Offer an open source perks program

[chadwhitacre]

The idea here is for companies to give their developers a mini-budget for spending on open source projects. We want to be under "Open Source Allowance" here—"$100/mo to spend on whatever open source projects you would like."

---

Was: offer khan-style splitting for employees of a company

@andyweissman suggested this a while back and it just came up on HN now that Khan Academy is doing this. Let employees of a company vote on how to split money.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @jeremiahlee in private email.

[chadwhitacre]

Here is where "khan-style splitting" is defined:

http://ejohn.org/blog/gittip-at-khan-academy/

[cakey]

Idea:
Let's model this as the 'opposite' to a gittip team.
Participants have money received from two types of sources - people and teams. Likewise, they should be able to gift money from two sources - themselves and teams.
A team admin can give each member a 'stipend' to give to recipients outside of the team.
On each person's profile, it will show money given both independently and through a team scheme. Likewise for receiving.

[chadwhitacre]

Right, I think we should be able to reuse the Members tab that we added. Now we need facilities for members to get a budget to spend.

[wyze]

@cakey Is the stipend a max amount or a fixed amount? If it is max amount, then that is fine, but if it is fixed, wouldn't there need to be a way for the team to get the money back if the entire stipend was not gifted?

[cakey]

Stipend is a max amount. A participants gifts take from the stipend first. If there are multiple stipends, they take in proportion of the max stipend for each team.

[ghost]

I'm thinking more Kiva Teams style. Individuals contribute on their own and assign each gift to a team.

[chadwhitacre]

@jeremiahlee Presumably only certain people have access to assign a gift to a certain team, yes?

[chadwhitacre]

Lending Teams are self-organized groups where members connect with each other and rally around shared lending goals.

http://www.kiva.org/teams

We've got self-organized communities on Gittip. Not sure yet how that might relate.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @ipmb on Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @adambrault via support@gittip.com:

I have a huge feature request, which I'm sure you've already considered—and likely in depth.

In order to better evangelize individuals and organizations to give, users should be able to join as a company or donor group and allocate a budget to members of their group.

Basically, users should be able to:

• join as a group (team/company/organization).
• add users to a group.
• assign a budget for each user on their team (either individual allocation or across the board) — If users do not allocate their budget, GitTip chooses how to disperse those amounts.

Donating companies show up listed separately from individuals in terms of "ranked givers". Individuals' donations made with company funds show up as individual donations.

I'm not saying anything you don't already know here, but my thought is that companies have a ton more money than individuals do, and if we can evangelize making this a common perk of technology companies without undermining the power of the individual donation, we should be able to dramatically increase the overall cash flowing through gittip. Make it easy for companies to donate money and get credit for it, and make their employees happy by getting to be recognized for their generosity, too, and I think you have the recipe for some serious growth.

[chadwhitacre]

Prioritizing one star per @chrisdev: there's a workaround (use the Khan code!).

[chadwhitacre]

+1-ish from @nslater (Engine Yard) via support@.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @RobSpectre via Hangout.

[chadwhitacre]

Bumping up to ★★☆ because this would be a great feature to have for company patrons but there are other more important and easier things such as #1199 and #1513.

[duckinator]

+1. (Just now got around to reading the entire post on ejohn.org)

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @zimbatm on Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

An alternative to this would be to partner with foundations like the Python Software Foundation, Django, jQuery, etc., and let them handle further distribution (off-site or on Gratipay).

[techtonik]

And it will also save 50% on taxes that are paid when people receive cash first and then pay.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from Yahoo in private email (emphasis added):

We seek to celebrate the donors in a branded way (either we grant money to our employees who select projects, or we solicit ideas from them and grant for them, something like that). So we'd want to co-brand and say something that acknowledges both [employee] and Yahoo for his sponsorship of this very important Node.JS module.

[chadwhitacre]

+3 from Salesforce during gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#948—"That's an effin' cool idea!"

[mattbk]

? #2571

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk Pretty sure that's a separate idea. You see it lining up with this?

[mattbk]

I wasn't sure whether parts of the same interface could work for both.

#2571:

• Company A deposits money and makes it available for payday
• Member 1 takes some of the money
• Member 2 takes some of the money

Khan-style:

• Company A deposits money for Khan-style
• Member 1 uses some of the money for Company B
• Member 2 uses come of the money for Company C

Both depend on adding members to a project and self-funding, and then the difference is whether that member can take and/or give.

This assumes that Khan-style uses projects as the main entity, or whether you would make a different entity. I'd argue for everything to be a project, and those who don't want to receive can turn off receiving.

[techtonik]

This is the interface that could be possible with the API we could provide:

Thanks to donors:
anonymous
frank [Yahoo]
elija [Westwood]
membrr1

This is the project page. People looking at this page can see where people were working and would be able to choose company that allows them to do monetary contributions to that project that they like.

[mattbk]

This assumes that Khan-style uses projects as the main entity, or whether you would make a different entity. I'd argue for everything to be a project, and those who don't want to receive can turn off receiving.

Regarding #4246, companies would be Projects, not ~users, right?

[chadwhitacre]

Benefits are far more reliable than perks, and cover more basic needs. Perks are like bonuses that companies offer to make their offer seem better than the competition, and can give a richer picture of the company culture, and what they value for their employees.

https://justworks.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-a-perk-and-a-benefit

[chadwhitacre]

Some brainstorming in slack about what an "open source perks program" could mean for us.

[techtonik]

It is good that there is a public slack archive. Bad that from GitHub activity Gratipay seems mostly dead.

[chadwhitacre]

There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead! 😆

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @kennethreitz in private phone call.

Also, P.S., Sentry uses https://www.brightfunds.org/.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @mxstbr on Twitter:

Yep yep, this is definitely a great idea as a job perk: "Spend $x/m on OSS projects you want to support"

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @benvinegar in "We Offered Matching Funds for Open Source — Here’s What Happened."

Companies could put up the budget and engage employees in deciding how to distribute it. At bigger companies, the barrier is bureaucracy. Employees don’t want to go to some financial officer and pitch someone who’s probably not going to understand. It’s too hard.

What if companies decided on a dollar amount to contribute to open source, say $10k, and divided that among employees or teams to decide which projects to fund? The commitment would already be unlocked at a higher level, and it would be a great way for companies to engage their engineers.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