allow for one-off tips

[chadwhitacre]

The essence of Gittip is recurring tips, but once we solidify that I'm open to mixing in one-offs.

The reason recurring tips are important is because my mortgage is recurring and Gittip is about paying my mortgage.

There is a $80 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.

[danostrowski]

"The concern with one-time gifts is that they would cause week to week gift totals to vary too wildly."

People can drop their contributions whenever they like, though. Gittip is not an employer, you have no contract with the people paying you through it. A one-time gift distributed over a time period is no less reliable than a subscription that can be cancelled at any time.

[wilkie]

I'll add a -1 for myself. That sounds like a payment, and doesn't feel right as to the spirit of the site. I'd rather be encouraged and encourage others for ongoing work based on their current work, not just give them a one-off kudos for something they just did.

[nicksergeant]

But Gittip is about "Inspiring Generosity". Just because right now it only allows weekly gifts, doesn't mean that's how it should be. There are an awful lot of +1's in this thread, myself being one of them.

Honestly there are a handful of times per month that I want to quickly throw someone some cash for something they've done (or in exchange for doing something small for me), but I can't. So I say "I'll give you an extra $3/week" but that isn't very motivating if my intention is to offer a reward for doing something that benefits me.

So what do I do now? I PayPal them... and that sucks :(

[fractastical]

Frankly, I think the weekly model is poor and needs improvement in some way, but I'm not sure one off donations is the best way.

For me the ideal situation as something like this: I assign a monthly budget for contribution to projects I find helpful (i.e. $100). Every month as I work I have the option to give Github projects I am using points (ideally through a chrome extension that provides a nice overlay). Every time I assign a point, I can chose whether it is simply for this month, or regularly every month. These points are aggregated, and at the end of the month my allocated budget is divided by the number of points I have assigned.

Example: 10 points assigned over the month, 1 point to 8 projects, 2 points for gittip => $10 for those 8 projects each, $20 for gittip.

This would ideally also accomodate organizations (i.e. companies) that have money to support ecosystems around their products.

[wilkie]

Cool. I disagree. I think you should give them an extra $3/week. That's an awesome reward for something that benefits you. :) I'm think that if you give people the choice to not give reoccurring payments, they might not do so. It would be interesting to see, and if this is implemented and people generally contribute this way, I feel like it should be removed.

I feel like one-off payments is something a different service can provide (for instance, place your venmo info on your profile,) and gittip should promote ongoing support for ongoing work.

[nicksergeant]

So if I have one person do a few things for me @ $3/week, I'm now giving them almost $40/month? I'd way rather shoot them $100 every once in a while and not worry about it after that.

Obviously just my opinion. I would use Gittip far more if it allowed one-off tipping.

[nicksergeant]

Also if someone asks me to whip them up something quick for $3/week vs. $100 up-front, I'm going to take the $100 every time...

[wilkie]

Also if someone asks me to whip them up something quick for $3/week vs. $100 up-front, I'm going to take the $100 every time...

Heh. That's exactly what I don't want people to generally do. :) The objective of mutual communal support will only occur if the majority of people do recurring payments. Maybe it can be done in a way that doesn't interfere with that spirit, but if the dynamic of the site changes, then this particular goal will not be met.

[nicksergeant]

Really? I mean, I'm still supporting these people with one-off tips, right?

[bruceadams]

Count me for -1 on this issue.

Throwing one time gifts for specific actions starts to sound too much fee-for-service. There are many, many ways to handle fee-for-service today. I'd rather not get Gittip confused with those payment mechanisms. At its best, Gittip is ongoing support for someone being awesome. I'd like us to claim that as our niche.

Being awesome is not a one time thing.

[whitmo]

was mulling this a bit more. What if a one time gift was paid out over a series of payouts?

ie. I give a "tip" of $500 to a person, but they receive it in installments of $24 until the tip is exhausted (roughy 20 weeks in this case).

-w

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Bruce Adams notifications@github.comwrote:

Count me for -1 on this issue.

