Gittip: New, Interesting, Important | Hacker News Reader

Gittip: New, Interesting, Important

justinlilly.com

37 pointsjustinlilly18 comments

I noticed this a few weeks ago and like the idea. I hope it catches on. I think Gittip could really benefit from Bitcoin integration, since it would lower the cost of micropayments to almost nothing.

EDIT: ANd yes, to be clear, Gittip is not down -- it's hosted by github if I'm not mistaken. The actual address is: http://www.gittip.com

Bitcoin would also make gittip international. Currently payouts work only in US. This severely limits the possibilities.

For reference, here's the Bitcoin ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/14

And here's the non-US payouts ticket:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/126

(P.S. It's hosted on Heroku.)

The problem with gittip is the size of tips developers are collecting. Most developers have high-end salaries, IMO. The top people on gittip are collecting around $150/week. For these people that's probably converts to an hour or two a week of paid equivalent work. Great, so these developers can handle a couple of merge requests a week, but it doesn't actually enable them to work on something. Gittip also lacks focus, it doesn't commit a developer to work on something, it's merely a thank you, a donation. Donation-ware conversions are super low, you can't expect it to supplement anything.

I think gittip is a neat idea, but I strongly feel that it is a doomed project unless something changes radically.

> Most developers have high-end salaries, IMO.

David Glick and I are currently the top two on Gittip, and neither of us have high-end salaries right now:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/27072581481/i-believe-in-gittip

http://glicksoftware.com/blog/goodbye-groundwire

#3 is Eric Holscher, and he's specifically using his gittips to host ReadTheDocs.org:

http://ericholscher.com/blog/2012/sep/20/help-fund-read-docs...

#5, Alex Gaynor, has a high-end salary (I'm assuming). So far it sounds like he's planning to use his gittips to attend an extra conference or two this year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4438937

#7, Mike Bayer, has also said that his gittips are covering his infrastructure costs, for SQLAlchemy:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/10a32v/gittip_is_the...

> Gittip also lacks focus, it doesn't commit a developer to work on something, it's merely a thank you, a donation.

Not sure where you're coming from on this. It sounds like you're talking about the focus and drive of someone receiving money on Gittip. The idea is that people worth giving money to on Gittip are people with a history of productive self-motivation, people that don't depend on coercive economic relationships to stay focused.

Honestly, for me, there's nothing more humbling and motiving to get me out of bed in the morning than knowing that 100+ people believe in me enough to freely give me $1+ this week. That keeps me way more focused than a corporate salary ever did.

> Donation-ware conversions are super low, you can't expect it to supplement anything.

The numbers speak for themselves: Eric is at 125% of his goal, after about 48 hours of floating the idea of Gittip support with his userbase.

The article talks about the focus issue as well, with the "What do they want from me?" question. I think that's partly missing the point of Gittip, as is your first point. All of these people have been contributing to open source long before Gittip came along, and would continue contributing even without it. Now they potentially get something a little extra for that, no obligations, no nothing. As I perceive it, it's not outright meant to be a platform that makes you quit your job and go open source full time (though Chad's goal is exactly that). It's just showing open source contributors that their work is noticed and appreciated. Full time salaries might happen for a certain percentage if/when the service grows, but I don't see that being a necessary element of the service.

I see other issues with it, but they're all part of a new developing platform. Biggest one is the payments/receiving payments issue for anyone outside of the US, but I think Chad is aware of this as much as anyone.

Another one is psychology of the thing. Seems like a lot of people receiving money from it experience this awkward response, as if it's somehow wrong to get money for their open source contributions. I don't know if they undervalue their work so much, but I hope they realise these rewards are to be proud of, and that they in no way signify any obligations, but just appreciation of their work.

