Pia Mancini, Open Collective

Thank you for tuning in to today’s full episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and Chief Evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore specific topics from the world of APIs, but through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Pia Mancini, co-founder and CEO of Open Collective. Pia talked about what I consider to be the future of open source business models, but more importantly, the future of technology at the intersection of open source and social justice. Well, let’s dive in, let’s start with the basics. Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Pia Mancini, I’m co-founder and CEO of Open Collective, and I’m also co-founder of Open Source Collective and the Open Collective Foundation. Anyway, everything that’s out there called Open and Collective, it’s my fault.

Well, thank you, I’m very thankful for the work you’re doing. I’m very familiar with what Open Collective does, it helps support several of the projects that are very critical to my world, but explain to us what Open Collective is.

Yeah, so Open Collective is a path for distributed communities like open source projects to be able to raise funds and spend those funds transparently without needing to have their own legal entity to do so. Essentially the problem that we solve is in the space of enabling communities to manage money, raise it, spend it, decide how they use it, without having to become something that they’re not, a not-for-profit or an LLC or any kind of legal entity.

Yeah, no, it’s so needed, there’s a lot of projects. I’m part of AsyncAPI, JSON Schema, several projects that are open source API tooling and/or specifications that would not exist without Open Collective. So why is it so hard to be able to fund open source work like this? Why do we need a kind of structure, scaffolding, like Open Collective?

Yeah, so I guess the answer to that has several parts. There’s an infrastructure answer to that that is part of the solution that we provide. When you are an open source project, you are likely a group of people that might not ever meet face to face, you’re likely distributed around the world, you’re using tooling, either GitHub or GitLab or any kind of version control mechanism to develop software, you are likely using a chat like a Discord or Slack or whatever you use to communicate. So you have most of your needs covered in terms of creating collaboration. Now when someone wants to fund your community, you have a problem, because you are not structured, you are likely not structured as a legal entity. AsyncAPI is not the AsyncAPI Corporation, it’s just you, it’s just people doing something that they love. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be funding them, on the contrary, I think that we should be funding communities more than anything else. But the problem is that we live in a world where corporations speak to corporations, they don’t speak to a group of people doing something together that is good or that serves a purpose in the world. So you have this situation where we have a financial mechanism that understands the corporation, understands the individual, like a freelancer, but it doesn’t understand the community as a group of people that can manage funding. So if someone like Postman, for example, wants to fund an open source community, they run into the problem of, where do I send the money, and who’s going to give me an invoice for this money? And that’s where Open Collective and our network of fiscal sponsors come in. Because we’re like, okay, Postman, here is an invoice, here is another corporation you can speak to that understands your language, and then you can go through your soulless procurement process, because we are incorporated somewhere in the world, we are reporting taxes, we do everything that your compliance department is going to be asking you to do in order to send money to someone. So we’ll take care of that, but then we’ll do that in the name of the open source project, essentially provide them with fiscal sponsorship. So it’s a really easy way to solve the problem of a lack of infrastructure for companies, foundations, donor-advised funds, governments, to give money to this amorphous group of people that’s doing something in the world. And we not only solve this problem for open source, we also do it for many other types of communities. So we do it for global movements like global political movements, social movements, we do it for the whole climate justice community. Imagine you have a local group of Extinction Rebellion, and people want to fund this type of civil disobedience, so they want to put money there so you can find the resources you need. But again, who are we going to send the money to, a PayPal account of the organizer? What happens with taxes for the organizer, what happens with transparency and trust for that community? So we really become that thing that enables communities of all sorts and everywhere in the world to be able to access and unlock access to funding and spend it transparently.

This is much more than the money, it’s everything that goes with this, the structure of an organization. And you mentioned before the foundation. What sort of business structure, what’s the whole apparatus look like that you can provide?

