Using Open Collective to manage money for do_action charity hackathons and Intro to OS workshops

We have a call for assistance for deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. with writing some new documentation at the end of this post, so read on and comment if you would like to help out.

As all WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organisers will know, invoices for WordCamps are managed from within the event dashboard and finances are handled by the WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org.’s subsidiary, WordPress Community SupportWordPress Community Support WordPress Community Support PBC is a subsidiary of WordPress Foundation. It is created specifically to be the financial and legal support for WordCamps, WordPress Meetup groups, and any additional “official” events organized within the WordPress Community Events program., PBC. MeetupMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook. venue payments are also handled through the same entity, even though the process for requesting those funds is a little more manual.

Aside from WordCamps and meetupsMeetup Meetup groups are locally-organized groups that get together for face-to-face events on a regular basis (commonly once a month). Learn more about Meetups in our Meetup Organizer Handbook., the community team oversees other event programs, with finances managed via WordPress Foundation bank accounts — right now, that includes do_action charity hackathons and open source workshops.

Both of those event programs are growing, and we have found ourselves in need of a better way to handle invoices and finances (currently we’re using email threads). We also want the finances for these events to be public and transparent. With that in mind, we are going to be using a new third-party platform for this – namely, Open Collective.

Open Collective is a platform that makes managing organisation and event finances public, transparent, and simple. It is a great platform for our use case here, and we are excited to try it out. Not only will it make these event finances more transparent, but it will make it far easier for us to support more of these events as they continue to grow.

So what next?

We are nearly finished setting up Open Collective for our needs. The next step is to put together documentation for organisers so they can start using the platform with ease.

We are looking for deputies who are keen to assist with creating the documentation to help out, so that we can start using Open Collective as quickly as possible.

If you would like to assist with creating this important documentation, please comment on this post, and we will work through it together.