Weather Vanes

Open Collective is shared infrastructure for the solidarity economy — an open-source, community-led platform providing technology, administration, and access to nonprofit status for some 15,000 grassroots groups across 30 countries. As the platform grows, so does the picture it holds of what movements are actually doing on the ground — a picture Open Collective, in conversation with Arising Quo, came to call a 'weather vane'.

This piece of work set out to explore what that weather vane could become. Most platform data tells you what is happening, and where. We wanted to know whether it could also become anticipatory: helping movements sense what is emerging, and helping resource holders move money in a more dynamic, less reactive way. Could a record of activity become a piece of foresight infrastructure?

Looking back, two things became clear. The data already reveals a great deal — clusters of activity, fast-emerging issues, projects gathering sustained support — much of which Open Collective's research team can surface visually. But the data is only ever as anticipatory as the questions put to it. It is, in essence, a record of what people do rather than who they are, which means its deeper value lies in what those patterns are a proxy for: where energy is rising, which efforts are quietly durable, which people are becoming the nodes a movement organises around.

That insight reframed the work. The live question was no longer "what can the data show?" but "which questions are worth asking?" A weather vane reads the wind from four directions — and naming those directions, deciding who should help define them, and asking how this intelligence might move wealth holders toward more anticipatory giving, is where a next phase would have begun.

We didn't get to carry the work into that next iteration, so it sits unfinished rather than fully realised. But one of Arising Quo's roles was to illuminate opportunities — to point at something promising and show what might be possible there — and illuminating an opportunity isn't always about completing it. The questions it opened still feel worth sharing, alongside the materials developed along the way. These were public works in progress, and some may no longer be live: an overview of Open Collective's work, the discovery and horizons thread, an early dashboard sketch, a draft funder dashboard, notes on peer learning, and some films and storytelling.