Glossary

A quick guide to the acronym's and terminology we use

Open Collective have produced an excellent guide to the terms used on the platform and you can find that here. We recommend taking a quick look before your onboarding call to get a sense of what the terminology is. Here are a few other phrases or terms you might hear our team using or find in this guide.

Admin

When we talk about your admins we mean what Open Collective call "collective admins". This is the two (or more) people who run your OC page, approve and reject expenses and act as our contact points with your group. This can be anyone from your group, and we don't take a position on how you organise or what other responsibility these people have. They can be a group leader or coordinator, a treasurer or just a member of the community who is willing to look at the page. We'll always refer to them as "admins" and ask that you have at least two of them added before we approve your page.

Expense

We generally refer to any payment made from your page as an expense. We know that many collectives are actually making small solidarity payments or grants rather than just reimbursing volunteers for their expenses. We use the word "expense" as a catch-all term for payments you make from your page as that's the language Open Collective uses.

Collective

It is Open Collective’s name for any group who is being hosted on their platform. Groups can be very small, or very large. To secure a Fiscal Host, they will need to meet that hosts' terms and will undergo a simple verification process.