Radar 33

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Teams on Gratipay have to be legal entities in order to use payroll.

[chadwhitacre]

It honestly doesn't matter what kind.

[chadwhitacre]

LLC, S, C, B, PBC, Ltd., Plc., etc., &c.

[chadwhitacre]

Charitable or not.

[chadwhitacre]

Fiscally sponsored or not.

[chadwhitacre]

The real heart of the matter for Gratipay is that payroll has to tie to tax withholdings.

[chadwhitacre]

We want to be agnostic about specific tax laws.

[chadwhitacre]

We have to push that burden out to our customers.

[chadwhitacre]

We have to go the Braintree route—bring-your-own [entity] at first, with an "easy" button later—instead of the Stripe route—"easy" button-only out of the gate.

[chadwhitacre]

We have to go the BYOE route because we don't have the capital to go the Stripe route.

[chadwhitacre]

So then payroll is an optional add-on for Teams?

[chadwhitacre]

And it's pretty manual?

[chadwhitacre]

Like, for each member you add to a Team, you set up some rule about withholding?

[chadwhitacre]

Let's say for Gratipay we adopt some rule like, "We pay you as a contractor for up to 6 months if you're in the U.S. or 18 months if you're outside the U.S. After that we pay you as an owner."

[chadwhitacre]

That gives @rohitpaulk et al. time to jump through the hoops of becoming a co-owner of a U.S.-domiciled cooperative.

[chadwhitacre]

And they can still get paid in the mean time.

[chadwhitacre]

(Perhaps we also have a dollar cap: 18 months or $18,000 or something like that. A Q for the Ls.)

[chadwhitacre]

We add @rohitpaulk to the Gratipay Team with withholding of 0% (he's a contractor).

[chadwhitacre]

After a year or whatever, he gets his paperwork all done and we can promote him to an owner (yay!).

[chadwhitacre]

Now his withholding is set at 35%.

[chadwhitacre]

Do we care to force Teams to use payroll?

[chadwhitacre]

Do independent contractors still get to take-what-they-want?

[chadwhitacre]

Back over to https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/3433#issuecomment-158520212.

[chadwhitacre]

Let's see how this goes: https://github.com/naspeh/mailur/issues/4. O.O

[chadwhitacre]

We should do that 128 times and see what happens: https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/412.

[chadwhitacre]

Or 64. Or 32. Or 16.

[chadwhitacre]

https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/87#issuecomment-158824497 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/118#issuecomment-158824115 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/115#issuecomment-156868901 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/114#issuecomment-158817300 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/113#issuecomment-158817279 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/117#issuecomment-158817245 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/116#issuecomment-158817017 https://github.com/gratipay/team-review/issues/108#issuecomment-158816805

!m @webmaven :dancer:

[techtonik]

Until we have payroll, we're vaporware. We're only half a product.

What is the other half? =)

Who needs another payments solution?

Everybody.

There's gillions of those.

Paypal and ... ?

How the heck are we gonna get back to payroll? Both in general—it's our core product!—and in particular—we have to pay ourselves! Teams on Gratipay have to be legal entities in order to use payroll.

That's the core problem. We need to find out WHY getting money and sharing money is illegal. Why all of the sudden we need to pay $500000 for the license (or where is the proof, BTW?)

The internet full of people who can not read English and people who do have time to read. People who don't want to know about all that and people who can't remember anything. Those regulations are overly complicated up to paralysis.

There must be root cause, but the picture is so complex that we need to rely on vision to store the pieces of the puzzle. Right now all we have is just a lot of text. How about we try to illustrate all the hard stuff we have now? How about we try to approach art communities to help us with visualizing the stuff? Starting from WHY sending money from one person to another through Bitcoin or through Gratipay is illegal and finishing with complete picture of system that is legal with separate strips explaining WHY.

If we have drawn roadmap on out main page, we could bring more hope to people waiting for such platform to appear and more people following. Explaining legal problems of Gratipay 1.0 is hard - I tried several times, but the truth is - I am not a lawyer and I fail time after time to explain what is money transfer license, why laws require us to need it. So, we may have a simple map of Carribean and a detailed one, more suitable for navigation in The Sea of Legal Wreckage we are currently in.

[mattbk]

Is this not embarrasing to anyone else?

Maybe I'm too focused on the immediate future. Maybe there are always "more fish in the sea" when it comes to teams (or people, since that seems to be on the table again) who will want to use Gratipay. I've said before that there is likely enough space for multiple recurrent payments systems, which I guess means there are enough teams/people without needing to accept every last one...but Gratipay is rebuilding, which means focusing on what needs to be done to get and retain those initial teams, IMHO.

[webmaven]

@techtonik :+1:

[mattbk]

Not trying to be negative for the sake of being negative.

[webmaven]

@techtonik:

How about we try to illustrate all the hard stuff we have now?

I'm willing of doing the illustration/infographic work, if we can at least brain-dump, outline, or mind-map 'all the hard stuff', along the lines of the information captured in the mind-map in this post: https://www.codefellows.org/blog/this-is-why-learning-rails-is-hard

Subsequently, we can write up a blog post that incorporates the final illustration.

[rohitpaulk]

^ :+1:

[techtonik]

Is there any online tool for writing mindmaps? Or better a human readable format like blockdiag? I started documenting competencies for grtp.co here -- https://github.com/gratipay/grtp.co/issues/107#issue-115225333 and it may worth to record it in some JSON file that could be rendered automatically (and where you could mark the spots you're proficient with).

Here is Rails Competencies for reference:

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme Here's a nice one: https://twitter.com/nathanairplane/status/667564949258960897. :)

@mattbk I'm not embarrassed, no. There's a lot going on there, though, so it's certainly possible to read it multiple ways. I appreciate @webmaven stepping in.

[kzisme]

@whit537 Sorry! I've been working WAY too much these past two weeks (and will be working this Friday as well)

Sent out another tweet including our post about the conference :smile_cat:

[chadwhitacre]

!m @kzisme !m @techtonik !m @rohitpaulk !m @webmaven !m @mattbk

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)