So we call it the constellation, because it’s essentially like a huge mess of legal entities around the world of all sorts of types. So we have a company that is Open Collective that builds the tech, the platform where everything happens, but it’s an open finances platform, everything is transparent by design, you know who gave money to whom and how they’re spending that money. We make it really easy for the foundations or the organizations that are receiving the money for the collectives to do their compliance, to be able to provide that service. So that’s the platform, and it’s built by our company, Open Collective Inc. And then we’ve created a series of not-for-profits around the world that essentially become the custodians of those funds. So the Open Source Collective or the Open Collective Foundation, there are different types of entities that have different purposes, but at the core they are providing fiscal sponsorship services. So what they do is they essentially lend an open source project their fiscal status. If an open source project wants to apply for a grant, receive money from a company, or have organized an event and they need to sign the lease of a venue, or they need to hire catering, all of that is the type of thing that the fiscal host will provide. And depending on the fiscal host, we provide different types of services. So we even employ folks. The Open Source Collective, for example, now is employing the Open Web Docs technical writers. So when MDN, like Mozilla, stopped funding, or the drama that happened last year, a group of companies and technical writers started Open Web Docs. Open Web Docs is a collective that has the mission of improving the documentation of the web. And so what we are doing is we are hiring those technical writers with benefits wherever they are, the whole thing. So now the community can hire their own members. That’s something that we, I don’t know if we’re doing it with AsyncAPI, but we discussed this with Fran many times, we wanted to hire someone for the open source project, so the hiring happens at the fiscal host level. We provide those services, legal services as well. I guess we do this more on the side of the solidarity, mutual aid, crisis aid work that we do, but we’ve also been doing it for open source. For example, we worked with a project who’s reverse-engineering some firmware, so the legality of it was tricky, and we spent a lot of time supporting them with how to go about this, and we ended up not being able to host them in the US, so another host that we have in Europe was able to host them in Europe. So we have this kind of large and complex setup that is a headache for us but it really gives communities a lot of flexibility and a lot of support. Legal, insurance, liability policies sometimes if they need, being able to receive and spend money, obviously, in compliance, signing agreements with their team members and things like that. So a lot of financial support, a lot of business support.

It sounds like this will help me navigate my doing-business-in-a-global-world issues as well. I’m an open source collective in the US and I need to think about European Union, Open Collective can help me there.

Yeah, 100%. It’s tricky for projects to hire internationally, so we give them that kind of support. We either do that ourselves or we do it through a global employer, for example. But again, the global employer, they are like, who is AsyncAPI, what am I talking to? No, they’re talking to a corporation, a nonprofit incorporated in California that has this track record, this budget. So it really abstracts the complexity of doing these things for projects.

Yeah, the hiring piece I think we’ve managed, because the AsyncAPI team is up to I think 10 or 11 folks now as part of my team, and we’re doing better setting up entities around Europe specifically but around the world to hire, because AsyncAPI is very diverse. There’s someone in Poland, someone in Spain, someone in Argentina, so it gets complex very fast, but that’s the community, that’s what we need to support. So I’ve been really thankful for Open Collective being there as a stepping stone for them.

Yeah, and it’s the world we live in. Communities have a huge impact in the world, and it’s very unfair that we can’t fund them. So at our core what we do is we move money from the center to the fringes, that’s what we do. We help unlock money and move it into the fringes. A lot of times, going back to your question about why is it so hard to fund open source, very often it’s not a matter of someone in the company not wanting to fund a community, it’s that they have no idea that this is even possible, because they don’t speak the same language. So for us it’s really about removing complexity for communities so communities can focus on their craft, on what they do best, and not on accountants and knowledge. So it’s about that, and it’s also about almost removing an excuse for corporations not to fund, and large funds, etc., because now it’s easy. We’ve onboarded to every single procurement system out there, trust me, they are all equally appalling, but we are there, so it’s really easy for company A to do a PO and send the money, it’s not a problem anymore. So then the conversation moves from, all right, how do we do this, now infrastructure is in place, then, okay, great, how do we do this, which project do we fund, what level of funding, how do we manage governance of an open source project with large or substantial corporate funding, what does it mean to be a good open source citizen, what does it mean to be a good corporate open source citizen. So I’m very proud that we’ve managed to move the conversation away from the practicality of how you actually send the money, or how is this even possible, to the much more interesting questions around governance of open source projects, the level of involvement, what can a corporate expect, or governance of the project itself, how do we spend this money, what do we spend the money on, how do we decide, how do we pay ourselves, how do we decide who’s going to get paid, how much. I think that we still have a long road ahead in helping projects decide better how to spend their funds and what to spend them on. Because at Open Collective we see some projects that have enough budget to pay for maintainers, and so that is a whole set of problems. Which maintainer is going to get paid, how do we guarantee that if someone is quitting their job to work for their community we can guarantee their employment long enough. So that’s one set of problems there, and why some are able to get paid and some not, that’s a whole issue. Then another is groups that have funding but not enough to guarantee an 18-month runway for a maintainer, or not enough to pay a person or a group of people market salaries, so they’re sitting on this cash and they don’t know what to do with it because it’s not enough but it’s also more than what you need to pay for your Heroku costs or print stickers. So I think that there’s a lot of work that, now that we have this role in the ecosystem, we need to be doing, and that we will be doing, that has to do with the spending part of the equation. We’ve been very focused on raising, because when we started, money in open source was like, wait, what, why? And now all of that conversation is quite obsolete, there’s no question that we need to be funding these groups building the building blocks of the economy, no one’s arguing with that anymore, but now we need to be focusing, I think, on the spending aspect of it.

