40. Operating Open Collective

François Hodierne is a lead engineer at Open Collective, and he's joined in conversation by Danielle Adams (the Node.js language owner at Heroku) and Becky Jaimes (the product manager for Heroku Data). Open Collective serves as a legal and banking entity for non-profit tech projects to raise donations and funds. All of Open Collective's repositories are open source, and they run a complete Node.js stack, via a GraphQL API on the backend and a Next.js frontend.

As a core team of just three people, Open Collective relies on public contributions from its community. Recently, they've instituted a very successful bug bounty program, which uses labels to identify the amount of money an issue is worth. By assessing the difficult and urgency of an issue, they've been able to asynchronously communicate to others what they need to do and what they need to achieve to close the bug. Contributions have come in from developers all around the world, but after Open Collective's recent partnership with Open Source Community Africa, the main countries they've seen activity from were Nigeria and Kenya.

Open Collective is hosted on Heroku, and they've found deployments by Git to be their most essential feature. They also rely on Heroku's metrics dashboards, which provides just the right amount of information. François notes that his key requirement for any hosting platform or JavaScript dependency is its adoption; the more popular a technology is, the more likely it is to be understood and the easier it becomes to on-board new contributors.

Links from this episode

OpenCollective.com/

OpenCollective on GitHub

OpenCollective's blog post on their bounty program

Open Source Community Africa