This week we’re talking with Pia Mancini about the latest updates to the mission of Open Collective. Earlier this year Open Collective announced “Funds for Open Source.” The idea is simple, make it easy for companies to invest in open source, and they will. Also, since recording this episode, Pia and the team at Open Collective along with Gitcoin announced fundoss.org as part of Maintainer Week announcements. And right now, they have a matching fund of $75,000 dollars funding open source that you can support.

Pia Mancini:

We are on a mission to make working for an open source project a legitimate alternative to a career working for a for-profit corporation. To achieve our goal, we must remove friction between projects, the communities who support them, and the corporations who depend on their work (and can fund them)

Their entire premise is that companies would invest more in open source if it were easier for them to do so. So, they’re making it easier by introducing “funds”, which companies can set up and then give to one place instead of a dozen (or more) projects separately. And they’ve already gotten the ball rolling:

Over the last year, we’ve been quietly establishing a number of Funds, which have turned into great examples of what happens when you solve the barriers between corporations and open source projects.

I hope it works. Airbnb alerady has a fund. Indeed already has a fund. More to come?

Pia Mancini, CEO of Open Collective:

BackYourStack is the first step to help companies discover the dependencies in their stack that are seeking to become sustainable and a way to start subscriptions to them. Each collective can set up different tiers for their subscriptions such us brand visibility, support or in-house training.

Just input your GitHub org and BackYourStack will generate a list of supportable projects by analyzing your dependencies. This is a great idea and a good first step toward making it easier for organizations to put their money where their source is.

(YMMV as the results are a bit limited (and maybe buggy?) at the moment. Our report is saying we only rely upon 1 open source project, which definitely doesn’t cover it.)

Pia Mancini joined the show for the first episode back from a nearly 5 year hiatus. We talked about her work at DemocracyEarth, being a mother, her new role as CEO of Open Collective, their focus, supporting ad-hoc community formation all around the world, their revenue and growth plans, and their path to sustainability.

Pia Mancini joined the show to talk about Open Collective, her background and where she came from, her passion to upgrade democracy, funding and sustaining open source, what open collective is, how it works, how you can support your favorite open source communities, but more importably how you can take part and start your own collective.