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Gittip at Khan Academy

ejohn.org

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Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#21

Post by jashkenas »

shmageggy wrote: post #19
jashkenas wrote: post #16

I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try. On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool. But on the other hand, when so many successful busines…

Does NYT have a policy about taking on outside work or accepting money from outside sources? If NYT means New York Times, is this something to do with journalistic integrity? I liked the author's suggestion about donating unwanted tips to charity or turning them back around into tips.

Yes. When you're working in the newsroom, you generally need to steer clear of accepting any gifts, free services, or free products. It really matters when it's from a company that the Times has covered, or might write about in the future -- but that's a pretty wide net, and most startup employees would arguably fall into that category. The Khan Academy's sponsored donation program certainly would.

Here's the actual language:

    Staff members may not accept gifts, tickets, discounts, 
    reimbursements or other inducements from any individuals 
    or organizations covered by The Times or likely to be 
    covered by The Times. (Exceptions may be made for trinkets 
    of nominal value, say, $25 or less, such as a mug or a cap 
    with a company logo.) Gifts should be returned with a polite 
    explanation.
From this little gem of a handbook: http://nytco.com/pdf/NYT_Ethical_Journalism_0904.pdf

... it's the Times' internal ethics rulebook specifically aiming at the conundrums of journalism -- but I think that quite a lot of it applies to ethical business practices in general.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#22

Post by ronaldx »

jeresig wrote: post #13
olalonde wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of supports parent's point. If the creator of CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Underscore.js only gets 806$/year, us unknown developers will probably get the equivalent of a cup of coffee per year. That being said, I do hope Gittip becomes more popular.

That's true - although that should be an incentive to write and release good Open Source code! Even if a single person gives you $0.25/week (the minimum amount) you'll get $13/year. We're attempting to give most developers at least $1/week - and I should emphasize that this is only from Khan Academy . Just because we're giving this amount it doesn't mean that these devs won't get money from other sources. I, personal…

This message is very confusing for me.

I'm happy that you're finding personal benefit from Gittip. If it allows or helps you to keep providing great work to the community, that's excellent for everyone.

However, the numbers you quote are not good. $13 is an amount that a Bangladeshi garment worker earns in a week or so. It's nobody's aspirational goal to earn that in a year.

It may be the case (in the wider population) that such disproportionately small rewards actually discourage contributions compared to volunteerism, as it provides a (very bad) point of reference to compare the value of open source work to paid commercial work.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#23

Post by mercuryrising »

jashkenas wrote: post #16

I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try. On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool. But on the other hand, when so many successful busines…

Just an idea, but if you get a bunch of tips coming in, that'd be awesome if you tip them to projects that you use. You probably have a pretty good idea of what the cool things on the horizon might be.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#24

Post by whit537 »

jashkenas wrote: post #21
shmageggy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does NYT have a policy about taking on outside work or accepting money from outside sources? If NYT means New York Times, is this something to do with journalistic integrity? I liked the author's suggestion about donating unwanted tips to charity or turning them back around into tips.

Yes. When you're working in the newsroom, you generally need to steer clear of accepting any gifts, free services, or free products. It really matters when it's from a company that the Times has covered, or might write about in the future -- but that's a pretty wide net, and most startup employees would arguably fall into that category. The Khan Academy's sponsored donation program certainly would. Here's the actual…

I had a go-round on this with Gabe Stein of FastCo.Labs. Since Gittip is anonymous in the particulars I thought maybe that would get around the journalistic conflict of interest, but Gabe articulated how that probably wasn't sufficient because there's always the threat of finding out (as with jashkenas and Khan in this case).

