add a field for funding goal

[chadwhitacre]

This comment from @therabidbanana (see #98) got me thinking:

I think a possible reason that more people haven't backed their tips is that they want to wait and see if gittip actually becomes reasonably viable before actually kicking in - which keeps it from being viable... a painful cycle to break out of, and exactly the kind of thing Kickstarter was made for.

One of the things that makes Kickstarter work is the clear funding goal: $3,000 in 30 days.

How about a facility on Gittip for stating a funding goal?

"My personal funding goal is to {give,receive} ________ per week."

Since gifts are ongoing for ever we don't get the nice urgency of Kickstarter, "only 10 days left!" It'd be more about a slow build over time. But it does give some sense of movement and accomplishment. I actually like the way Gittip feels like a train building up momentum. Since gifts are recurring, if Gittip stopped growing entirely we would still be moving $110 every week for quite a while. It's like we're ratcheting it up or something.

This could help satisfy @jacobian and @toastdriven's desire to give money but not receive any (see #61). Depending on how we implement it we could even preclude gifts to people who have explicitly set a funding goal of receiving zero dollars.

[mitechie]

My only concern with this is that it provides a mental reason to not do something. "Oh, it's only 5 days left...he'll never get there"

I know I've done that with kickstarter. It turns out less about doing the original goal, pay towards a good thing, and instead about "am I committing to something success/failure bound."

[chadwhitacre]

@mitechie So what would that look like in this context? I guess, "Oh, he's only 5% towards his personal funding goal. Must be a schmuck." Two thoughts:

1. The goal you set matters, and you can change your goal. Taking too long to reach $10,000 a week? Dial it back to $1,000. Hey, I'm 50% funded!
2. If we track funding goals over time then that will tell an important part of the story. "Alice started out shooting for $50 a week and reached it within two weeks. Then she went for $5,000 and that's taking longer but she's getting there."

Kickstarter depends on urgency. Gittip is about the slow build-up. Seems like we should be able to implement funding goals in a way that supports that.

[mitechie]

Bah, nevermind. I misread that you were attempting to build some of the urgency to match kickstarter. I was speaking directly to the case of "Oh this is cool, but it's only 20% funded with 2 days left...I'll pass" that I've experienced on kickstarter.

You're right, in gittip's case, it would be different since it's more of a "I'd like to get to xx/wk" and there's not the feeling of helping a lost cause that you can find in kickstarter.

[chadwhitacre]

Well, maybe I was thinking at first of trying to capture a sense of urgency, but I like the slow build-up much better. Good feedback.

[chadwhitacre]

Sorry, those last three belong on #43.

[chadwhitacre]

With this last changeset I started using the Python locale module to format numbers with thousand separators. To get it working on Heroku I had to run (via):

heroku config:add LANG=en_US

[chadwhitacre]

Deployed.