write a few user personas

[chadwhitacre]

Reticketing from #12 because I think user stories are more narrowly focused and worthwhile in their own right as a tool if we want to use them. We did some work related to personas in #7 and #8 but I think the "Audience" doc we ended up with is not pointed enough.

Personas are fictionalized one-pagers describing certain types of users. The purpose is to understand who we're building Gittip for. Insofar as we have sales and marketing people selling our product, then personas are a point of contact between sales/marketing on the customer-facing side, and design/development on the product delivery side.

I think the two personas we want to start with are:

• Developer Evangelist
• Open-source Project Owner

There are other ways to use Gittip (content creators, artists, writers, etc.), but let's not kid ourselves: Gittip's big win so far is funding for open-source, and we need to serve that market first and foremost right now.

[chadwhitacre]

I think it will be interesting to develop personas in the open, because people who fall in one or the other category will be able to see how we're viewing them and give us direct feedback.

[chadwhitacre]

Looking through our top receivers ... what personas do @ashedryden @shanley @lynnco @tkwidmer represent? Maybe ...

• Activist
• Open Product Owner

[chadwhitacre]

Ideally we would have representatives of each persona authoring the persona for us. That seems like the safest way to ensure that we're capturing the right information and not projecting too much. :-)

Essentially a "persona" one-pager is a place where users, sales/marketing, and design/development can all converge for a hopefully-mutually-beneficial conversation.

[chadwhitacre]

Also, for @sudoroom @iElectric:

• Hackerspace Owner

[chadwhitacre]

For @JEdgar @sferik @ncoghlan @juliepagano et al.:

• Individual Patron

[chadwhitacre]

Maybe we can even label our tickets according to persona so we understand who we're building what for.

[shadowcat-mdk]

• community manager/advocate

Quite a lot of foundation/support personnel are non- or semi-technical but fully open source related.

[shadowcat-mdk]

I would label your tickets via persona, if it shakes-down that you have more overlap than individuality then you can re-organise to the more suitable metric.

[chadwhitacre]

@shadowcat-mdk You're thinking of someone at an open-source software foundation like the Perl Foundation?

[chadwhitacre]

@shadowcat-mdk So looking at http://www.perlfoundation.org/steering_committee, who would represent the "community manager/advocate" persona? Ya'akov?

[shadowcat-mdk]

Pretty much, there are a number of orgs. for a number of languages, projects and communities and many of them run like the projects. Talented volunteers building something that's community owned. It's why I get tipped.

Advocacy: Ya'akov
Steering: Best is the President Karen Pauley

I am on Advocacy, Steering and Marketing for tpf and Secretary, Director for EPO.

[chadwhitacre]

@shadowcat-mdk Okay, so maybe broaden the "Open-source Project Owner" persona above to include directors, etc. for larger-scale projects? "Owner" applies best to smaller projects, it seems.

[shadowcat-mdk]

That seems like a sensible way to manage it without ending up with too many personas to fill. I appreciate that fewer will equal faster iteration and development. Gets you to the goal/understanding point earlier.

[sferik]

Ideally we would have representatives of each persona authoring the persona for us.

I’m happy to attempt to author my own persona but I’m not sure I fit cleanly into one of these categories. While it’s true that I currently give $120 per week to open-source contributors, I also receive $15 per week for my open-source contributions and I aspire to earn more. I hope that—some day—my receiving will outnumber my giving, so I wouldn’t define myself by my giving, even though that number happens to be larger at the moment. Depending on what you mean by “developer evangelist,” I’m probably that too.

I would define myself as an open-source junkie. I habitually write and consume open-source software. I give tips to show gratitude to those who I see doing good work and I put out a virtual tip jar (in the form of README shields) so that others might do the same. I have also set my Gittip profile as my personal URL on my GitHub profile to encourage tips and show off my giving.

I was heavily inspired by this essay by @ashedryden to start giving on Gittip and pledged to give $500 per month in November, which I’ve done for the past 4 months and plan to do for the foreseeable future, unless there is a significant change in my employment or personal life. I’m not independently wealthy—this giving represents a significant portion of my post-tax income. Living in Berlin, I actually pay more to Gittip each month than I pay for rent and utilities (eat your heart out San Francisco).

I’m trying to remember how I settled on giving $120 per week. It was about the maximum I could afford and seemed like a nice round number (I could give $4 per week to 30 people, $3 to 40 people, $2 to 60, etc.). It was also high enough to put me on the overall givers leaderboard. I’ve since been pushed off, as more companies have started giving on Gittip. I haven’t felt compelled to increase my donation to get back on the home page, mostly because I don’t think I can compete with companies as an individual—the fact that I’m even in the same ballpark is surprising to me.

