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Open Collective

The design system behind a fork of Open Collective, and pages built on it. Published so it can be opened on a real device and reviewed by people and models who are not on the machine running the fork.

The premise changed on 9 August 2026. Four pages here argue for a product that was abandoned.

Collectives were going to be private, so Open Collective could show a stranger nothing and the whole donor experience had to be built as a separate app of ours. That was priced at roughly eleven extra things to build, and the Builder chose public collectives instead. The helper app went with it.

Open Collective now does the giving page, her account, emailed sign-in, her history across organisations, receipts and updates — all verified on the running fork. Razorpay is merged into its own contribution flow. Everything is in rupees. What is left to build is configuration, a few lines in one receipt template, and an export preset.

Nothing has been deleted. Each affected page carries a red block at the top saying what changed and what of it survives. Start with the shaping document, which has been rewritten against the new facts.

Read this before reporting anything.

These are static HTML pages. Nothing is wired up — no data, no clicks that go anywhere (the module picker is the one exception: its checkboxes work, but nothing is saved and reloading resets them), no dark mode, no icons (the product uses Lucide throughout and none are embedded here).

The design tokens are not approximations. Every colour, radius and type size is copied from the platform's own stylesheet, and the Inter font files are the ones it self-hosts. Where a page departs from upstream, it says so on the page.

Start here

The shaping document Rewritten — leads everything What this is for, three storyboards, what is actually left to build, and the four decisions still open. Rewritten on 9 August against public collectives; it says at the top what changed and why, because two earlier versions have been read. The people in the storyboards are invented, and the page says so.

What a donor actually meets

All three are Open Collective's own pages. This is the whole donor experience now — there is no app of ours in front of it.

Collective profile Public — the front door Who runs it, what it is for, what money came in and went out, and how to give. Since collectives went public this is the page a stranger opens from a forwarded link, and the page that carries the burden of being believable. Modelled on the running fork's BrusselsTogether page. Contribute in rupees The one sanctioned exception The contribution flow with UPI first and the fee shown without being charged. Drawn as a proposal when Open Collective had no Indian payment method; the Razorpay provider is now merged into the platform, and this is the only code written into somebody else's codebase. The Razorpay row on the payment step Patch spec On the one screen where money changes hands, Razorpay is drawn as a bank — directly above a row called Bank transfer. What the row should say and show instead, with the exact change, and why the Razorpay logo is not the answer. Admin dashboard What Devi sees on signing in — balance, money in and out against the previous period, and what is waiting for a decision. One login now, not two, which is the single biggest thing the reversal fixed.

The design system

Design system Colours, type, buttons, badges, form controls, shape, and the ledger row. Every other page reads from the same tokens.css.

Superseded — kept so the change is visible

These were drawn for the private-collectives model and the helper app that model required. Neither exists now. Nothing has been deleted — each page carries a red block at the top saying what changed, what of it survives and where that goes. The reasoning in them is mostly intact; it is now a specification for configuring Open Collective rather than a thing to build.

The giving page Now a configuration spec Built because a private collective serves a stranger nothing. Open Collective's own flow does this job now. The words, the amounts, the UPI-first ordering and the refusal of foreign money all survive as settings and tier copy — four of its decisions reversed outright and are marked. The return moment Now an update template The bill above the gifts that paid it. Nearly all of it can be authored inside an Open Collective update; what cannot survive is the word "your". That loss is named on the page and it is the one thing genuinely given up by deleting the helper app. The update email Now content and tone Open Collective sends this itself. We own the body and the subject line; the wrapper is theirs. The rule it exists to protect — nothing personal in anything designed to travel — survives, but is now enforced by somebody else's template and has not been checked. What this is called Unsettled Recommends "raseed". The address is now doable.aikyam.fund and nobody has said which is the product's name — or whether anything a donor sees needs a name at all. The tension is laid out on the page and deliberately not resolved. The voice rules survive whichever way it goes. The module picker Selection overturned Twenty modules and the problem each removes. Its 19-of-20 selection was overturned when the model turned out not to be fiscal hosting. The method and the descriptions still hold; the selection does not.

Known gaps in this set

How to change it

Do not edit the copy you are reading. This folder is published output and gets overwritten. The source is ~/opencollective/design-system/ on the machine running the fork; changes are made there and republished.