First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket
http://building.gittip.com/big-picture/mission
Well, that made it more confusing, so I click process at the bottom of the above page.
Now it sounds like it's a giant pool of money, anyone can volunteer for anything, and take some of that money. So, I can say I want to keep the elderly company and go play scrabble with them in the evenings, and take $10/hr from Gittip for my time? So, I visit the site directly to see if this is accurate...
Apparently not. Ok, now I'm suppose to enter a Twitter username? This is to donate money to Twitter users? Still confused, so I click a random profile of someone receiving money. It starts to make more sense, so these are just people marketing themselves, and asking for weekly donations. The about page confirms this...
Far too much work to figure out what's happening here. I still have no idea what I can donate money towards. I mean, how do I browse causes? If I want to support musicians, or people cleaning up garbage on their beaches, where do I go? I can't find any type of listings, or categories here. Is this just for programmers? I need to know their Twitter/Github username, or randomly click profiles on the site?
I give up, I've spent 20 minutes reading, and browsing this site, and my only conclusion is that it's a place to sponsor your favorite programmers, by giving them a weekly donation. I've been programming and freelancing for over a decade, and I can't think of anyone by name that I'd donate towards. This site gives me zero help in finding people to donate towards, aside from aimlessly browsing hundreds of profiles, hoping for someone to catch my attention. I don't have that kind of time.
This entire thing is too frustrating. I don't have a Twitter, GitHub, Bitbucket, or OSM account, so they won't even let me sign-up anyway. However, they say, 'Gittip's audience is everyone; it's intended to be a mass-market consumer product.'
Browsing the above, it looks like they spent way too much effort on over-analyzing everything. They have widgets, an API, browser extensions, but they're missing the most important thing, I working business model. It seems like the result of too many engineers and programmers in a room, while no one is spending a minute thinking about marketing, sales, or the user experience.
The GP doesn't understand what gittip is for, what the overall direction is supposed to be or could be, and so can't reasonably submit a pull request to fix that confusion.
I've ticketed "Building Gittip is confusing as a first impression"
"revamp homepage" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1074
"sign up with email" https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1052
We're working on bringing disciplines besides programming into the mix. The challenge for us is that we run everything open source, which is a cross-cultural experience for most marketers, sales people, and product designers. I talk about this in the post.
If you are or know any folks with relevant skills that want to try out open source, by all means send them our way! :-)
It's great that people use gittip for that, but I also think the barrier to understanding gittip is easier for people who support feminist causes than for most other demographics.
I've tried using gittip as a single-donation tip jar for people who fixed or forked broken repos, but having to use the subscription-like format makes that too much of a hassle in most cases, unfortunately.
I assume it's for tax or regulation reasons that this option is not available? It'd have been great to use in my GitHub issues, if someone helps me out with a problem there.
We currently have an "Other Ways to Give" on your profile where you can link a bitcoin address or Venmo account. That's an outlet for one-offs. We may mix in first-class one-offs eventually but we're not in a rush. See https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5.