Fiscal host, Topo drawing and more
Our wonderful fiscal host, the Open Collective Foundation, has made the difficult decision to cease operations by the end of 2024 (read the official statement). Under its wings, the foundation hosts 598 member projects, enabling initiatives like OpenBeta to attain 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status and receive online donations. As a fiscal host, the foundation also relieves its members of accounting and red tape duties mandated by US laws. It has been a pleasure working with the great people at the foundation, and we wish them the best in their future endeavors.
March 15, 2024 is the cutoff date:
This is the last day we can receive funds/financial contributions.
Recurring donations will be paused on this day.
We are evaluating alternatives and will keep you updated in the upcoming days.
Work in progress
Our volunteers are actively working on two major features:
Bulk Climb Import: This feature enables users to bulk upload climbs into our database.
Topo Drawing: We’re building a free and open source topo editing tool.
What’s new on OpenBeta.io
Introducing a new and improved crag map available at openbeta.io/maps. Traditionally, hosting a large-scale map server has been prohibitively expensive. Thanks to recent innovations in the digital mapping space, we can now host our own map tiles at a significantly lower cost compared to commercial providers.
Volunteer Spotlight
A big thank you to Iacami Gevaerd from Brazil for his invaluable behind-the-scenes infrastructure improvement work (we'll get into the technical details in a separate future blog post). In short, our monthly bill for media hosting has now decreased to an average of $16, compared to the previous $50/month.
Have an idea or a suggestion to share? Join our Discord chat server.