Throwing one time gifts for specific actions starts to sound too much fee-for-service. There are many, many ways to handle fee-for-service today. I'd rather not get Gittip confused with those payment mechanisms. At its best, Gittip is ongoing support for someone being awesome. I'd like us to claim that as our niche.

Being awesome is not a one time thing.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5#issuecomment-14938849 .

<=> david "whit" morriss

"If you don't know where you are, you don't know anything at all"

Dr. Edgar Spencer, Ph.D., 1995

[rummik]

+1 for @whitmo's idea. It solves the whole "I want to gift someone $100, but don't want to use the $24 option for a month because I'll forget" problem. It also won't make the gifts for a given week spike when a one-off is made.

Expanding on it a little: It seems like giving the option to specify how much per week would be useful. Maybe with a minimum of around 5% of the gift per week, to a maximum of around 20%? (Not too sure on the last part, but it does seem a little silly to gift someone $500 at 25¢/week...for the next 38 or so years)

[abnor]

+0

I think the issue boils down to: givers want to give in a quick and easy way, receivers want to receive in a more sustainable way.

Gittip is based on sustainability so the concept is almost frowned upon, but one-off tips would increase visitor/user diversity, in addition to traffic flow.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from avolcano on HN.

[codebykat]

New Gittip user here. FWIW, I expected I would be able to send one-time tips, and came to the site after finding a script someone posted on Github that saved me some time. I wanted to send him $2-3 in appreciation for that, and remembered someone posting about Gittip, and thought it would be perfect -- a "tip" being, in my mind, a little something extra you throw someone's way to let them know they're appreciated.

I want to use this instead of Paypal because Paypal is too clunky, requires knowing the recipient's email address, and I like the transparency of others seeing the gift. Plus the sense of community, and having a centralized place to see people I've supported.

I did sign up, following the advice of doing a weekly gift and planning to change it, but have begun to feel awkward about that (the recipient is not on Gittip and has not yet accepted). I'm afraid he'll sign up for the site thinking that I'm "promising" to give him $1/week for the foreseeable future, and then when I cancel it after 2-3 weeks, he will be frustrated and disappointed (or, worse, think that I was being deceptive). Obviously that is the opposite of what I want.

I agree with others that, as a giver, signing up for recurring payments is hard. And most of the time I want to throw someone a little payment, it's because of a one-time thing -- a good answer on StackOverflow, a blog post that helped me get unstuck with something, a little script up on Github.

This thread, though, makes me think that maybe Gittip is not what I thought it was, and/or not the thing I actually want.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jmhobbs via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 for @malexmave via Twitter.

[DamosDaze]

Couldn't agree more with Kat. One-time gifts are really important. As is the option of having your gift be public, taking it a step further and offering a share button so you can give and then share that gift with your networks so they have an opportunity to show support as well.

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Chad Whitacre notifications@github.comwrote:

+1 for @malexmave https://github.com/malexmave via Twitterhttps://twitter.com/malexmave/status/339435161378779136 .

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5#issuecomment-18573540 .

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from Paul Burke via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @rpicard via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from Hope Leman here.

[kimptoc]

+1 for onetime gifts, someone added what I asked for and would love to tip them :)

[lyndsysimon]

A few weeks ago, I spoke with one of (the?) founder of Giv2giv.org. They appear to have solved the "give once - receive forever" problem. The catch - the recipient must be a 501c3.

[rpicard]

@lyndsysimon Is that like Flattr for charities?

On a side note, I think Dwolla is decent for this type of thing. I still think it would be nice for Gittip to do it so you don't have a bunch of donate buttons, e.g. "Click here to donate once with Dwolla. Click here to tip every week." An example of that sort of thing is Reddit Enhancement Suite's contribute page: http://redditenhancementsuite.com/contribute.html

[chadwhitacre]

This is our biggest feature request after non-U.S. payouts, so it seems wrong to ignore this. I think the way to implement this would be to allow one-off gifts, and then notice when the giver makes a second payment to the same receiver, and prompt them at that point with something like the following:

"You gave FooBar $20 ten weeks ago. Want to set up a $1/wk gift? [ Yes ] [ No ]"

[cakey]

+1 : People want to one off tip, so let's allow them to without needing an additional service, but we need to be very careful.