As I mentioned above, I wouldn’t define myself solely by my giving. I hope to one day receive substantially more than I give. Ideally, I could achieve financial independence through Gittip so I could dedicate more time to open-source projects. I’m not sure how realistic a goal that is, but I’m really happy that Gittip exists so I can have that dream—and I’m inspired by people like @ashedryden, who have proven that it’s possible.

Behaviorally, I visit the Gittip site a few times per week to check whether I’ve received any new tips and to reallocate my giving. I also check the page for the rubygems team, of which I am a member, mostly to see whether there are any new contributions. I also typically check the Ruby on Rails community page, to see where I rank, both as a giver and a receiver. And I check the charts page about once per week, just to get a sense of how the community is growing over time.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like me to share about my usage of Gittip.

[coilysiren]

Definitely activist! I'm crazy busy right now but would love to be able to help (as of there being a concrete thing for me to help with? A set of questions maybe?)

Although to be honest I follow Ashe or Teagan's lead on most things ^^

[ashedryden]

I'm happy to help out.

I'm a diversity advocate, but know about gittip because I've been a programmer for 13 years. Gittip has become a way to get compensated for a job that doesn't really exist as far as the industry is concerned, for work that most companies wouldn't create a position for. I educate people by writing resources and critique, speaking, and interacting directly with the community both online and off.

Most people find out about my gittip in a few ways:

• Every few months I'll tweet about it, explain what work the money goes to support, and talk about what I've been able to do with the support thus far.
• I have a moderately popular blog with a lot of resources that people reference frequently. At the bottom of each post I have information about by gittip and let people know that gittip is the way that I get compensated for the otherwise unpaid labor that goes into that.
• There's a link in the footer of my emails. I do a lot of email support for the community, so it's an easy way for people to compensate or thank me for personally helping them out with things.
• I'm in a lucky position that I've been easily discoverable to new gittip users because I've been on the front page for a while, so when they sign up it's a passive reminder to support my work.
• Indirectly because they've looked up my info online after I gave a talk, wrote an article, or was featured in some bit of media. My gittip link is in my twitter bio and on my website, the two places I devote most of my energy.

I use gittip because:

• It's easy. Other than initial setup or sometimes updating my profile, I don't have to interact much with the site. Automatic deposits without having to jump through hoops every week is definitely a huge win here. I have done other fundraising-types of things before, and it was a big investment of time and effort on top of the work I was already doing. Gittip doesn't create extra work for me.
• It's anonymous. If it weren't, I might feel compelled to change the way I do or say things or avoid certain topics to keep from offending larger supporters or the bulk of the supporter base.
• It's distributed risk. I often tell people that I have 200 internet strangers for bosses. If a handful decide to stop supporting me or can no longer do so, it doesn't impact me so much as if one boss at a job decided the same.
• It's community supported work for the community. It reminds me that people find this work valuable and want to see it done.

My goals have shifted over the past year plus from "help me buy cat food so my cats don't starve while I do this stuff" to having a base salary, with the end goal of matching the income I received as an independent developer/consultant/contractor. The majority of my income as it is right now comes from gittip; on top of that I do some consulting and some conferences help out with travel/accommodation expenses for the conferences I speak at.

Let me know if I can answer any other questions.

[tkwidmer]

What ashe said. While I'd love to replace my entire income and devote myself to work like RefugeRestrooms and coming up with other such things - my life has taken a turn at least for a little bit with an actual software job - so I've been putting most of my energy into that for the past couple of weeks. But gittip was and still is huge for me. It allowed me to justify spending as much time as I was (and still am on refuge) -- because i was actually making some money doing so. Before that, it was all just extra labor on top of my min wage job trying to pay the bills.

I think most of my traffic and donations came from friends and then from twitter where i spent most of my time posting about it. Probably some from my website too. And some from the refuge site itself where gittip was linked as a way to donate to the process.

I'd like to do more activism, but I felt like i needed a little stronger technical background to do so more adequately. I hope to use gittip again more and more in the future once I've gotten a little bit more technical background as a software engineer so that I can devote myself to less money making / and more enjoyable (and personally profitable work).

[chadwhitacre]

+1 for user interviews from @adamstac in private conversation.

[chadwhitacre]

@bmann is working on this, with a focus on the corporate patron side of the equation.

@duckinator is stepping up on #56 to do related work re: user advocacy.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @juliepagano at #49 (comment).