I bought a weekly round for my friends

Given our community is a little... let's say cautious I feel the need to open with a disclaimer. I am in no way affiliated with Gittip, in the past, present and the foreseeable future. In fact I looked at their bugtracker for the first time this morning and am appalled that a site in production for 2 years can have so many outstanding basic conceptual issues.

In any case this entry is about the underlying idea, so if you can manage to not get distracted by a shoddy implementation - read on (NSFW language as always :)

It started yesterday when I looked here and asked Y U NO WANT BEER?!. While twitter did not manage to spark a conversation, IRC did (and boy, was that some conversation :) The chatter quickly evolved, climaxed and (painfully predictably) broke away for good. And also predictably it boiled down to a split into several distinct camps

  • Some genuinely believe it is not worth bothering with chump change, since "we lack the hipsters in our community" and without them any kind of funding drive will not have an impact
  • Some feel uncomfortable seeing their avatar among the current highest donors/receivers (after you look at the current top receivers you either instantly understand what the problem is, or you don't - there is no easy way to explain it)
  • Some genuinely believe they rather get patches as opposed to chump change

I say FUCK THAT. And instead of explaining how and why you should do something you are not currently doing, I will instead explain why I am currently pledging $50 (possibly more in the future) per week, and distribute them among folks of my choosing.

First of all: it is easy for me to do so (and yes, this part is important). Connect my twitter / github / bitbucket / whathaveyou account, connect a credit card: done.

With that out of the way - let's take a simple example - Pumpkin Perl and the current Pumpkin (or Pumpking depends on what you like). At the time of writing Perl is #3 on the metacpan leaderboard, with 168 "backers". If these 168 decide to give our pumpkin $5/week each - that's roughly $3500 per month for him right there.

THIS JUST IN, BREAKING NEWS: chump-change adds up.

Now, am I confident he will use the cash to further my interests (that is keep Pumpkin Perl sane) in the foreseeable future? Yes, I am pretty confident, given track record and all that. But the more important question is - does it matter if he actually does? Not in the slightest. I am not sharing some chump-change with expectations of extra commitments and future results.

I am virtually buying my fellow colleagues a beer for EXCELLENT OUTSTANDING WORK *ALREADY COMPLETED*

What I particularly like about Gittip is that it does not require any extra effort to keep doing what I decided to do. Yes, I could go broke by oversharing my extensive wealth, but so could anyone with a non-dumb phone and an appetite for extra game content. At least I'd know there is an actual person (that I might even like) on the other end ;)

Will I feel cheated and sad if none of this goes anywhere? If the virtual beers do not motivate anyone, and if the Perl-portion of the Gittip community remains unseen and insignificant? Not really. $50 is the cost of a decent-but-not-spectacular dinner for two where I live. If this is cash that ended up being thrown away - shrug, it could have been a shitty dinner anyhow. And if I *do* feel bad about it - this means I am a petty shithead and I deserve to feel like that anyway :)

So to recap:

  • It is easy
  • It doesn't cost me much of anything
  • It can make a real tangible difference on the other end
  • It sends a clear continuous "Thank you!" message
  • Makes Perl as a whole look good, without compromise of my values
  • No hipsters required (though of course welcome)

What's not to like?

Cheers

14 Comments

Ribashushi

Now I know why frew pointed this site out to me. I think its a good idea and what's more I hope we can encourage some big companies that make a ton of money with Perl to add some sizable amounts.

thanks!

jnap

I think the real value of Gittip is how it converts tiny amounts of financial capital (say, 25 x $2) into social capital that exceeds the dollar value on the tin. Someone gets an anonymous little nod of support and appreciation, often unasked for, that is a reflection of their peer's appreciation for their ongoing efforts. It's by definition no-strings-attached and anonymous. Doing a return favour is categorically impossible.

It's like a machine that strips away the baggage and expectations of money, converting chump change into good feels

Since disclosures seems like the right thing to do in this community -- I'm in love with the vision of the Gittip project, and am soon taking 4 months off work to burn through my bitcoin savings and contribute to the project :)

Gittip seems pretty US-centric so far. I hear they have plans to improve in this area.

Flattr seems better in this respect. I do wish more CPAN projects were represented on it.

@peter yeah, we actually need to clarify that FAQ item -- the confusion was brought to our attention yesterday.

I opened an issue here to sort it out:
https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/2020

Sorry for the confusion on that. You're definitely not the only one to misunderstand our poor wording :)

Last time I tried to use Paypal to receive money outside the US it was a bit of a nightmare to get set up, though admittedly that was many a year ago.

As far as Flattr is concerned - I do not like its "american-centric" everyone-participating-gets-an-equal-prize idea.

It was made for a completely different use case than yours – it only does one-time donations, not recurring ones. It’s for buskers on the Internet basically. You enjoy an article/song/clip/etc. enough to think it’s worth a tip, you throw some pocket change into the Flattr hat in front of it. The point of the fixed budget divided between everyone is so that you never have to hesitate from paying for some thing you enjoyed, because you never have to wonder whether you’re overspending, no matter how often you’ve been tipping.

But what you are looking for is to subsidise creators you know, rather than pay for things you’ve consumed. For you, the Flattr model makes no sense. But it’s basically complementary with the Gittip model, as far as I can tell.

I like the gittip model. There are plenty of people in the Perl community whose work has helped me tremendously in the last 15 years. It's nice to be able to give back to them.

Now what I can't seem to find is a way to list the people in the community, so I can choose who to give to. At the moment I can only see the new subscribers, top receivers and top donors. I can't get a list of the other members. Am I missing something?

Thank you to the people who donated to me, I am very flattered!

Now I am wondering when gittip is ever going to send me a notification about this.. I haven't received a single email saying "hey you have funds waiting; what do you want to do about that?" ...so if I never went back to the site myself, I'd never see that there are funds accumulating.

I know what the Pumpking is. What is Pumpkin Perl? Is it just Blead Perl? Or is it any release of Perl?

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About Peter Rabbitson

user-pic Musing on the pitfalls of the Swiss Army Chainsaw