I’ve offered to take point on some of the initial “business-y” things like working with the landlord and coming up with a plan to manage finances, and my initial first impression is that Open Collective would be a good option for something like this. Thoughts on OC or alternatives would be welcome!
@jakintosh we use OC for layer zero, and it’s unimpressive. for us, it basically serves as a thin stripe wrapper, and we’d prefer having written something for ourselves.
@j3s valuable perspective! how many people interact with OC at layer zero? is it something that everyone touches, or just a few people who are designated to do finances? my main worry with this project is that it’s not really a tech space, it’s much more broadly an “arts” space, and so the number of people who’d be able to engage with something that isn’t a modern web app could be very small (or just me), at least at first.
@jakintosh 2 people engage with OC in an admin sense (me and forest) but everyone else subscribes to it. the interface is very rough, to say the least, it’s confusing and basic features (like csv export) are buried or hard to find
it’s not the worst and does function and is free, so i have to give it credit where it’s due.
@forestjohnson - do u have any feedback you could share that i didn’t cover?
@j3s @forestjohnson oh this is even more valuable, thanks. do you use a fiscal sponsor, or handle all of that yourselves?
The main reason OC sucks for us is because we use our own bank acct for it instead of using their bank account.
That means every non-donation txn has to be entered manually, the ui is optimized for the version where OC holds your money for you. So its less intuitive for us. We have to create fake OC accounts to represent the entities we pay bills to like landlord, gas company, etc.
The ultimate slap in the face is that OC represents the donations to us as Individual txns but in the bank acct they show up in batched deposits that represent multiple ppls donations.
So if we want to "balance" the accounts ala double entry bookkeeping, we have to solve the (NP complete BTW) bin packing problem / "cafe problem"
At our scale this is "fine", I wrote a tool for it that works, in practice its not that messy and an automated tool can solve it... Its just annoying that this is even a thing
https://git.cyberia.club/cyberia/layerzero-account-balance
So I'd say if you arent comfortable with letting oc handle all the money, if you can get recurring donations set up and working w/ your own stripe account that will be better in the long term
And if you've never done double entry bookkeeping get ready to learn, if u wanna use OC with your own bank acct
