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gratipay / gratipay.com

Here lieth a pioneer in open source sustainability. RIP
https://gratipay.news/the-end-cbfba8f50981
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Champion Service #2621

Closed balupton closed 8 years ago

balupton commented 9 years ago

As an extension to https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1273

I'm sick and tired of Gittip not actually being sustainable for 99.9% of its users. This needs work.

I've got an idea around this called Championing. It's a 3rd party service built on top of gittip where people/communities register, specify their gittip username, and how much they need a week (e.g. $1500), then it sets up a page for them. Companies then view that page, and enter their gittip api key, and start donating $100/week. They are now champions.

Champions are then listed in everything that the person/community does for the weeks they are champions — project READMEs, talks, etc. This is largely automated through the service provided APIs that can be quiried with the right tokens, and can use bevry/projectz to keep their readmes up to date. If a champions gittip donation changes or fails, they are no longer a champion, the service will autodetect this and email them in case it was a mistake with instructions on how to fix this.

There are only enough champions that are needed to bring in the needed amount. E.g. If a person/community specifies $1500/week, then that means they get 15 champions. This provides a really interesting dynamic, especially when coupled with the technical restrain here of Gittip's $100/week limit. It has exclusivity, which promotes urgency, and a tangible target that needs to be accomplished. Everyone know where they stand, and it is clear cut. If there is less than the needed amount of champions, then that is actually a seriously urgent situation, that luckily can be addressed fluidly and with enough financial leeway that the money from the existing champions can support the person/community in the meantime until they fill that spot. If there is all the available slots are filled, then they wannabe champions can signup on a waiting list instead. Champions are displayed in order of how much they have donated over time.

Champions will be able to see all the contributions that have financially supported, including talks, etc. It's about generosity giving, but businesses need tangible output to identify it was worth giving, having tangible output of what they sponsored exactly accomplishes this, without compromising values.

Several pointers are pointing towards this being a good idea. Years ago, I actually pitched this to Chad as an alternative service to Gittip, and he convinced me of the values of Gittip, which can be seen as evident in the above.

I'll be exploring this idea for Bevry, however if others are interested in this, let me know and we can work together to help make it easier for others to use it.

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

balupton commented 9 years ago

Depends on https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1199 — however, we may be able to provide this via our own layer maybe.... would be good if gittip implemented it though.

chadwhitacre commented 9 years ago

@balupton Good news for you! We've upped the limit that companies can give other companies to $1,000/wk (#1378). We're talking about doing something similar for companies giving to individuals (#2570). We're also talking seriously about allowing non-anonymous giving between companies (#236), with an API for receiving amounts. I believe with those pieces in place we'd be on the way to something like you propose here, yes? Also, does this overlap with the idea of a "community ad network" (#1513)?

balupton commented 9 years ago

@whit537 cool, will read up

Naatan commented 9 years ago

I think with "Champions" you are adding layers of complexity that will cost you potential sponsorships. Why not just call it what it is - sponsorships (or funders).

It would be nice if you could create some type of sponsorship page which different sponsorship levels and what they get in return. When you say "you will be mentioned on website x on page x" be sure to also say what type of traffic this page is receiving, as this is what companies will care about most - how much exposure they will get.

Maybe you could even tempt individuals to contribute by offering eg. support time for certain funding brackets. eg. when I give you 20 bucks a week I get 30 minutes of your time to work on a docpad bug, which would end up helping others as well as the bug will generally not be specific to that one user.

I think there is a lot you can do but you need to work on insentive; right now there isn't much reason for anyone to contribute except from the goodness of their hearts, and if it comes down to that then stuff like sick puppy charities and the like will probably win over your cause.

chadwhitacre commented 9 years ago

Tit for tat would go against the Gittip grain. We are about no-strings-attached funding. That said, I believe we do need to explore sponsorship and/or membership models. That's something we're exploring for OCI (cf. https://github.com/opencompany/www.opencompany.org/issues/93). You should also check out https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/pull/2629. It's a long thread but I believe it's the future of Gittip. tl;dr Let's figure out how to price to value for pay-what-you-want (voluntary payment) open businesses.

webmaven commented 9 years ago

We've upped the limit that companies can give other companies to $1,000/wk (#1378). We're talking about doing something similar for companies giving to individuals (#2570). We're also talking seriously about allowing non-anonymous giving between companies (#236), with an API for receiving amounts.

@whit537 Does 'companies' (on either or both sides) include or exclude nonprofits?

chadwhitacre commented 9 years ago

@webmaven No, technically we look at the participants.number field.

chadwhitacre commented 9 years ago

@webmaven Sorry, didn't answer your question. 'Companies' includes nonprofits. :-)

webmaven commented 9 years ago

Perhaps 'Organization' would be a better term than 'Company', then.

Do you know if any 'umbrella' non-profits (eg. SF Conservancy) or larger funding nonprofits (eg. Knight Foundation) have looked at Gittip as a means of accepting donations or disbursement to recipients, whether individuals or groups?

chadwhitacre commented 9 years ago

@webmaven I haven't had any conversations with either of those groups, but I'd love to work with them. Want to lead those conversations? :-)

chadwhitacre commented 8 years ago

It's a 3rd party service built on top of gittip This is largely automated through the service provided APIs

What are the APIs Gratipay would need to provide to enable this?

balupton commented 8 years ago

I've started working on such a thing over at https://github.com/bevry/sponsored

The thing needed for gratipay is https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/236

So far, only the following part is planned for it:

Champions are then listed in everything that the person/community does for the weeks they are champions — project READMEs, talks, etc. This is largely automated through the service provided APIs that can be quiried with the right tokens, and can use bevry/projectz to keep their readmes up to date. If a champions gittip donation changes or fails, they are no longer a champion, the service will autodetect this and email them in case it was a mistake with instructions on how to fix this.

chadwhitacre commented 8 years ago

I've started working on such a thing over at https://github.com/bevry/spnsored

I think the correct link is https://github.com/bevry/sponsored, ya?

The thing needed for gratipay is #236

Okay, cool. I've copied your comments over to #236. Closing here ...