Why We're Supporting Gittip | Hacker News Reader

Why We're Supporting Gittip

workforpie.posterous.com

disclaimer: I say this having my own somewhat "competing" site in the oss crowdfunding area, though it is new and frankly unused. I'll give out the link if anyone is interested, but it seems poor form to do so directly in this comment.

I like the gist of gittip: giving hackers a way to write open source code while still making a living. That is ideal to me, and crowdfunding works for oss because oss has a return on investment for everyone.

I just have a hard time seeing how gittip will break an initial interest plateau. Traditional crowdfunding has worked for a few projects because there is an exact "you are getting this output for this input". With gittip it is much less obvious. I can donate an amount each week to a person, but there's nothing attached as to how that should be used for either side. The giver might expect a certain result, but the recipient doesn't know what that is or why they are receiving it.

Not to mention there is the issue where of what if a receiver wants to take a month off? The people who are giving do so because they expect something in return, and either the receiver is tied to that nebulous expectation of production, or they can take a break and risk losing whatever funding they received before and the resulting need to build that up again.

I just don't see how that can scale beyond a small, very interested audience. I feel we need the hard goals which say "if you give me this, I'll give you this". These goals give more concrete deadlines and expectations and probably are more likely to drive results.

But hey, anything in this area is encouraging and it will be interesting to see where gittip goes.

I think the tippers should get 1 vote per dollar or something. Contributors can vote on TODO lists. This lets the developer get feedback on what the community needs. The developer can do whatever he fancies. But the votes will reduce the communication gap between the developers and the donors.

Prioritizing development tasks has not been a pain point so far with Gittip. I get plenty of feedback here on HN and on Twitter and GitHub and otherwise, and the fact that feedback is not directly tied to dollars has not been an issue.

I think gittip fills an interesting niche. Rather than supporting a particular project, gittip allows me to support a particular developer.

By contributing to gittip, I am saying I trust that developer to manage their time appropriately. I don't expect a specific amount of work every week; I expect a professional, long-term commitment to the project.

Notice that you conflate developer and project as well. You want to support "a particular developer", but you expect commitment to "the project".

So is the donation with regards to the developer or a particular project? The developer doesn't get the donation with any regards to whether it is aimed at them or the project. Is the developer free to work on a different project? Does the person who donates even know? It just seems like it can lead to disappointment and frustration.

I believe I've seen some developers outright reject no-strings attached donations for this reason. What is expected of them? Should they feel beholden to those who give, and even if they shouldn't does psychology inevitably lead to that?

That's why I feel like it has to be hard goals. This is expected for this, and not a donation which has too many unintended consequences.

I don't mean to be overly argumentative.

The relationship between individuals and projects is a huge open question for Gittip. Here's the current state of my thinking (long thread preceding):

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27#issuecom...

Hard goals to me implies management, and I for one don't want to be a manager. ;^)

I think of it as a mix of supporting a developer, and a project. There is a lot of trust in gittip, and that is a good thing. If I ever grow dissatisfied with the developer I am supporting, I can withdraw my support, with no hard feelings.

I get some of these issues. I ran a middle school chess team for about five years. Sometimes I was paid, sometimes it was volunteer. There are different freedoms and pressures in each model. I think there is definitely a place for gittip in the OSS world.

fwiw I tend to look at it as a "thank you" and a no-strings "keep up the good work." Same way an actual tip works. That's clearly not the way everyone looks at it though.

Still, donating to an individual for their contributions, rather than to a project with the implied nudge that comes with a donation like that is, imo, the best approach.

"The people who are giving do so because they expect something in return."

I believe they don't. Gift tips have no strings attached on either side. It's like employment at will, where either party is free to call it off at any time.

"[E]ither the receiver is tied to that nebulous expectation of production, or they can take a break and risk losing whatever funding they received before and the resulting need to build that up again."

I think it's a matter of telling your story openly and transparently. If people see me working productively for a year and then I blog about how I'm burned out and plan to take a break for a month, I would expect my funders to understand and not totally bail on me. I mean, I could set up visits around the country and have a nice vacation and still keep the story rolling. If I'm finding my living on Gittip I have to have a relationship with my anonymous funders and trust them. The Internet lets us have a relationship with the anonymous crowd.

Gittip wants to make it easier for receivers to tell their story. See:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/133

This is really WFP's thread, but I'm interested in seeing your site.

I believe you when you and others say they don't expect specific results and no-strings attached, I just feel like it is human nature that when we give something of value, particularly money, we expect something in return. That's because money is inherently tied up into the idea that you get something of value for it. I'm not sure you can really break that. Perhaps it is a non-issue in practice.

The site is http://www.kodefund.com. It is somewhat of a Kickstarter only for open source projects, and you can also do a "reverse" project which helps you to get both funding and someone else to work on your idea, whether a library or bug fix or whatever. I've tried to further distill some of the ideas here: http://www.kodefund.com/about/. I agree that it is someone else's thread, so that is the last time I'll link it here.

