run a pilot project for 1:N funding

[chadwhitacre]

Gittip has two basic uses cases:

• 1:N funding, where a large patron funds many, many individuals.
• N:1 funding, where many, many individuals fund a single celebrity.

Gittip intends to support both cases. This ticket is about running a pilot project to develop Gittip's capacity to support 1:N funding. The canonical use case here is corporations funding contributors to open source projects, and the basic pieces of this puzzle as I see it right now are:

1. A non-profit software foundation stakes a claim on Gittip.
2. Corporations make gifts to the non-profit foundation, earmarked for distribution via Gittip.
3. The Crowd allocates the earmarked funds to the appropriate individuals.
4. Project progress is tracked and published.
5. Patrons are publicly recognized.

So ...

We need to run one of these once to test the model, build the software, and work out the kinks. In view of the history to date between Gittip and the Python community, I would be honored to work with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to make this a reality in 2013, with additional open source communities to follow soon after.

Here's what this would look like:

The PSF stakes out the URL https://www.gittip.com/for/python/. Companies interested in moving Python forward make gifts to the PSF earmarked for distribution via Gittip. The community uses Gittip to vote on how the money should be distributed. Gittip distributes the money. Corporations receive public recognition on Gittip, and the distribution amounts and recipients are published there as well. Stories are published about the progress being made on Python, and corporate patrons are recognized at the same time.

I'm immediately following up on this ticket with a private email to @VanL (cc: @jnoller) to get the ball rolling on this conversation. I'm posting here simultaneously in the interest of openness.

[chadwhitacre]

This has been subsumed by teams:

https://medium.com/building-gittip/eba0a27825b8