description: >- Below you’ll find information to help you get started. Please read carefully & feel free to let us know if something isn’t clear enough or missing. You can email Pia directly at [email protected].
Some of the information below is included in different parts of this documentation. The goal is to provide an easy Welcome Document with all the relevant information new Open Collective Team Members need to get started.
- Open Collective Way
- Core Contributors Guidelines
- Communication
- Team Retreats
- Prioritization Framework
- Project Templates
- Leave
- Expenses
- Design Collective
- Engineering Collective
- Checklist
Mission
We are on a mission to enable communities to be sustainable and fundraise in full transparency without having to create a legal entity to do it.
Values
Sustainability: We can’t achieve our mission unless we are sustainable doing it. We take a broad definition of sustainability as financial, collective and individual sustainability.
Openness: We work in the open, use public slack, our code is public. We strive to be reachable and welcoming.
Resilience (people come and go): A successful company survives its founders. We try to do things in a way anyone can pick up after and carry on.
Transparency: Our data is public as well as our revenue numbers, our investors update are regularly published in our medium and our salary tiers are published here.
Work in the open. It saves a lot of time. There should be little to no distinction between an internal and external contributor.
Seek advice but make your call. Make sure you ping anyone internally or externally that could add valuable feedback to what you are working on.
Be mindful of everyone else’s time: don’t block others. Think about how someone can take over from you, don’t become a bottleneck.
Apply rough consensus. You don’t need everyone to sign off on something.
Go ahead, results speak louder than words.
Deliver. Schedules are flexible but…
...Show up for (online) meetups, let the team know if you can’t make it. Trust by default, don’t break the trust.
Don’t lie.
Support and encourage contributions. When someone contributes, it means they care.
Take care of yourself, it’s a marathon - not a sprint. Take care of each other. We are all doing our best.
Expect review requests to be replied in 24h hours (excluding weekends), after this period you can merge.
Ensure you have proper RFCs for important changes
You’re responsible for deploying what you develop
It’s everyone’s responsibility to make sure we are all as autonomous as possible.
Slack
We use Slack to communicate. Make sure you join the appropriate channels for your area (#engineering #design #internal-support #support etc) We try to have most conversations on open channels. We will invite you to the private Team channel which we use for internal conversations.
Slack is used for our asynchronous standup. We will add you to standuply when you join (please ping François on slack or [email protected] if you are not on it yet). Every day we answer:
- What’s your update for today? (what are you working on / what have you done?)
- Do you need anything from anyone?
EU/Africa’s deadline is before the standup 3pm CET
Americas / NZ: deadline is at the end of the day
Good Practices for Slack:
- DM if it’s urgent / personal
- Use public channels by default
- Thread replies for ease of flow
GitHub
Conversations about features, feedback, bugs, etc must be reported on GitHub. This allows us to properly track them.
Main Repo: All issues should be posted in the main repo.
Bugs: We provide a template for bug reporting - Please follow up as much as possible
Features: Features have a template that starts with the user. For example, As a Collective Admin I want to…
Freshdesk
We use Freshdesk to track user support requests. If you receive a support inquiry that can’t be solved immediately (e.g. on Slack or email), you can create a Freshdesk ticket for followup. You may be assigned support tickets that relate to projects you’re working on.
Weekly Calls
Monday 330pm CEST / 930am EST: Weekly meeting: weekly planning, review of To Dos, numbers and open issues. This is the document we use to track our weekly goals.
Tuesday 830am CEST / 830PM NZT: EU/NZ Weekly Meeting
Friday 3pm CEST / 9am EST: Friday Demo: We present the week’s progress. If you need to make a presentation you can use this template
Monday and Friday calls are recorded for team members who can’t make the time.
Daily Calls: Tuesday-Thursday 3pm CEST / 9AM EST: daily standup. Rough account of what we are up to & blockers.
We organize quarterly Team Retreats to bring the whole team together for 3-4 days. There is an expectation that everyone (within reason) participates. If you live very far away from where the retreat takes place, or it’s hard for you to travel we ask you to try to come at least once a year.
Design normally sends one member per retreat so they all get a chance to participate.
We will cover expenses for you to join. Please submit the receipt of your travel to the relevant retreat event on our Collective. Please try and take the train when possible! If you are coming from far away and the ticket is expensive, please contact Alanna ([email protected]) to sort it out.
You can find previous retreats docs here.
To achieve that we use these questions to prioritize what gets done:
- Does this serve our mission?
- Will this make us financially sustainable?
- Is it possible to build and maintain with our team and runway?
- Can this make us move faster?
- Does this increase quality and not technical debt?
- Will this bring us more Collectives and financial contributors?
- Is this already solved elsewhere, or is it our unique contribution?
- Can we measure the success of this?
All projects must have an owner, metrics, and a timeframe and must follow these guidelines:
- Create a Github issue using the Project template
- Bring it up in team meeting and/or host a kickoff workshop
- Link related issues or create Github project
Project owner role
- Facilitator
- tie breaker & decision-maker
- Producer
- makes sure no one’s blocked
- Responsible for delivery
- QA
- Documentation and comms plan
- Pass the role on if they can’t continue
- Post-ship plan for maintenance
Example:
Expense Flow: opencollective/opencollective#2394
Owner: Alanna (and Pia)
Timeframe & Milestones:
- (see github issue)
- Finish specs
- Wireframes
- Feedback
- Separate API and frontend dev
- Ideally implementation starts end of Oct
Metrics:
- More expenses filed
- Less support requests
- Less host admin time spent
- Way fewer issues with invoices (fewer expense comments)
- Use of the new features (ex batch expenses)
Vacations:
- 25 days a year, paid
- Unlimited unpaid leave (make sure everything is organized and anyone can take on your tasks). Please note we are a startup and on a constrained budget that can change by the time you are back. Over 3 months unpaid leave, we can’t guarantee that we’ll able to pay you again.
Parental Leave:
- 25 days paid (your vacations)
- 6 months unpaid. Please note that we are a startup that is not sustainable yet and our situation might change but we will strive to pay you again after 6 months of parental unpaid leave.
Open Collective will cover the following expenses:
- Travel, accommodation & meals during retreats.
- Travel to conferences (pre-validation required)
- Personal development workshop/classes (pre-validation required)
Core contributors are responsible for:
- Healthcare
- Office, Hardware / Internet
- Commute / Lunches
Core contributors (& part time contributors) should submit their invoices to the corresponding collective:
- opencollective.com/opencollective
- opencollective.com/design
- opencollective.com/engineering
Please submit your invoices to your relevant collective. Invoices need to be addressed to:
Attention: Open Collective Inc.
340 S. Lemon Ave. #3717, Walnut, Ca. 91789, USA
Coming Soon
François ([email protected]) is the director of the Engineering team.
Please make sure you read the Development Section and Developer Guidelines of our docs.
These are the development contribution guides.
Best Practices of the engineering collective.
Changelog for our updated release notes.
You can find RFCs folder here.
A current team member should set the new person up with the following as needed:
- Signed contract
- Invite to Slack and appropriate channels
- Github.org
- Team meeting calendar invitations
- 1Password
- Freshdesk
- Ghost blog author profile
- Set up Open Collective user profile
- Open Collective email account
- Access to Google Drive
- Figma access