Most use cases seem to involve one off tips as a reward or more conditional gift compared to weekly gifts. "Thanks for doing this" vs "Thanks for doing good work in general".

We want to encourage "I really enjoyed Chad's latest blog post, so I'm going to tip him $30", or "I appreciated this guys stack overflow response so I'll send him $40" but discourage "Hey if you quickly do this thing for me, I'll send you $x on gittip". We need to avoid gittip being essentially a casual billing system.

Suggestions for implementation:

• Anonymous, but with a required 'reason field' that has high visibility on the receiver's profile. Like a toot with far more weight.
• You can set a bonus for that week, which would show up as $x/wk+$y bonus this week.
• Pays out on pay day.
• Has a maximum (probably the same as the weekly limit now that the weekly limit is $100). This is because the types of things we want to encourage tipping for (helping out in irc, stack overflow etc) are lower in value than actions I feel we should discourage (like essentially buying a feature/bug fix)

[cogat]

+6 from me and 5 others at our Pycon AU sprint. Main rationale is that people find it a lot easier to make a one-off payment and to work it into budgets etc. Making cashflow more predictable for recipients should not be at the significant financial detriment of the recipients.

[chadwhitacre]

@cogat Thanks for weighing in and also for repping Gittip at Pycon AU! :D

... at the significant financial detriment of the recipients.

You meant "donors" instead of "recipients" here, perhaps?

[waldyrious]

I think he indeed meant recipients (at least I can interpret it that way), because people who aren't ready/able to commit to a weekly tip but otherwise would like to contribute one-off thanks-for-your-work-on-x tips aren't able to do the latter — essentially depriving recipients from that extra.

Also, +1 for @cakey's idea of a "reason" field. Maybe I'm not among the average audience Gittip seeks, but I do find it much more compelling to tip people for "Thanks for doing this" than for "Thanks for doing good work in general". Again, the fact that I'm not able to give in the less regular form means the people who I'd tip are being deprived from those potential tips.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from timrpeterson on Twitter.

[ghost]

I strongly support one time donations—it's how I expected the site to work before reading the FAQ.

My team is thinking about picking one project or developer a week to give to together (as individuals).

[bruceadams]

One of the biggest challenges in building something (nearly anything, with software suffering especially badly), is sticking to the key functionality; avoiding adding extra "features" that detract from the main purpose.

Gittip's central action is to provide ongoing support. Weekly gifts support "ongoing" and help explain our mission to new users.

What about one-time gifts? They line up better with many peoples' expectations, as @jeremiahlee reminds us. When we do what people expect, it is easy to explain. But, this ease gets in the way of communicating what Gittip is, especially to someone for whom the central Gittip concept of ongoing support is a surprise.

A narrow focus on, and narrow functionality for, repeating gifts helps us communicate our mission.

[whitmo]

if one time gifts were paid out over the established intervals / week, I think you could have both the sustainability and accessibility. -w On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Bruce Adams notifications@github.comwrote: > One of the biggest challenges in building something (nearly anything, with > software suffering especially badly), is sticking to the key functionality; > avoiding adding extra "features" that detract from the main purpose. > > Gittip's central action is to provide ongoing support. Weekly gifts > support "ongoing" and help explain our mission to new users. > > What about one-time gifts? They line up better with many peoples' > expectations, as @jeremiahlee https://github.com/jeremiahlee reminds > us. When we do what people expect, it is easy to explain. But, this ease > gets in the way of communicating what Gittip is, especially to someone for > whom the central Gittip concept of ongoing support is a surprise. > > A narrow focus on, and narrow functionality for, repeating gifts helps us > communicate our mission. > > — > Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/5#issuecomment-21990486 > . ## <=> david "whit" morriss "If you don't know where you are, you don't know anything at all" Dr. Edgar Spencer, Ph.D., 1995

[wyze]

What about taking a page out of reoccurring bank transfers book?

