UbuCon Asia is now on Open Collective with Open Source Collective!

Today, We’re glad to inform you that we’re now on Open Collective with Open Source Collective as our fiscal host! Until last year (2023), We’ve been asking our local team who host UbuCon Asia in their city, to handle our event finances by bringing their own non-profit entity, company or local fiscal sponsor. This includes handling sponsorship contracts and receiving funds, receiving individual donations, spending funds on the venue, printings, renting equipment and even handling travel grants for speakers.

After doing this for a couple of years, We’ve found that this is indeed not really a good way to handle event finances as it burdens the local team a lot. Especially when handling travel grants for foreign participants. This also makes our event finance not very transparent, as local team members are usually already exhausted after the event, so they couldn’t really share the final finance report after the event. This also made the global team unable to check the finance report and estimate the budget for the next event. it’s also not very clear how we should handle the remaining funds after the event that the local team has been holding. It would have been nice if we could use the remaining funds for the next event, but that was difficult since we don’t have some person or organization who would properly hold and manage that. And also not easy to start the discussion due to the same reasons.

Starting this year, We’ll try to solve these issues with our finance by using Open Collective (with Open Source Collective as our fiscal host). While we will still ask the local team to handle some event finances, the global team will be also handling finances on Open Collective at least for some global sponsors and travel grants for foreign participants. We’ll be also trying to collect remaining event funds on Open Collective so that we can use them for the next event. This will also allow us to make expenses in advance if we need them in case the sponsorship fee has not arrived yet. Managing our finances on Open Collective will also make our finances transparent as transactions happens on Open Collective are recorded and publicly available on web.

We hope this would make our current and future local team less burden and also helpful for preparing events in much better ways. And also make our finance transparent.

Would like to support our journey for better managing our event finances? You can donate UbuCon Asia team today, on Open Collective of course! It will be helpful for us to handle some initial event expenses and travel grant reimbursement after the event. Note that we don’t plan to provide benefits other then exposing donor names on website. If you plan to join us in Jaipur, India this year and want some benefits with donations(such as special swag or free conference dinner), We also plan to get registration for donation ticket. Registering for that would give you what you want :)

Thank you - And see you all in Jaipur, India this year!

Links

• Find us on Open Collective - And donate us today!

This post is also available on Open Collective.