Operating as LLCs or corporations doesn’t feel right in the Internet Age. We need new vehicles to embrace the Internet’s collaborative nature. We don’t need to explain in this community that DAOs (aka digital cooperatives) are the way to go.

You can’t discover a new world with an old map 🗺️, nor with outdated vehicles. 🚗💨

However, starting and managing them remains challenging. We believe we can contribute a piece of the puzzle here 🧩 to make it easier to start or join them.

Open Collective’s mission has always been about providing a new form of organization for the Internet Generation.

In 2015, we launched Open Collective by creating a new abstraction layer on top of existing non-profits.

📖 Read: We need a new form of association for the Internet generation (2015)

This enabled more than 3500 collectives to exist. Together, they raised more than $100M (https://discover.opencollective.com). This includes a couple of web3 projects and communities that needed to raise good old fiat money for some of their activities (ReFI Lisboa, Circles UBI, She256, Breadchain, Peercoin, Dandelion, even metamask gave it a try in their early days).

Kevin told me, “Open Collective was one of my inspirations to start Gitcoin” (“Open Collective was the OG Open Source Software crowdfunding platform” - Kevin Owocki).

We actually have quite a story together already. In March 2021, Open Collective and Gitcoin worked together to bring quadratic funding to web2 open source projects (see also the wrap party).

And in December 2021, with our fiscal host dedicated to climate projects (allforclimate.earth), we worked together to create the first Gitcoin Climate Round 🌍 (see finale event).

However, Open Collective has been stuck in the world of fiat. Earlier this month, we decided to “exit to community” the current business, so that we can make space for starting a new web3 branch.

📖 Read: The Open Collective Platform is Moving to a Community Governed Non-profit

What if we would fund this new web3 branch as a community?

Here is our commitment:

• Everything we do will be open source (always has been)
• We will do as much on-chain as possible to ensure great compatibility with any other dapp.
• We will eventually exit the company to the community (like we did with the current branch) through a DAO (with progressive decentralization)

What would Open Collective v3 offer?

A simple platform to manage common resources as a community (aka commons):

Concretely:

• A way for your project to provide much more visibility on how you are spending the funds you raised (with gitcoin, crypto, fiat)
• A user friendly interface that normies can use to take part in your DAO

📖 Read: A New Chapter for Open Collective: Digital Cooperatives

Our first test collectives will be the Commons Hub Brussels (where the Regen Village happened during EthCC) and the Citizen Wallet (that has already participated in a few Gitcoin Grant Rounds). If you are interested to follow along and take part in the first private beta, please fill out this form.

Can’t wait to work together on this!