Financing

[victorb]

Currently, I'm the Treasurer and handle the current income and expenses for Open-Registry. It's not something I want to do personally, but doing to get it off the ground.

Obviously this is not the most optimal situation right now, so we have a couple of options at our disposal:

• Continue to use a single person as Treasurer (I don't think this is a a very good idea)
• Start a Aragon Organization or similar (governance on the Ethereum Blockchain)
• Start a non-profit in a country, probably needs at least 3 people to do (I would be able to do this in Spain or Sweden, not too comfortable doing it where I'm not familiar with the legal structures)
• Join a foundation such as Linux Foundation, OpenJS, Apache Software Foundation
• Start a Open Collective and join the Open Collective Europe ASBL

I'd be fine with any of the last three. Probably Open Collective would be the easiest route (but we'd lose out on some % of the donations), but we'll get easy APIs to log values, while the foundation way would be more bureaucratic. Although the foundation way has been proven and is successful for many projects, while Open Collective is relatively new.

I don't think single person treasurer is either safe nor desirable in the long-term, and Aragon does not look ready today to be used.

Is there any other options that I'm missing? What do you think would be the best way forward?

[victorb]

So, easiest way forward is using Open Collective with Open Collective Europe ASBL as a host which is a european non-profit (based in Belgium). This way, we don't have to setup a separate legal and accounting entity, as Open Collective EU would do that for us.

It comes with some drawbacks though, such as a 10% administration fee + credit card fees (1.4% + €0.25 for European cards and 2.9% + €0.25 for non-European cards) which will be taken from the donations, so less income.

As it's the easiest way to get started and the fees are not too bad, it's my suggestion that we move forward with this.

Unless someone has any objections against using Open Collective Europe ASBL as a host for us, I'll move forward with this in a couple of days.

[victorb]

With no pushback on this issue with Open Collective Europe ASBL, I'll move forward with moving us from LiberaPay to Open Collective.

[victorb]

And it's been moved to Open Collective Europe ASBL! You can see the page here: https://opencollective.com/open-registry

I've signed up to contribute 10 Euro per month to get started. Estimate is that we'll survive the hosting costs with about 600 euro per year (60 euro per month) which will certainly increase in the future.

[victorb]

Funds received via LiberaPay has now been transfered to the Open Collective for Open-Registry