I do like your open dev model. It is interesting to see problems so quickly turn into issues that anyone can work on.

(I'm getting a DNS error?)

Strange.

I've had users sign-up, I've had someone say it works on the Google DNS, but you aren't the first with DNS errors. I'm hosting it on gandi's DNS, I wonder what I'm not doing right.

I think this is because an A record query for www.kodefund.com returns multiple CNAME records, which is not compliant with the DNS specification:

    mrowe@vega:~$ dig A www.kodefund.com @a.dns.gandi.net
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> A www.kodefund.com @a.dns.gandi.net
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 53562
    ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
    ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;www.kodefund.com.		IN	A
    
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    www.kodefund.com.	10800	IN	CNAME	intense-ocean-3642.herokuapp.com.
    www.kodefund.com.	10800	IN	CNAME	mie-9107.herokussl.com.
    
    ;; Query time: 125 msec
    ;; SERVER: 173.246.97.2#53(173.246.97.2)
    ;; WHEN: Sun Jul 29 16:47:59 2012
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 110

If I perform the same query via my system resolver rather than directly against the gandi.net DNS servers then I simply receive no result:

    mrowe@vega:~$ dig A www.kodefund.com
    
    ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> A www.kodefund.com
    ;; global options: +cmd
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 36608
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
    
    ;; QUESTION SECTION:
    ;www.kodefund.com.		IN	A
    
    ;; Query time: 1306 msec
    ;; SERVER: 192.168.1.254#53(192.168.1.254)
    ;; WHEN: Sun Jul 29 16:48:58 2012
    ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 34

This is presumably because one of the intermediate resolver is being strict about the presence of multiple CNAMEs in the result.

I'm pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. For the time being I would probably discontinue my contribution if one of the developers I am tipping decides to do something I don't approve of (say, join Oracle). However, that's not my ideal long-term situation:

Ideally, I would, over time, decide for myself that I actually put total trust into people I support, that I trust them to do the right thing and continue to do so. To continue to make the right decisions, even if I may not understand their every reasons, even if I am actually opposed to a particular move.

Basically, I want to help „setting them free“. This concept exists for entrepreneurs in the form of „FU money“ but I would like see something like that to happen elsewhere, be it OSS developers, political activists or philosophers, caring mothers or fathers, teachers, artists, or musicians. I think crowd-founding makes possible which I could never achieve from the income I generate alone.

So eventually I'd like to decide (in some cases) to make my commitment irrevocable, if that would be by contract alone or by putting 500 weeks of tips into a safe fund, I don't know but I think independent of whether gittip is going to have a feature like that eventually I think this is an important step into the right direction, namely not expecting anything in return for the absolute trust I give out :-)

(I really like the idea of fully generalized reciprocity, i.e. all give not because they receive something in return but because they know enough people are giving, too. I'm not naive enough to think everybody will take part in such a scheme but I think these OSS developers show how much impact even freeing some of them could make).

(I absolutely agree on your other post, many will be suspecious of and reject no-strings-attached donations, I have no problems with that at all)

Hey. Quick tip: I knew what gittip was in the first sentence. But what is Work for Pie? There's no mention of that on the blog so I clicked the link. It sounds a lot like github but you can sign in with github? Pretty confused.

Ha! Good point. Wanted to take the emphasis off of us for a bit, but I understand the confusion.

Work for Pie is a community for software developers--and especially for developers who contribute to open source software. Joining gets you two things: a portfolio, and a score. Portfolio puts the emphasis on open source work, and score is based on meaningful participation in dev-centric communities (right now Github, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, and Hacker News with more coming).

In the future we'll be doing a couple things:

1) Making it easier for developers to connect with like-minded individuals

2) Making it easier for developers to discover great companies without the pressure that comes from working with outside recruiters or the frustration that comes from searching the job boards. We'll be sure to do a Show HN what that stuff is ready.

Thanks for asking! Feedback is welcome and encouraged cliff (at) workforpie.com

I just don't see how anyone is going to get a sustainable, recurring income out of Gittip. But give it a shot I guess.

That's another issue I see with the project. Since these are recurring donations, you can never really count on them. I suppose you can't "count" on keeping a job either, but if you are expecting $60,000 a year to keep your lifestyle up and someone drops out donating for whatever reason, you are in trouble. You can't depend on it the way you would job or an up-front donation.

I'm sounding too critical. I really do like what is being attempted here, there just are hard barriers.

gittip has an upper limit on the number of tips from any one source to any one person, specifically to avoid the issue you mention. Reaching $60000/year in tips would require at least 50 very generous tippers, or more likely several hundred modest tippers; thus, a few people dropping out would not have such a drastic impact.

Not too critical and there is a world of difference between hope Joe Benefactor keeps shelling out his $100 a week (and then depending on 20 of them) and having pay check like the rest of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com