to anyone. We really wanted to be very clear -- well, we are very clear, but we really wanted to enable that to happen for smaller organizations as well. Because for us, the Open Collective team, it's the same; to give money to a maintainer or to give money to an organi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned Airbnb... We had a conversation with Duane O'Brien way back on the Changelog. Jerod missed that show. Where were you at, Jerod? |
**Jerod Santo:** I was just listening... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just listening. Episode \#392, it was Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And I know that you know Duane well, and Indeed is a part of -- they have their own fund on Open Collective... Is there any back-story to some of the trials and tribulations Duane went through and shared on that show to kind of continue into what you're now doing? Has there been any cross-over? Has ... |
**Pia Mancini:** Oh yeah, he's been a great advocate of funds for open source, the FOSS Contributor Fund for sure. He's been right there, talking to his fellow open source peeps in different companies and getting them to start this. Indeed's experience was really -- I think it really kick-started a lot of what's happen... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Pia Mancini:** It's not everyone though. It's really interesting, it's not just everyone who's an engineer that can vote. It's those who have contributed to open source. So they don't just want to get them to decide which project to fund, they also wanna get their staff to contribute more to open source. And that was... |
\[28:08\] And we just came in to, again, enable. That's what we do, we facilitate, we enable, we catalyze these things. We wanna make it so, so simple for companies to say "Okay, we're just gonna put this many here, and from here we'll decide how to spend. We'll spend here, there, we'll offer grants etc." But it's a hu... |
I guess the biggest example that we have is Chrome's fund. They have a pretty big fund on OpenCollective.com/chrome. I think it's about $700,000, and they've just committed another half a million for this year... So they've been great at this. And you can go in there, you can see -- not only they are kind of disbursing... |
So yeah, Funds for Open Source is a big one for us this year. When we launched, it had a lot of traction, so it clearly struck a cord with everyone who's involved in procurement processes in companies. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. You mentioned persuasion... You didn't say the word "persuasion", but I was thinking about that. Or activism, or encouragement I think is the word that you used... And you're an enabler. I'm curious if there's a missing component to this. Because you have the tooling now, you have a mechanism, y... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, I think we need to be better at that. I think companies are more aware now of the need they have to invest in the open source ecosystem. I've been seeing a lot of companies -- Trivago is one of the greatest examples of this. Trivago - they're very invested in supporting WebPack, Babel and Preact.... |
So I think that more and more companies are seeing this as an investment and not as a charity. More of a "I need to do this if I wanna keep my employees and my engineers happy and working for us, and also if we want to have a good name in the community, if we want to be responsible citizens." I'm not saying that this i... |
So we need to be better -- like, we, OpenCollective and Open Source Collective need to be better at having this conversation with companies. Right now it's quite centered in me and (luckily now) Ben Nickolls, who joined as the executive director of Open Source Collective. |
**Jerod Santo:** Shout-out to Ben. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yes! Hi, Ben. But still, it's a very kind of interpersonal relationship... Which is fantastic, but I also think every single day about how I can make myself redundant from my own company... Because I think that the only way of -- |
**Jerod Santo:** Sure. |
**Pia Mancini:** ...I want to create something that survives me, and I believe that sustainable is a mission that survives its founders. So I think a lot about that, and I think a lot about that in the context of my relationship with all of these companies in the open source space. So I think that we need to do better ... |
\[32:23\] Sustain was obviously a big part of that conversation of convincing companies that they need to invest in this space... So yeah, I think I would like to do something that is like a toolkit for -- you know, your sustainer toolkit. You're in a company, these are all the resources at hand, these are all the stat... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, you might be preaching to the choir with our show in particular, but... Point taken. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** To some degree. Well, you launched this, at least by the blog post, March 24th. We've talked about Airbnb, Chrome, Indeed as participants of funds. How many funds are out there? How do you find these funds? If somebody wants to start a fund, what's the process to begin that workflow? Is there a butt... |
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