offer gifts in kind

[chadwhitacre]

was: integrate with BrewPony

From @leto:

I know I am crazy, but I want to integrate @brewpony and Gittip. Send the gift of coffee to promote free + open code!

https://twitter.com/dukeleto/status/321386030634762242

http://brewpony.com/

[leto]

Sounds like we need a UI sketch and maybe a user story about how this would look on the website. Any volunteers?

[selenamarie]

Volunteering!

[leto]

☕ ☕ ☕ !

[selenamarie]

Under the hood:

To avoid the "anonymous giver of gift" authentication dance, ISTM like the most obvious thing to do with donations is to have them made through Balanced Payments to Brew Pony.

From the bits I understand, we'd need to:

• Set up Brew Pony as a recipient of gifts (inside of Gittip)
• Set up Gittip as a giver of gifts inside of Brew Pony
• Send recipient information to Brew Pony through an API (maybe tied to each payment?)
• Send payments to Brew Pony on a monthly basis on behalf of the gift givers

Suggested API thingies:

gift/add (send address information)
gift/cancel
gifts (list of current valid gifts)

My best guess about how this could work is that Gittip would pay monthly, and there'd be a reconciliation process to ensure that enough payments were made for the number of gifts sent. Gittip could handle that part itself, actually.

We also need to add "Mailing Address" as an element to each user's possible profile.

[chadwhitacre]

This sounds like a "gifts in kind" idea that I believe @whitmo brought up in the past, though I can't find a ticket for it now.

[chadwhitacre]

I'd be happy to try this out with BrewPony. If it works out we can grow the feature to include other vendors.

[chadwhitacre]

It seems like recipients should have some say in what gifts in kind they receive.

It also seems like a giver should be able to contribute partially to a gift in kind.

(For reference, the main Brew Pony plan is $29/mo.)

Another angle on this would be to build out a marketplace on Gittip so you can redeem your Gittip balance on goods of your choosing. That gives maximum flexibility on both sides of the equation, and would play nicely into profile timelines (#133). We need somehow to close the loop between a gift and "what they did with it," and this would be one way to do that (the idea being that they can do whatever they want with it, and there's no hard obligation to report what they did, but this is going to be more fun and more successful if givers are like, 'I gave this person a few bucks and they turned around and did awesome thing X with it!').

[sporksmith]

Givers might be more motivated by the idea of giving something more concrete, but I agree that receivers would probably prefer flexibility to choose.

Perhaps givers could choose a concrete suggested gift (e.g. brewpony), which would allocate the appropriate amount of cash and perhaps by default be allocated to actually cash out to that gift on the receiver's end, but the receiver would be free to reallocate it to raw funds or other gifts...?

[leto]

I like the idea of flexibility on both sides (if I give you the gift of coffee, but you stop drinking coffee tomorrow, you should be able to use that Gittip for something else).

Redeeming a Gittip balance on external sites sounds very interesting. What do we need to make that happen?

[chadwhitacre]

@cakey mentions www.graze.com in this regard (via Twitter).

[chadwhitacre]

@leto You should check out the conversation going on over on #933. It's a related concept that may lay the technical foundation for this ticket.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @sylvinus in private email:

I was wondering if it could be possible in some fashion, to give some incentives to open source contributors, to offer conference tickets. I would feel really happy that attending my conferences would be an incentive for people to contribute to projects on github or elsewhere.

[chadwhitacre]

@leto, @sylvinus, et al.

This is a fun and interesting idea, but it's too far outside of Gittip's core product for us to work on right now. We have a lot of work to do on our core product (giving money every week to people and teams you believe in), and we need to really focus on that if we're going to succeed. Let's reopen further down the line.

[chadwhitacre]

@duckinator and @rummik are dusting this off. IRC

[chadwhitacre]

Sounds like the suggestion on the table is to add "Amazon Wishlist" under "Other Giving Options." Reticketed as #2195.

[voxpelli]

+1 on what was said in the international payouts discussion and which @whit537 pointed here.

I think the most interesting part of gift cards and such is for the receiver to use it as an alternative to cash payouts to thus circumvent eg. transaction fees and or integration problems that can especially happen on international payouts. For people not receiving very much money, choosing to get that money as eg. Amazon gift cards or such could be an easier more flexible solution compared to eg. a bank account number.