Idea - Gratipay Project Funds

[andychase]

(This idea may have been suggested before, it seems obvious)

What if you want to be more specific about why you are giving to someone?

Gittip users could select repositories from their github account to be added to their profile. People could choose to give to the person, or give various amounts through one or more of their projects. People could add arbitrary projects if their projects aren't on Gittip or computers in general.

It would work the same way as it does now-- the money goes all together to the person with no strings attached-- Gittip would just keep track of the different projects amounts as form of communication (i.e. I'm giving to you weekly because I like that you are doing this).

If a recipient removed a project later, the weekly amount would simply roll into that person's basic weekly amount (instead of it going away, so people aren't afraid to remove projects).

12-second basic mockup maybe to help explain it:

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[chadwhitacre]

Is this you on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7845509

[andychase]

Nope! I'm asperous on Hacker News.

Also his idea is a bit different. He wants a bucket that goes to a bunch of people, I am proposing multiple buckets for a single person.

On Wednesday, June 4, 2014, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.com wrote:

Is this you on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7845509

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2455#issuecomment-45114635 .

[chadwhitacre]

Ah, okay. Sorry. :-)

What usually happens with this is that projects will create their own account on Gittip. E.g.:

https://www.gittip.com/DrupalCoreGittipTeam/ https://www.gittip.com/readthedocs/ https://www.gittip.com/NuvolaPlayer/ https://www.gittip.com/Homebrew/

We have a feature called "Teams" where projects like this can link other Gittip accounts as members, and in that case we list the teams someone is on from their profile. From there you can give to the project.

As far as earmarking gifts to a person or even a Team for a more specific purpose, that has been suggested before (#328), but we're not going to do that because the money on Gittip is supposed to be a no-strings-attached gift. There are some less directive options such as #222 and #2011, so feel free to +1 over there if you like. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Reopening because the Software Freedom Conservancy is potentially interested in Gratipay, but as a fiscal sponsor, they manage multiple projects, and having to maintain multiple accounts for each is cumbersome.

[webmaven]

Actually, as I understand @karenesq and @bkuhn concern, it is more like account setup is the issue, each of which would need to point to sfconservancy's bank account. Account owners or members could likely handle management themselves if they are interested subsequently.

[techtonik]

project concept is too restrictive. It is better to have pools that may be or may not be tied to a project. pool has its own (transparent and verifiable) rules. Such as pay 2% of the pool per commit (BitHub), or use https://twistedmatrix.com/highscores/ metrics.

It is more flexible, because it will allow to play and implement different strategies of distribution that we currently can not set in stone. For example, a good distribution strategy is adding some resources to the pool, but only for a limited set of people that you trust. pool can also support claim schemes, where you can set the rules for the claim (such as some test passes, or LGTM from three committers). The transparency of the pool can also determine where the colored resource went (it may be traceable on pool level or on underlying resource level). This may also be used by companies to match donations - they usually don't have ability to track interactions between members of community to distribute funds in a manner won't piss off most of the people, so community "knows better". This may be even used as a mechanism to "repair damage" done to the ecosystem when some valuable member runs out of funds and is bought by a company to a work for them - when company starts to possess such artifact, it may choose to automatically pay a salary of that person back to the ecosystem filling the links that this person had to his trusted (and not so trusted) peers in the pool network.

[andychase]

@techtonik

My idea came from the roots of gratipay as gittip, that one could auto-link github projects from their account.

I conceived this idea as "no-strings-attached" bucket. As a form of communication. Perhaps "sponsor a project" was a bit too specific. Maybe "Why are you giving? " would have been better in my prototype.

I believe the original mission of graitpay is to inspire generosity through no-strings-attached recurring payments to people. Your suggestions seem rooted in some sort of trust-less world, where humans interact through rules, data, and colored resources. Your idea sounds great for some sort of auto-company model. But is the purpose of gratipay to control people?

[techtonik]

@asperous, coming from a country where coders constantly confront the lack of resources to go on (because they don't know English), I've seen many people doing desperate things just to get some money. I've seen many cases of clashes when money are introduced into voluntary process. It is a "funny" thing to observe that a thing that was invented to resolve conflicts between people, actually produces them. It is not about trust - I may trust Chad or Guido anybody else, but at the same time it doesn't prevent me from feeling bad that I can not earn as much and that is demotivating. What is the point in making points if there is no workaround against preferential attachment bug?

I agree that this isn't a role of Gratipay to resolve conflicts between people, but it could become a platform for different gameplay. no strings attached is a good start - I believe flattr already does this - when I star project on GitHub it always warns me that I don't have funds on my account. I thought that project concept still imposes some rules on how money is distributed and that's only logical - why me, as a developer, should deal with all the gory and sensitive details of distributing the compensation? Only people themselves know how much do they need, but at the same time evaluating themselves is the worst thing they can do ever.

Therefore another idea was not to provide funds to project and let people kill each other (of course, people won't do this, but some folks will just feel alienated, because they will be forgotten), but use project concept to find people who contribute to it. Sometimes you just want a donation be split 50%/50% over committers and those who just send pull requests that are got accepted. Over time you rules will become more complicated, but it is a natural evolution to make your donation less destructive to the environment.

[chadwhitacre]

This is moot with the shift to Gratipay 2.0, since we've moved away from no-strings-attached gifts to individuals in favor of payments to "Teams" (organizations) in view of specific products or services they provide.