figure out how The Gittip Report is going to work

[chadwhitacre]

Paging @abnor @hurlothrumbo @clone1018 and anyone else on the newly-christened (ht @abnor) "Marketing Board" of Gittip, Inc.! (Actually, it's an LLC, and I'm still waiting to get the paperwork back with the official name change.)

@hurlothrumbo and I started a tumblr focused on people on Gittip (as opposed to the blog, which is more for announcements about the site itself). Here's the first post, from @hurlothrumbo:

http://report.gittip.com/post/43696850189/carousel

Here's the second post, from @abnor:

http://report.gittip.com/post/44427109330/introducing-gittip-users-at-open-hack-night

Here's some words from @hurlothrumbo in private email to @abnor and I regarding The Gittip Report:

Chad and I had a meet last week where I suggested an industrial- or white-paper-themed publication that tells more about the people and organizations that are on board with Gittip. Each entry would be a sort of manifest (combination of About, FAQ, Call to action, etc.) for that person/org. Entries are digested in what is basically a blog format.

For it we need:

• a master version of the entry, so anyone can write one. The best version of that depends significantly on what community that person/org is perceived to be within, and viability thereof. Which means --
• the demographics participating in Gittip need to be formalized somehow, and most importantly --
• we need to figure out our org, and its market, in a single-braid statement of identity, which will clarify the voice of the publication and everything after it.

To that end, I like the pocket bios. Along with the Carousel band abstract currently on report.gittip.com, I think they're a decent first attempt at a standard entry for The Gittip Report.

The interview is also good but seems to me yet another abstract defense of Gittip.
We need to focus on figuring out who is closest to our fire, and how best to serve them.

Let me know what you think.

[chadwhitacre]

I went ahead and published @abnor's first TGR entry without editing it. Nobody's tracking that blog yet and it gives us something to look at and mull over. We have social matters and technical matters.

Technical

TGR is set up on Tumblr, which I see as buying us ease of accepting new submissions at the cost of difficulty editing them after the fact. The Balanced blog, e.g., is managed as open source on GitHub. The point of TGR is to move beyond the develo-sphere, so I don't see GitHub as the right tool, here. (It's not the right tool for accepting submissions from random people off the Internet, mind you. I'm willing to ask you who are more committed to join GitHub to participate in project management.) What that means is that we need to give someone the TGR tumblr so you can manage and edit submissions and probably tweak the theme as well. As with setting up Google Webmaster Tools (#693), this means hiring you (in, of course, the Gittipian sense). I plan to put forward @hurlothrumbo for Editor of TGR, as I'm proposing @abnor for GWT (https://github.com/zetaweb/humans/issues/2).

Social

@hurlothrumbo articulated an initial format for TGR, as described above, and incarnated in his Carousel post. @abnor instantiated a different format in her [Open Hack post]. To what extent do we want to standardize the voice of TGR? My sense is that we need to play fast and loose, especially here at the outset. We don't know what this is, quite yet. It's much more important at this stage to get something, anything, flowing through the pipes. As we have things to look at we can decide which are working. It also occurs to me that it's fine for different authors to have different voices under the same TGR banner. Perhaps we can emphasize the byline more. Each adding an avatar on tumblr would move us in that direction.

[abnor]

CHANGE THE BLOG TO BE THE REPORT AND THE REPORT TO BE THE BLOG >:0

[hurlothrumbo]

Point taken on some content over no content.

It would be nice to establish some standards, or at least examples, for users to have at hand. What is essential surely varies from user to user... but, to push the "everyman over rockstar" aspect mentioned in #696, it'd be nice for users who are uncomfortable with self-selling to have a current to follow.

The blog and/or report is a mannered, relatively neutral third party ascribing worth to a person/org, hopefully minimizing the sales burden for that person/org.

[chadwhitacre]

Yes. My take is that we simply need volume at this point. Let's turn the hose on and then decide between shower or stream or vertical or whatever.

[abnor]

I'll write another piece once we overcome another milestone :D

-International Payments!

-Name Change to Gittip LLC!

-More Ways to Sign-Ins!

-New Deactivate Button!

-Terms of Service Update!

etc.

[chadwhitacre]

@abnor I've been thinking we'd do one on "Partnerships" once RubyGems lands (#223), to also include other existing partnerships as well as the browser extension.

[chadwhitacre]

This seems to have lost steam. I'm making DNS changes at the moment (related to #407) and am going to let report.gittip.com go for now.