What we have right now is give $X/wk until I cancel. But this could be expanded by saying give $X/wk until $X has been given. Also, give $X/wk until a certain date, or for Y amount of weeks.

[rpicard]

I think that it'll be tough to add this feature without confusing the process. It creates another decision for tippers; they now have to think, "Okay, I like this guy's work. I should give him some money. How much should I give him? Oh, hmmn, should I give him money one-time or make it a recurring thing?" Maybe it's better that Gittip makes the latter decision for you.

It's also worth considering the option of making the "how much" decision for the tipper if they want to go with a one-time tip. Gittip could have a link that lets you tips someone $5 once. You can click it multiple times if you want to tip more, or maybe we could have a sneaky way to specify any amount, but by default just say $5.

This link could also be positioned around supplementing your contribution this week. So if you give someone $2 a week, but they just pushed a big update to their software or an article that you really liked, you might say, "Add $5 to my contribution this week for releasing 2.0." It could also function if you give the person $0 / week, so a little thought into the UX for this feature would be required to make it flexible enough to cover one-time tips.

Essentially, recurring tips are to support the person's work in general and one-time supplements are to reward a specific thing that they've done.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @markoheijnen via Twitter.

[sc0ttkclark]

Would be nice to have tip bonuses available for one-time sort of what @rpicard was getting at.

[ghost]

By not supporting one-time tips, you're creating a barrier for people who might otherwise tip but don't want to deal with having to remember to cancel the recurring tip after it's been charged.

Nearly every charity donation site has figured this out: donation amount, checkbox to make it recurring. Default the recurring checkbox to checked if you feel that better aligns with your mission, but don't intentionally make it difficult for people to support you in the way they want to support you.

[wilkie]

A tip of 0.25/wk will be only a little over $1 per month. That's $13/year. I feel as though somebody able to pay you a single, presumably large, tip will be able to pay a recurring tip.

First off, the desire for a one-time option seems rather like an easy request. I'm not surprised at the amount of support for it, but it will be hard to find a large group of people suggesting to not offer another way to tip contributions.

I'd agree with some comments above suggesting this comes from the mindset that this is what gittip is expected to be, which is interesting. Thus, it stems from a problem with how gittip is introduced to people, or the ingrained associations with the word 'tip.' Actually, nowhere on the home page does it say that the amounts listed are per week, which may be contributing to this problem. I would say that the goal is a site dedicated to providing reliable communal support for future work, which seems to require an ongoing donation and is weakened by any confusion that reinforces the wrong mission.

Furthermore, ongoing support is far different than a one-time tip and, in my mind, would require a completely separate service. I see no need for gittip to provide both of these. How about if gittip works together with one of the myriad of choices for a one-time donation? Put a link in profiles in a noticeable place? This ensures that such one-time tips are easily made when necessary but still sends the message that 'this is not what gittip is ultimately about' and encourages the weekly tip first.

[mikeryan776]

tl;dr: +1, but no rush...

I agree with the original take on this, that the recurring weekly tip is a differentiator and should be emphasized. However, the possibility for one-off tips should be on the roadmap (and not just because that's how "tips" normally work in most people's minds).

Speaking from the open-source perspective, the weekly tip fits the model of most open-source software/services, where people use it on an ongoing basis and it makes sense to show appreciation on an ongoing basis. As it happens, though, my specialty (software supporting website content/data migration) is something that's typically used on a temporary basis, in projects lasting some number of months rather than years. Someone using my software in such a project might be willing to drop me a single tip during or after the project, but not set up a recurring payment (what if we forget to cancel it after the project?).

