[joewadcan]

> Taking that 3% and allocating towards your own developers contributing to OSS gives everyone more bang for the buck right?

I see what you mean. However, as a two person company we think the impact from supporting those projects is a better use of funds. It's all a bit of an experiment, but we wanted to put a stake in the ground somewhere because of how important open source has been to our existence as a company.

Joe (Eventbot co-founder)

[piamancini]

Hey Joe, I'm one of the founders of Open Collective (opencollective.com) Happy to help if you have any questions on how to implement or if we can help out somehow.

[joewadcan]

Hi Pia, we love Open Collective and are using it to donate to one of our sponsored projects. The platform is a great way to relieve a good deal of pain that OSS devs would have to endure in running a funded project.

One of the hardest things we've found is helping small projects (1 or 2 people) that don't have/need the structure of Open Collective but still could use the funds. PayPal is surprising bad since you can't even accept a recurring payment without going through hoops to set up a page/button.

[piamancini]

For those projects in countries with stripe, they can use open collective with their own stripe account. Fees are half since we don’t do fiscal sponsorship (they would self host) and the benefits is that we have the whole subscription / tiers / badges system set up. If you think some of this projects might be able to use it, feel free to send them my way. I’m happy to help them.

[simplify]

Maybe https://donorbox.org would be better for those small projects?

[epanchin]

I can see why you’d not want to give up the time to train, but improving the open source projects you rely on could be a really nice job for a summer CS intern - if 12 weeks intern salary is < 3%.

[watwut]

There is non-zero chance that the project owner will appreciate the direct money more.

[nwhatt]

Makes sense, exciting to hear how the experiment goes.