prompt for tip to Gittip

[chadwhitacre]

Been floating around but this ticket is prompted by @mgrouchy on Twitter. The idea is to prompt users to tip Gittip as some part of their workflow.

[chadwhitacre]

-1 from @benatkin on Twitter.

[mgrouchy]

+1 from me.

I am essentially advocating for some way to reduce the barriers for everyone to tip @gittip and to get @gittip a predictable revenue stream. ie/ over time you could see that as a whole on average users donate 1% of all tips to gittip. You could then extrapolate that out for N users to predict revenue going forward. This could be simply a checkbox as part of the signup process, or as part of the deposit/withdrawl process.

This also opens up a bunch of doors to investment and ability to either repay investment or produce a dividend like structure for some of the profits to go to investors in gittip.

[tshepang]

I feel like Gittip team should not get more special treatment than it already is... the mention in the docs that it is funded on Gittip. I would of course want to see it get (a lot) more money than it does at the moment (< $400/week), but not through a shortcut like 1% goes to THE team.

[mgrouchy]

@tshepang so, as an outsider(not part of the team), Gittip needs to make it easier to donate to the team, allowing people to optionally donate a portion of their incoming tips is a low friction way to make this happen. The reality is, Gittip is substantial, and it requires a lot of work. Removing barriers to people to show their appreciation to the operators/builders of gittip I think should be an ongoing concern.

Maybe donating a portion of your incoming tips should be an option to begin with. Instead of the set amounts that exist now. There could be an option that for example says, N% of the weekly tips I receive I would like to pass onto @zzzeek because I think SQLAlchemy is awesome. (replace @zzzeek with @gittip @whit537 or whoever you want).

[tshepang]

Giving to team Gittip (or anyone for that matter) is easy enough, I believe.

BTW, what you propose in the 2nd paragraph should be a separate feature request. It's a good idea.

[benatkin]

I think you should feature the team members in a prominent place and try to increase the tips of @gittip and each one of them. Perhaps add "We need resources to maintain @gittip! Please consider supporting gittip." to the flow in several places, and a list of staff to https://gittip.com/gittip.

How about a new type of gittip page, organizations, with this for a layout:

[INTRO FIELD (markdown)]

[organization tipping widget]

[list of members]

[MORE INFO (markdown)]

BTW I was thinking about asking for big donations from outside of gittip but the lack of clarity about taxes might complicate that (I think gittip should be able to do what it does and 501c but since it doesn't check whether the recipients are providing a public service or need the money it might not be able to).

[benatkin]

Maybe the list of members on an organization page should include a tipping widget too. So someone could just go down the page and add tips for the organization and each of the members.

[rohitpaulk]

This was done in #2629.