Last, an issue that's becoming more evident as the service grows, is a need for a more structured list of people on the platform and their received donations. I'd love if there was a possibility of browsing through a subset of developers, for example Ruby or Android developers, maybe by letting users fill out an additional field in the sign-up process. The effect of this could be positive from multiple perspectives. The person donating can focus on donating in the field they're interested in, and as a bonus, it would be a great discovery platform for open source projects inside that specific field. As far as people have commented, it's mostly the Python community now, but maybe grouping specific communities would also have the effect of it being more interesting to other communities aside from Python (edited from Django), and some people would just visit gittip.com/Ruby every day.

In general, I love the idea and I hope it continues to grow. Good luck Chad!

Okay, your second-to-last paragraph sent me down a rabbit hole, from which I've emerged with this:

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

The idea of associating individuals with groups (aka communities, projects, etc.) is one of the trickiest aspects of Gittip. I feel one step closer to finding a solution that handles the complexity appropriately. Thank you! :^)

(A side note: the givers leaderboard is basically ad real estate available to companies. We've already got one company, workforpie, using the global givers leaderboard as such. IMO this is totally within the spirit of Gittip because their gifts still have no strings attached and are anonymous to the individuals receiving them. Having different giving leaderboards for separate communities would create more and better-targeted ad space for companies, increasing cash into the system.)

Just my two cents here, maybe it's worth thinking of offering a more loose relation to specific fields for gittip users instead of projects/corporations, which isn't related to being compensated for being in that field. Something like the tag system on Stack Overflow, for example. Considering the broad scope you mention the platform could have in the future, it could look like this: upon sign-up, a musician adds tags to his profile, #music and #acoustic, a programmer adds #programming, #python and #opensource. That way you let your users build your categories, and your users get a nice filter for their interests, and as you mention in the side note, companies can get ad space by donating in the fields they care about.

(I decided to give feedback here, since the issue is more about projects than communities, and I don't want to mess up the issue content.)

Edit: I forgot to address the issue of people tagging themselves with a specific project. Maybe it's me, but gittip seems to be oriented around people, which is why I find the projects aspect confusing. I think a much simpler solution is currently in place (and maybe should be encouraged for this case in the future), where companies/teams/projects can sign up with a single account, and people can decide to donate to that account, and the companies/teams/projects solve the money split internally. I know you've done a lot of thinking on the projects aspect, and there's been a lively debate on the issue, but personally, it seems as it adds a lot of complexity to the system, with relatively little benefit.

Great thinking.

Let's use the following ticket for tags / communities:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/94#issuecom...

I posted your edit to the projects / corporations ticket:

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

Gittip is pretty young. If it takes off, these numbers could easily change by an order of magnitude. I hope they do.

Also, I am a high school teacher who does a bit of programming on the side. I have a couple open source ed projects I've been wanting to do, and the Gittip model might be interesting to try. I see Gittip serving people who make good things happen in any field, not just in tech fields.

It's a pretty safe bet that the money is related to django as the last time i looked nearly all of the activity on gittip was django related.

And if you're going to define "open company" I think I'd shoot a little higher than open source project + authorized_keys

> [T]he last time i looked nearly all of the activity on gittip was django related.

Quick rundown of the top ten, username - known for:

whit537 - gittip

davisagli - plone (python)

readthedocs - readthedocs (python-centric)

jnoller - psf (python)

alex - pypy (python)

mitsuhiko - flask, etc. (python)

zzzeek - sqlalchemy (python)

steveklabnik - ruby

kennethreitz - requests, etc. (python)

antirez - redis

You could argue it's python-heavy, but not django-heavy. And besides, who cares? You gotta start somewhere. If you're plugged into different communities, then go spread the word.

> And if you're going to define "open company" I think I'd shoot a little higher than open source project + authorized_keys

Please do. :^)

FWIW I also do work on Django :)

Oops. Too late to edit. :^)

Gittip is one of the most interesting charity concepts I've seen these past few weeks.

LOL... Gittip.org is down, the URL you have in your post should be "gittip.com".

I scrambled and wired up DNS for gittip.org, but not soon enough apparently, sorry. :^/

Oh well, ready for next time. :^)

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