You have a lot of very passionate, very smart people who don’t care about the business of all of this, that’s why they’re in open source, that’s why they believe in these communities, but it still takes money, it still takes structure, we all have to live and eat and breathe. So there’s a lot of education and awareness to be brought to the table, and I think that’s a worthy part of Open Collective and bringing to the table, helping folks understand all of this and providing the structure for them.

Yeah.

So what are your favorite projects? We talked about AsyncAPI, share some of your favorite projects that you’re seeing.

So of the work we’ve done, AsyncAPI is first, because they’ve been on Open Collective for a while, but also because of the work that we’ve done with the Afghan refugees. For me that was almost like a cross-pollination of, wait, this open source world that probably was very separate to all of this solidarity world that we’re doing, they’re suddenly part of the same. It really made me realize, or see very clearly, that there’s a lot more work that we need to be doing meshing the different large ecosystems, if you want, on Open Collective. And right now we’re seeing that again with Ukraine, we turn around and we emailed our open source projects and we said, hey, you have some budget here that you haven’t been using, we’re setting up this Support Ukraine collective, we’re going to be using this money to fund these organizations in Ukraine, would you like to donate? And the response was incredible, in like two seconds, a lot of projects were diverting their funds from their collectives to this Support Ukraine collective. So I’m a big fan of starting to mesh these worlds a lot more. The work that we do under the Open Collective Foundation is very related to mutual aid groups, bail funds, giving circles, really grassroots solidarity work, and they could all use so much support from decent tech people, and we have so many decent tech folks on the other end, and I’m like, why aren’t we doing more interconnections, because life is like that, and we’re all together in the same boat. So AsyncAPI for me is close to my heart, because also that happened and for me it was that moment where, oh, I don’t need to keep this separate in my head anymore, we can do this all together. So that was great. I’m pretty proud of the work we do with Open Web Docs, because I guess it was the first project where we turned around and said, okay, we’re going to be hiring folks, and so we are I think five technical writers now that we have, and that is work that’s important to me, to be able to support groups not just, we’re going to receive some funding here and there, but really give people the opportunity of being employed. Because what we want to do is we want to make working for your community as, or almost as, financially rewarding as working for a corporation. If we can get there, we are building something here. And the numbers are growing. Last year we funded more open source projects than all the previous years combined. Last year we sent 12 million dollars to open source projects, and that starts being some serious money. We have thousands of projects, so that doesn’t mean that everyone has a lot of money, but we are on that path, and we want to be doing more things. For example, Back Your Stack, where someone can back their entire open source stack or work down the dependency trees, so when a project becomes like this beacon that they receive a lot of funding but they’re still using a lot of projects to do their software that might not be receiving all of this funding, how do we really easily and seamlessly help them distribute some of their wealth down to their dependency tree? Projects like that are things that for me are super interesting, because it’s more about building the ecosystem and just funding, project-directed funding, which is what we’ve been doing very heavily until recently.

Yeah, it makes me happy that you’re all investing so much in the ecosystem, because I would say my relationship with Fran and AsyncAPI is very much born out of 10 years of me passionately trying to stay independent. I didn’t have a job, I was just freelancing working on open source, so 2010 through basically 2020, and I was always a big advocate of Fran and AsyncAPI and building. So as soon as I got budget, which I have at Postman now, I run our Open Technologies program, I carved out a space for Fran as quickly as I could, because him and I really get along well, and I can see why you and him get along really well too. Fran has some pretty radical notions of what technology should do in the world and what it shouldn’t be doing in the world, and I’m a big fan of that, and we’re working on, I’m going to push him to write a book on what he’s called radical transparency, and how do you run open source specifications out in the open, and why does it have to be community-driven, why does this piece of technology, this super-critical layer of our world, this asynchronous layer, have to be transparent in that way. And there’s a lot of folks I know right now who are encountering what you call the Great Resignation. There’s a lot of different reasons why people are in their tech jobs, no matter how well paid we are, it’s just not nourishing our soul. So do you feel like, if a listener is listening and they’re wanting something new to do, maybe taking their tech skills and applying but maybe to the environment or to some other social justice issue, is there opportunity for me to rethink my world right now?

