write a document about our open company philosophy

[chadwhitacre]

Reticketed from gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#49.

Balanced has a page explaining their understanding of what it means to be an open company for them.

We should publish something similar, at https://www.gittip.com/about/openness. A sketch:

Openness is sharing control, transparency is sharing information.

Users: We are open to user feedback, on our users' terms. Our users set the parameters of their engagement with us: private or public, confidential or shared. In accepting user feedback we prioritize consent, making people feel comfortable, privacy, and outreach. We share control of our company with our users as much as possible, up to and including trusting them entirely with our funding.

Contributors (people building Gittip; employees isn't the right word, what is?): All decisions are made in public. Private conversations are fine, but only public records count towards decisions. Somewhere in here we have to talk about the transition from privately received user feedback to publicly recorded input into decision-making. This is where the UA role (gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#56) comes in, ya?

Business Partners: Loosely defined? Includes journalists, or is that strictly personal? How about government agencies? Lawyers? I expect this to be the most transparent layer of all. We don't do secret deals. If you want to work with Gittip, you're going to work with us in public (but gov't?).

Do we talk about tooling on this doc? IRC, GitHub, Hangouts, email, etc?

Perhaps @duckinator as a UA (gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#56) can proxy feedback from the community?

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[chadwhitacre]

Dropping to ★★☆.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