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Cycle Seven Overview
Published on November 4, 2024 by Shannon Wray
The yearly Open Collective retreat shuffled our schedules around a bit:
  • We used the two weeks before the retreat to tie up loose ends and take care of outstanding issues. 
  • We ended the retreat with a two day hackathon which gave the team an opportunity to propose pet projects and ideas that don’t easily fit into our regular development schedule. Some of these will likely make their way into production in the near future (we’ll let you know when they do). 
  • The week after the retreat was also a bit erratic and so we opted to use the week for followup work from the retreat and hackathon and for review of our priorities for the full cycle that began on September 30th (the penultimate cycle of 2024).

This cycle is aligned with two of our strategic objectives.

Our work on fiscal host efficiency continues with:
  1. Building a tool that will enable fiscal hosts to export information about their hosted collectives. This will include description and state information, overall financials, expense related statistics and contribution related statistics. 
  2. Continuing our exploration into off-platform transactions (payments that take place directly from host accounts and are therefore not represented on the platform) by enabling hosts to connect to their bank accounts in order to automatically download off-platform activities in order to more efficiently represent them on the platform.

Our work on the crowdfunding redesign campaign continues with two projects:
  1. We are upgrading the goal infrastructure. This includes fixes to the underlying data structures and API, improved (and simplified) goal setup and improved calculation of goal progress (to be based on contributions and added funds and to correctly reflect recurring goals and recurring contributions).
  2.  We are evolving the accounts-tool (that is currently part of the Crowdfunding Redesign preview feature) to make it easy to move money around between collective accounts.

We are also picking up engineering work we started early in the year with the new expense submission flow: 
  • During the first two cycles of the year we piloted a new expense submission UX. 
  • We did some internal testing which yielded mediocre results that sent us back the drawing board. Expense submission is a core and vital platform experience and we want to do our best to make it a clear and confident experience, especially for first time or irregular expense submitters who may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable around financial terminology (invoices, receipts, etc.). 
  • This has turned out to be one of the most complex UX projects we have ever tackled, but we feel confident that this time (after numerous cycles of designs and reviews) we have a good outcome (and clearly a major improvement over both the legacy expense submission flow and the new design we tested early in the year). 
  • We have therefore opted to dedicate the engineering resources to implement the new designs. 

Redesigning the expense submission flow is also aligned with both of the above mentioned strategic objectives:
  1. Expense submission is a part of the legacy public profile experience which is changing due to the crowdfunding redesign campaign. An update of the expense submission UX is therefore necessary in order to keep up with the crowdfunding redesign.
  2.  A key driver in the expense submission redesign is to reduce the number of expenses which are found to be incomplete and lead to prolonged back and forth communication with fiscal hosts which delays expense payment. We have identified some recurring issues which lead to incomplete expenses and have addressed them in the expense submission flow itself. The new UX will prompt users when these potential problems are encountered and offer ways to resolve them while submitting the expense. This should reduce the number of incomplete and delayed expenses and reduce the workload on fiscal hosts.