It's Monday morning, you've just spent the entire weekend at FOSDEM in Belgium, and now the Eurostar departures lounge is filled with a disproportionate amount of people wearing hoodies and using laptops covered in stickers .... it must be the SOOCon Eurostar back to London!

A free conference, with 885 talks comprising of 365 hours of content over two days all of which are live streamed, recorded and made available within days, entirely organised by volunteers and with over 8,000 attendees - sounds impossible, right?

Ever felt like you're at the foot of Everest when you decide to create a huge project or a long-term collaboration for an Open Source project? Tell me about it! But here's some good news - I'm going to share the tips we discovered going through just such a project with Mautic, an open source marketing automation platform.

Like many Brits, English is the only language I speak fluently. I speak schoolgirl French, a bit of Welsh and a few words in German and Dutch.  I'm eternally grateful that many people I interact with from around the world are able to speak English at a basic level, and that when I speak at conferences and events, I do so in my first language. But, for so many, that's not the case. 

Often as an Open Source project grows there becomes a need to allocate funding resources to specific projects, teams or initiatives. It can be challenging to do this in an open and transparent way, effectively ring fencing the funds for specific purposes.

Here’s how we achieved this with Open Collective, some of the gotchas we encountered, and how it’s working out for us.

On GivingTuesday, the Mautic project—an open source marketing automation platform—shared its intention to allocate part of its budget each year to financially support the other open source projects on which it depends, as part of the Back Your Stack initiative.