Yeah, absolutely. We are now hiring two senior devs, this is not a pitch or anything but we’re hiring. And so we realized that we radically shifted the way we are hiring. We used to do the usual tracks of whatever hiring, and we turned around and said, this is not the pool that we want to be fishing, we want to be tapping into knowledge that is somewhere else. So we are now tapping into our solidarity economy networks, like co-ops, like New Economy Coalition, and we are talking to them about, hey, do you know someone in your network that is doing great solidarity work and they’re also a good dev and they would like to work with us? And it’s been super rewarding, to be honest, because the conversation is very different, and there’s a lot of talent out there who want to work for something that has meaning. We strive to pay as high as we can and we are super flexible, fully remote and everything, but at the core you work for a company, for a project, that has soul, that has impact, and that makes such a huge difference. And it’s not even working for Open Collective, it’s just connecting with the different networks out there that are doing amazing work and supporting them in the work they do. So it’s been amazing to see. And I have to be honest, the best hires that I’ve done by far are people who send me an email, they’re like, you’re not hiring now, but I just love the work that you’re doing and the impact, and I belong to a collective, and I’m like, great, we don’t have a role open now but come on board, we’ll figure it out, because what we want is that work. And we are not alone, there are a lot of companies out there who are now thinking more, we want to work with folks who are thinking of impact in the way that we’re thinking, and who have built those networks, a lot more than the right tech skills. This combination that we are looking for, it’s proven a lot more rewarding for our team.

And I would say, to give a little bit more background for people who are listening about what you mentioned earlier about Fran and Afghanistan. AsyncAPI was doing Google Summer of Code, and several of the Google Summer of Code contributors, it was a very active, successful season for Google Summer of Code and AsyncAPI, and they had some contributors who happened to be in Afghanistan that were very passionate and moved for the project in some interesting ways. And it just happened to coincide with the Taliban taking over and the vacuum that was left by the West leaving. So we worked really hard to get these folks out, because they were talented, because they were passionate and driven. And this is something that, what you just mentioned about hiring, I’m very dependent on my HR and our people, our recruiting, and doing it, but I’m finding those job positions and that filtering process fail me more times than it succeeds in finding people that are diverse voices, truly global, as part of not just AsyncAPI but I have JSON Schema, OpenAPI, wider Open Technologies. I find better employees, highly skilled, frankly, you can pay them a lot less than you can in the US and they’re much more happy, driven, and they tend to care about what they’re working on and the impact that it’s making in the world. So I’m finding that, it’s a whole new, when you hear about operating in a global world and doing business in a global world, it’s not what I expected when I heard, you know, global business enterprises. It’s at the lower levels of people and human beings on the ground trying to survive, and then you end up having to deal with things like Afghanistan and what’s going on in Ukraine, and you realize these are people who actually live on the ground in these places, have jobs, have families, have lives. And it’s been really eye-opening the last couple years working with AsyncAPI at this level, because my team is so diverse and wide.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We have folks from, I mean, it’s a scheduling nightmare, from British Columbia all the way to New Zealand, stopping everywhere in the world, so calls are messy and half the team is asleep because it’s too late or too early. But it’s amazing, because it brings a uniqueness to your team, and not just a diversity of voices but also the experiences, the visions of the world, and that makes the whole process a lot richer. And so now for example we are actively trying to find engineers who are still in Ukraine who can’t leave Ukraine but lost their jobs and want to work, and because Open Collective has always been remote since we started, we never had offices, we were always scattered around the world, because that’s just the life we led or we still lead, we wanted to build a company and a project that reflected who we were. So now if we can find folks there with a laptop and a somewhat stable connection, then we would love to hire from that community, because of course, why not. So I think that building remote, and having built all the processes over the years to successfully run a remote project like ours, which is very complex because it’s not just a company, it’s a company, it’s not-for-profits, it’s collectives, individuals, but it also gives us these amazing opportunities to help folks around the world.

Yeah, no, I’m impressed with the work you all are able to do. So what’s top of mind next? Is Ukraine kind of top of mind right now? What else is top of mind for Open Collective moving forward?

