GitTip - Ongoing micro-funding and distributed genius grants

Posted by greggles on July 10, 2013 at 10:31pm

I just happened across what seems to be a pretty cool project for micro-funding: GitTip. There is a community for Drupallers https://www.gittip.com/for/drupal/ but they require at least 150 members before they will show the members of the community. Drupal had 20 community members this morning and is now up to 30 which is great as percent growth, but pretty small overall.

I encourage folks to sign in there (uses twitter or facebook or github Oauth).

GitTip advertises themselves as Distributed Genius Grants which is a pretty fun idea. It's also possible for organizations to sign up as donors which helps get notoriety for their organization by being one of the biggest contributor within a community (e.g. MaxCDN is the biggest contributor inside PHP community right now).

Comments

@lotyrin suggested Drupalers

Posted by greggles on July 11, 2013 at 12:49pm

@lotyrin suggested Drupalers just join the php group but that doesn't quite make sense to me. I'd rather that the PHP community on gittip be used primarily by people who are working on the PHP code itself. Rasmus Lerdorf frequently points out that among the organizations that use and profit from php there is relatively little investment in development of the php-internals and my sense is that he's right. If the php community were primarily focused on the php-internals folks...we could help solve that.

knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation

Why not both?

Posted by whit537 on July 15, 2013 at 2:09pm

Thanks for using Gittip! :D As I mentioned on Twitter, I think it makes sense to have both PHP and Drupal communities on Gittip. That's been the pattern with other languages and frameworks and it seems to be working so far:

We are 21 days since this

Posted by greggles on July 31, 2013 at 9:27pm

We are 21 days since this post and the Drupal community on Gittip has gone from 20 to 95! Woohoo.

I've been watching the php community and jquery and javascript and seen several drupallers join the site. Our current superstar is patrickd who is making $27.25.

If you want to find Drupallers to give money to you can figure out their twitter/github handle and then pledge to give them money once they've joined like https://www.gittip.com/on/twitter/dries/ (but maybe he'll join and that example will stop working). Hopefully the example is useful anyway - gittip .com/on/twitter/NAME is the style.

You can also find drupallers by doing a google site search for drupal and site:gittip.com which finds a few folks.

While the penetration numbers are still low I think the growth is still exciting. Someone recently asked me what I like about this idea and my feeling was that it represents a low-friction, low-commitment, easy to use funding mechanism which is something I think we need. Right now it can be hard to find people to support their work and the transaction costs are so high that people only do it for "large" amounts of money (maybe $100). Gittip solves a lot of those problems...

knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation

Yeah we mentioned to get a

Posted by dawehner on August 9, 2013 at 10:35pm

Yeah we mentioned to get a full community.

Some ideas:

Allow people to insert their gittip account on the d.o userprofile
Embed some gittip widget directly into the userprofile?

A GitTip field on the user

Posted by amateescu on August 9, 2013 at 10:39pm

A GitTip field on the user profile page would be great!

Although I am not sure

Posted by plant life on August 19, 2013 at 3:04pm

Although I am not sure whether people give gifts for all types of useful reads if they do then I think the gift button should go on the feedback page / comment page.

The reason for this is that this is where any appreciation for a post can go before the reader gets side tracked onto something else.

Nevertheless you may well think that the person making the contribution wants to know something about the person and may want to see something more to substantiate the fact that they think the post is worth applauding via a contribution.

To achieve this the profile should be first and foremost or in fact only about the comments that the profile user gets from the posts they make.

This is a good way for someone to get quick access to content because the viewer can go to the original post the profile user made. In other words the comments provide a screening for good content. Comments enable the user to find good content. And therefore if only comments are on the profile page then that does it.

These comments may well be organised according to the type of content it is. Therefore the comment page may well have a list of categories that they select from.

At the same time it may be useful to give the person who made the gift something out of it as well. The person who made the gift (and perhaps comments to go with it) gets a link back to a page that they want to promote.

However it may be that the profile page of the original content wants to control the comments that are shown and therefore may delete ones they don’t wish people to see. The reason for this is that it may be a way of enabling the profiler to show only the most interesting posts on their profile page.

However to counter this it may be useful and nice to enable the profile page (of the person who sent the original content and who received the gift) to have a list of all the people that have provided a gift and some way of finding them. For instance a list Person’s name and a way to identify them via google or something using their location, or company where they work for instance.