Here is my thinking for @Open Collective V3. Please poke holes in it. Work in progress and open for feedback. #asknostr
🚀 Mission
Give communities the tools they need to manage their financial and non-financial resources transparently and effectively.
🤔 Why?
We need an Internet native way to organize ourselves (i.e. allocate our common resources) that would embody the open source values of transparency, decentralization and open collaboration.
🧐 Why?
Look at the impact of open source in the past few decades. What if organizations were operating by the same principles? What if we could complete each other instead of competing with each other?
🥇 First use case
Make spending transparent—show how the funds that you receive from the community are used.
Eventually, we want to support more than just financial contributions. We should help communities to:
- Issue and manage different currencies (tokens) to reward people contributing in other ways.
- Make it easy to spend those tokens to access certain resources of the community.
- Transparent decision making (think GitHub Issues for proposals)
🎯 Initial target group
I was thinking to first target open source projects on Gitcoin. But Nostr projects and meetups could also be good candidates if there is a demand. I’d just need help to support lightning ⚡️
Eventually: any association of people with a common resource to develop or protect 👠🔅💪
📦 MVP
- Make on chain transactions human readable by adding metadata (description, tags, pictures, …) using Nostr.
- Connect existing bank accounts to the blockchain (to have an on chain reference for each tx) using PSD2, Ponto, Plaid, …
Imagine if all government spendings were on chain with open annotations. DOGE wouldn’t be needed.
💕 Values
- open source
- decentralized
🎞️ Context / background:
I started opencollective.com 10 years ago. While impactful ($130M raised across 4k+ collectives, including $50M for open source projects), it’s still a drop in the ocean. Current implementation doesn’t scale because it relies on fiscal hosts. Too much bureaucracy. So we moved the current version to a new entity owned by existing fiscal hosts that rely on it.
I’m starting a new Internet native version to scratch my own itch to manage the @Commons Hub Brussels. It’s a common physical space in the capital of Europe that many of you have visited during the Nostr Meetup alongside #FOSDEM. We receive money through Stripe, SEPA, but also crypto (including satoshis to commonshub@coinos.io).
We also have our own “yin token” to reward non financial contributions to the community ☯️
🙋🏻♂️ Who wants to help?
Looking for developers that are themselves part of a community that could make use of it. Scratching your own itch is the best way to iterate fast 🔁
Xavier Damman
_@xavierdamman.com
npub1xsp9...62dr
Dad. Entrepreneur (@opencollective, @commonshub, Citizen Wallet, Storify). Citizen (Citizen Garden, Citizen Corner, Citizen Spring).
How can a relay avoid being spammed?
Shouldn’t there be an allowance of max 100 free posts per npub and then require one sat per post?
Cheap enough to not deter humans, but expensive enough to avoid AI bots spamming.
I changed my mind on inequalities.
I realized that I was against inequalities because it is the politically correct thing to say. Indeed, how can you not be against inequalities when you see super rich people and people on the street?
But when I look at nature, inequality is everywhere. The footprint of an elephant can’t compare to the footprint of an ant 🐜 🐘. Even within the same species, not all individuals have the same access to resources. The trunk has access to more resources than the branches, but the leaves have more access to the sun. ☀️
There is so much wisdom in nature 🌱. It’s the result of millions of iterations to find the right balance ⚖️. And it keeps evolving as the environment changes 🦕.
I want to be more aligned with nature. Learn and take inspiration from it. That’s why I’m now embracing inequalities.
Turns out that inequalities can’t exist without the concept of quantity, which itself cannot exist without a common –human made– unit of measure. 📏
But nature cannot be measured with a single measuring stick. It has a multitude of dimensions. We are nature. We are multidimensional beings.
This made me realize that being against inequality only makes sense in a human society that has reduced everything to a single dimension, incapable of seeing and acknowledging the beauty of life in all its dimensions. 🌈
It’s only when reduce multiple dimensions into one, that you can start comparing, ranking, competing, and that inequalities emerge.
That’s why I’m not against inequalities anymore. I’m just against a world that has been reduced to a single measuring stick, a single currency, a single way to recognize everyone’s contribution.
Once you introduce other dimensions, inequalities become irrelevant. If you take into account someone’s time contribution to your community, then Elon Musk’s billions of dollars don’t matter anymore. He doesn’t have, for example, a single token of the Commons Hub Brussels and he won’t be able to come cowork there.
We all thrive in some dimensions and less so in others. That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s what makes us all interdependent. That’s why we need to collaborate.
Your talent, your contribution is unique and sacred. It can’t be measured with a single measuring stick, it cannot be compared or ranked. Once you accept that, other people’s privileges and inequalities won’t matter as much anymore.
The key is to find the community that can recognize your contribution and that can fulfill your needs. A community that will not force everyone’s contribution to be measured with a single measuring stick as a condition to get access to shelter, food and care.
How can we open our minds and our hearts to many more dimensions? How can we properly recognize and value everyone’s sacred contribution?
Fighting inequalities means that we are de facto accepting to be reduced to a single currency. Let's start new ones and let's make inequalities and privileges obsolete!
Full house for the new yearly gathering of crypto communities of Belgium at the @Commons Hub Brussels Brussels. #block25
Gm Brussels.
Off to our weekly regen walk to stay connected with nature. What a treat to be able to take one metro and go for a walk in the forest.


- What happens when my nsec is compromised?
- You cry
👉 we need a better answer if we want to go mainstream
If there is a way to announce what relays we use, there should be a way to also announce other npub we use (and the ones we revoke). This would make it easy to “add devices” to our Nostr “meta account” and therefore protect it from device/nsec loss (it also removes the need to ever export the nsec which is a big security issue)
Wdyt?

Nostr time at #fosdem with @Constant


Gm Brussels.


Gm Paris.
Love this new slow Brussels-Paris train (2h45) for only €25 🚊.
You can book last minute without it costing you a leg. And you have plenty of time to read and slow down, reflect, think. Recommend!


Be your cells
Gm Brussels.


I used to fight inequalities. It sounds great but I came to realize that it makes no sense.
Inequality is everywhere in nature.
We need to embrace nature.
We need to embrace inequality.
We are only unequal if you compare us on a single dimension (usually money). But we are multidimensional beings.
So being against inequality only makes sense in a world that has been reduced to money, incapable of seeing and acknowledging the beauty of life in all its dimensions.
So I’m not fighting inequalities anymore. I’m fighting a world that has been reduced to a single currency, a single way to contribute to gain capital.
Self discovery > self development
Gm Brussels 

Gm Brussels


Still looking for the perfect blogging platform.
Anyone interested to build that with Nostr?


Gm Brussels


Remember when we used to send SMS at midnight and they would take hours to arrive?
This is how Brussels is welcoming you after you get out of central station 😔
It’s in front of the Commons Hub so we took some buckets, trash picking sticks and we got to work.
Thank you Jeremy for your help!