Yeah, for sure Ukraine, we’ve been sending, I think we sent something like 2 million dollars in the past 10 days, like in one thousand transients to families. So we’ve been funding families with a thousand. It’s been a bit of a crazy couple of weeks, but that is definitely top of mind, we want to do that more. I don’t know when this is going to get released, but the 1K Project, it’s the project that is either matching, so you can be matched directly to a family in Ukraine, you send them a thousand dollars, or you can add more or less or whatever you want to the pool on Open Collective for the 1K Project. So that’s top of mind. And then I guess something that is also now in my head has to do with exit to community, with this idea that we have of, okay, great, so we built a constellation, part of the constellation is a for-profit company that has a cap table with investors, how do we ensure that the mission is protected for the future? We take a very long-term view of what we do, so if you think in 50 years’ time, you need to build the right transitions for another set of stewards to be continuing your mission. And doing that from a for-profit company is very difficult, because the classic paths for exiting are you sell the company or you go public, and we don’t want to do that. We want to be able to figure out a path through which we share ownership with the community that we serve. So top of mind for us is really doing a lot of thinking in public about structures that would enable the Open Collective community at large to own the tech that supports their livelihoods, which is Open Collective.

Yeah, that’s so powerful. I think about it, there’s several blog posts out there, you’re playing with ideas.

We are starting a podcast series about this, talking to people, but the process has already started for us to figure that out.

It feels like to me that this is the front line of what open means, what open source means, and I feel like in my lifetime we’ve gone through several waves. It’s not our grandfather’s Linus Torvalds open source world anymore, it’s not a GitHub social, this is the future of community-driven not just open source code but open source content efforts, and then this intersection with social justice and just our lives, doing business at this global scale, or building tech, I wouldn’t even say doing business, applying tech at this global level. So it really feels like y’all are defining what’s next when it comes to open source and laying the foundation.

Yeah, we’re trying to figure it out. I think it’s so easy, but this is why we do what we do, and so we’re doing this very much in the open, because we are relying on everyone to help us think through this. There’s no blueprint for a company to become community-owned that just has investors. There is no easy path for this, especially not for one which is as global and diverse as ours. So what on earth this is going to look like, I think it’s something that we need to build together. Also, and I truly believe this, and I did a lot of work in politics, I come from politics, that’s my background, I’ve done politics until six years ago. I do believe that any participatory process, you need to be able to learn by living, by experiencing that process, otherwise you need to fail and then you need to learn from that failure. So we want to do this exit-to-community thinking with the community, because we don’t want to turn around in like two years or five years or whatever it is and say, okay, great, this is all the governance thing that you need to do now. We need to build the governance gymnastics, in a sense, in our community. So we are doing this very slowly and very open, because all of us need to live through the experience of owning a process like this in order to be able to own a tech project, a community like this, in the future.

So it’s so fundamental, and this is the core tenets of what Fran’s been talking about with radical transparency, and as he compares it with other specifications that we’re intimately involved with, OpenAPI and Swagger being one of them, but when you’re doing things at this scale globally within the community, the smallest thing can be misconstrued. Where you go to have a conversation, if it’s not out in the open properly, people feel like, oh, things are happening behind closed doors. If you don’t schedule an event properly and have the right transparency around it, people can feel like, well, now it’s a private network, or, in the US, a good old boys’ club. So you have to be very thoughtful about how you move these things forward and put it out there. And I think Open Collective, that’s what I really wanted from this show, is to help people understand it’s not just about money, there’s a lot more to this than just raising money and being able to spend the money.

Yeah, no, 100%.

Well, this has been great, this is exactly what I was looking for, thank you, thank you, thank you. And I would say the social justice, the Ukraine, I think what’s heavily weighing on us, what’s happening right now in the world. Where can folks go to get involved, how do they get involved in helping support what you all are building?

Yeah, so either 1K Project, so 1kproject.org or opencollective.com/1k-project. And then the Support Ukraine solidarity is Support Ukraine Now. So I guess we have a couple of collectives now going on, so if you go to Open Collective and search for Ukraine in the search box, the collectives that we are supporting are going to pop up, so that’s one path. Then in GitHub we have a lot of issues, star bounty, or our good first issue, some the bounty ones are compensated, but we really sometimes need some help, and so if anyone is like, oh, I’m just going to grab these two. The Open Collective Foundation also has issues that the Open Collective Foundation needs that the Open Collective core team can’t get to because we have a larger roadmap that we are trying to get through, so supporting the Open Collective Foundation in solving the issues that they need, that would be amazing, because there’s a lot of accessibility work that we are going through, and there’s a lot that needs to be done that we would love for, translation, we would love support there. And our Slack is public, so any questions or support or, hey, I want to get involved, how do I do that, slack.opencollective.com, it’s a really good place to start.

Sounds like a good place. I really appreciate you joining us today, this has been pretty eye-opening, I would say. I’m already familiar with Open Collective, but understanding its importance beyond the money and the funding part, and seeing how it reflects what’s next, I feel, for open source, it was very educational. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for having me.

Thanks again to Pia for stopping by. You can find more about Pia at piamancini.com, and Open Collective at opencollective.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.