write up the story of take-what-you-want compensation

[chadwhitacre]

Take-what-you-want compensation is the most interesting thing we've discovered. We should write up a case study of our first go-round, to help spread the word about the new version.

See #534 (comment) and #551 for places this would/could land.

[chadwhitacre]

A brief history of Gratipay teams (rubygems/rubygems.org#500 (comment)):

Gratipay's teams feature began life in this commit from April 11, 2013, reached its first point of stability a few days later, got a rewrite a couple weeks later, on May 1, and then a second rewrite to its present form two months after that, on July 1 (with a blog post two days later).

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, so it looks like we ran with twyw for almost two years (I had thought it was only one): from July 3, 2013 through the Gratipocalypse, May 7, 2015.

[chadwhitacre]

How much money did we move? How many teams participated? It'd be good to look at other teams besides Gratipay, though Gratipay went the furthest with it.

[chadwhitacre]

We have all the data in the transfers table under context = 'take'. 17,642 rows between July 4, 2013, and April 30, 2015.

[chadwhitacre]

• All told, 336 people took $49,339.20 from 117 teams over 96 weeks.
• 102 people took $21,656.61 from Gratipay.
• 22 people took $13,939.35 from DrupalCoreTeam over 52 weeks (starting May 8, 2014).
• The remaining teams had fewer then 10 takers each.

bucket ($)	teams	aggregate ($)	% of total volume
10,000.00 - 21,656.61	2	35,595.96	72.1
1,000.00 - 9,999.99	4	5,946.14	12.1
100.00 - 999.99	19	6,849.45	13.9
0.00 - 99.99	92	947.66	1.9

bucket ($)	members	aggregate ($)	% of total volume
1,000.00 - 6,412.10	13	28,095.11	56.9
100.00 - 999.99	46	18,652.77	37.8
0.00 - 99.99	276	2,591.49	5.3

(I'm actually seeing some errors less than a dollar in some of these sums; I also see a -$0.01 sum for one team; haven't squeezed it out.)

[chadwhitacre]

tl;dr: 300+ people took about $50,000 from 100+ teams over almost two years.

(Though 59 people and 25 teams account for most of that.)

[justinxreese]

cc @swans-one

[chadwhitacre]

The strongest part of the story is Gratipay's own experience with it. We had 100+ people split over $20,000 over the course of almost two years. Maybe we should focus on those numbers instead of "300 / 50,000 / 100"?

[chadwhitacre]

The strongest part of the story is Gratipay's own experience with it.

It's also the one we have the most experience with. ;-)

For Drupal's part of the story, we can refer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttWfSC2m7Ic.

[chadwhitacre]

I rewatched the video w/ Drupal Core from 18 months ago, and made some rough notes. They're an important part of the take-what-you-want story.

[chadwhitacre]

I reached out to @YesCT via private email (hi if you're watching GitHub notifications! :-) for a link to the criteria they used for the old Drupal Gittip team.

[chadwhitacre]

Mail bounced.

[chadwhitacre]

How may customers have we had?

"We’ve processed over $1,000,000 in payments on behalf of N customers."

We have 176 teams currently, but of course most of the $1,000,000 was under Gittipay 1.0. How about ...

=> select count(*) from (select distinct on (participant) participant from exchanges where amount < 0) as _;
┌───────┐
│ count │
├───────┤
│  1592 │
└───────┘
(1 row)

[chadwhitacre]

Part of the importance of writing up this story is that it frees us up to let go of the takes table in the database, which looks like it will happen in gratipay/gratipay.com#4018.

[chadwhitacre]

#683 will close this.