So, I think it should be an option, but perhaps require an extra step to perform. Actually, what if there were simply an option to set an expiration (either date or number of payments) on tip commitments? Then, setting #payments = 1 would accomplish this quietly while still making ongoing payments the clear, straightforward path. Besides one-off tips, tippers may have a myriad of reasons to limit how long they maintain payments, and worry about forgetting to come in the appropriate week to cancel. +1: let recipients project their anticipated income taking expirations into account, so anyone counting on that weekly tip be prepared if there's a dropoff looming.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jdorfman on Twitter.

[jdorfman]

+1

[pluma]

@wilkie You're making assumptions. $.25/week may only be $13/year, but that's the absolute minimum per recipient. And you may want to support more than one person's ongoing work and value some of them higher than others. $13/year is a pretty steep entry limit when you're just looking for a way to support someone's work.

I think this is primarily a question of what gittip wants to be.

Right now, donation increments of $13/year/receiver mean each donor will only support a very small number of people and in some cases rather make no contribution at all than commit to a weekly donation -- even if they can be stopped or modified at any time, recurring payments are in this case intended to encourage a "set and forget" attitude, which makes sense if you only look at long-term sustainability.

This is okay, but it's necessarily elitist: poorer donors are discouraged by the large entry limit / step size, less popular receivers have to compete with "top celebrities".

The risk of permitting one-time donations is that gittip becomes unstable. This isn't an issue if your donations are too low to encourage you to rely on them, but it could mean that donors may decide against a weekly donation when it is easy enough to donate just once.

On the other hand, it would allow gittip to benefit from "impulse donations", which could mean a larger amount of donations, even if the total sum of the donated amounts didn't increase compared to the recurring ones.

I think if the only concern is giving the receiver false impressions, this could be solved by better data visualisation (look at kicktraq for a good example - minus the predictions of course). If your open source contributions are so well known or your output of such a consistently good quality that people are willing to donate to you on a weekly basis now, you might see the same if all donations were one-time (especially if "return donors" are prompted with the suggestion to make their donations recurring, as above).

There's a risk recurring donations could suffer from a shift towards one-time donations if they become an option. I think worrying about that as an issue of its own misses the point: the goal is to establish a sustainable source of crowdfunding, the recurring donations are just a means to that end. If the one-time donations can augment that, even if they impact the recurring donations, it may still help achieving that goal.

tl;dr: Don't get so hung up on recurring vs. one-time as isolated features. Consider their impact on gittip's ability to achieve its goal. Sometimes sufficient amounts of noise can be more powerful than a few signals.

[cakey]

@pluma Good points, but the minimum is actually $0.01/wk now, which should help promote impulse donations. We should probably do a better job at communicating this, and make it as easy as possible to tip this minimum amount to as many people as possible, probably through #536

[pluma]

@cakey Ah, so that's just $0.52/year then ;)

I tried to check this by adjusting one of my donations before I commented and I thought the button remaining greyed out meant the manually entered value was invalid when in fact it simply hadn't registered I made a change. It only registers when the input field loses focus, so manually adjusting the value (rather than using the $.25 increment spinner) means you have to unfocus the input field before you can save the changes.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @isaacs on Twitter.

[tj]

+1 from me just because I think most people are more comfortable with this sort of thing

[isaacs]

The nature of a "tip", I'd think, would be a one-off bonus for doing something exceptional.

[chadwhitacre]

@isaacs Don't get hung up on the word "tip." Gittip is designed primarily for long-term, sustainable support. The goal is to be able to pay your bills with what you make on Gittip.

[chadwhitacre]

My current thinking on how we'll implement this is that we'll disburse one-time payments over 10 weeks. That will dampen spikes and crashes while still allowing for one-offs. Ideally we won't even signal to recipients that certain of their gifts are one-time payments. In fact, we could do some research on historical Gittip data to see if there are any average tipping patterns that we can hide one-times inside of. Like, if most people tip someone else for three months and follow a growth and decay pattern in their tipping then we can mimic that with one-offs.

Perhaps in a future iteration we can look at noticing when someone makes a second one-time payment and prompting them to set up a recurring payment for the interpolated amount.