Queued up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OerW0Q_2_7o#t=32m03s

Not sure yet what, if anything, is to be done about this. Gabe is experimenting with Gittip as well:

https://www.gittip.com/gabestein/

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#25

Post by whit537 »

ianterrell wrote: post #17
Lerc wrote: post #9

The granting employees the $5 tip a week idea is pretty good. There are a lot of businesses out there that see the value of open source but don't currently fund development. There are certainly companies out there where the reason for not funding is more logistical than financial. Giving employees the ability to send money to where they see it can do the most good would be a great way to target worthy projects. With…

This seems like something Gittip.com could offer as a feature: employees can log in and pick who to contribute to, and the company account they're associated with automatically makes the payment. Reduce that logistical hurdle to a signup. :)

Andy Weissman from USV suggested that on a skype call we had. Unfortunately that was before I started doing open calls so I can't link to it. :-/

Ticketed: https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues/1153

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#26

Post by gazarsgo »

I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#27

Post by jashkenas »

jeresig wrote: post #20
jashkenas wrote: post #16

I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try. On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool. But on the other hand, when so many successful busines…

I'm really happy that you've signed up! Amusingly I'm in a very similar boat to you. I'm fairly certain that almost all the money that I'm receiving on Gittip is due to my work on jQuery - which I haven't actively worked in quite a few years. One way in which Chad explained it to me, that resonated, was that Gittip can be better thought of as a "genius grant". People are giving you money not to support a specific thi…

Hah. I'm afraid that -- between being currently funemployed, having just had all of my worldly possessions (at least for this year) stolen out of the back of my car last week, and discovering that travel insurance doesn't really cover it very well ... I can certainly think of a few good uses for it ;)

I'm afraid that I'm still "actively" working on everything (except for Ruby-Processing, which has been passed along), but it's all on a light simmer on the slow burner. More excitingly, there's a new OSS project, still in the early planning stages, which I'm pretty jazzed about.

Seriously though, thanks for the nudge. Much of the time, open source can feel like a slog through a bottomless pit for inane GitHub issues, with the occasional diamond in the rough. Your article is making open source feel more like a friendly love-in tonight.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#28

Post by whit537 »

olalonde wrote: post #8
jeresig wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the developer, but in the case of jashkenas we're trying to give him $15.50/week, which is $806 per year - certainly nothing to sneeze at! That's almost a new Macbook Air! Or, if he's so inclined, a large yearly donation to the charity of his choice. There is definitely a snowball effect though. Once I signed up for Gittip people started to give me tiny amounts (like $0.25/week). It built up-and-up over ti…

This kind of supports parent's point. If the creator of CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and Underscore.js only gets 806$/year, us unknown developers will probably get the equivalent of a cup of coffee per year. That being said, I do hope Gittip becomes more popular.

Gittip is designed to grow slowly and shrink slowly. It's designed to be relatively stable over the long term so that you can depend on it to pay your bills. There are three ways for "unknown" developers to receive significant money on Gittip:

1) When a famous developer accepts tips despite the fact that they don't need them, and then regifts them to "unknown" developers that are known to them, perhaps as the people behind the scenes on the projects they're famous for.

2) When you set up an (opaque) project account such as ReadTheDocs has done: https://www.gittip.com/readthedocs/. ReadTheDocs can split that under the hood however they want.

3) When you set up a (transparent) team account and everyone on the team gets to take some of the money given to the team. This is a relatively new feature, see: https://medium.com/building-gittip/eba0a27825b8.

Again, though, funding will always grow slowly. Gittip is for the long term.

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#29

Post by whit537 »

gazarsgo wrote: post #26

I had an excellent exchange with Chad recently on twitter (and then Github Issues) where we went through a transient GitHub OAuth issue that Github ended up acknowledging via email as being an error on their side. I feel much more confident in him and the gittip service where initially I felt some hesitation and doubt about the trustworthiness of the service.

:D

Re: Gittip at Khan Academy

#30

Post by jashkenas »

mercuryrising wrote: post #23
jashkenas wrote: post #16

I've long felt conflicted about accepting tips through Gittip, but John's nice argumentation here persuaded me to give it a try. On the one hand, working on open source software (especially many years after the original projects have shipped, and you've moved on to other things) is really about the love -- a hobbyist's satisfaction of polishing a well-honed tool. But on the other hand, when so many successful busines…

Just an idea, but if you get a bunch of tips coming in, that'd be awesome if you tip them to projects that you use. You probably have a pretty good idea of what the cool things on the horizon might be.

That, and perhaps even better -- I have some tireless contributors to projects like Backbone who really deserve the thanks. For (one, good) example, @braddunbar is a shining paragon of helpful and polite open source contributions.
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