Gittip business contingency plan

[patcon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_plan

IRC

Was just thinking on what would happen to the Gittip project, a project that's even now financially supporting many people around the world in a real way, if something happened to Chad.

We should probably think on how to make Gittip Chad-getting-hit-by-a-bus-proof.

Thoughts:

1. Make sure all critical systems are accessible by at least one other person or will be made so in the event of Chad becoming unable to lead the project. This might include one of:
   1. Chad's wife having access to the master password of a password vault that stores credentials for all of Gittip. She should know of the expectation that she get this master password to someone, and who she should give it to. This should be something that's very easy to do and will take almost no effort on her part. Expecting her to gather information under the circumstances would be unrealistic.
   2. Some trusted member of the Gittip team having joint access to all critical accounts under normal circumstances.
   3. Use Shamir's Secret Sharing crypto to share a key fragment for decrypting the master password to a vault, so that, for example, 4 people would need to collectively decide to gain access in order to do so. The idea is that you can trust that 4 independent people wouldn't conspire to surreptitiously decrypt the vault (ie. presumably maliciously). This seems a little over-engineered, when a non-technical solution might work, but wouldn't actually be that hard.
2. Others should be familiar with the routine processes that Chad goes through -- deploy, payday, PayPal payouts, Bitcoin payouts, managing Balanced, etc. (@whit537: What else am I missing?)
   1. Any measure would be greatly weakened if we didn't exercise the emergency ability regularly. We would probably want to choose a trusted person with which to alternate these routine tasks, perhaps on a weekly or monthly basis, as part of our modus operandus.

This is a WIP. Anything else I'm missing? Does this strike anyone as premature optimization? Be honest :)

Action items

ie. What closes this issue?

• Rough doc of business contingency/succession plan
• Plan for actual and realistic changes to our process and way of operating, in order to make Gittip not implode in tragic circumstances. Implementation could be separate issues, but at the very least, we should know what we have to spin off into other issues.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_continuity_planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_planning

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[patcon]

For the record, there are service like these, but I think they're silly:
https://www.planneddeparture.com/
http://www.securesafe.com/

[ehmatthes]

This is a WIP. Anything else I'm missing? Does this strike anyone as premature optimization? Be honest :)

This does not strike me as premature at all. Gittip offers something fundamentally different than other crowdfunding platforms I've seen. I want to see Gittip survive as an institution, not as Chad's project.

Chad has been working hard to make Gittip not overly dependent on himself, and I think this issue aligns quite well with that vision.

[pjf]

This does not strike me as premature optimisation. Increasing Chad's bus number is also on the critical path for him ever taking a holiday. :-)

Although we should probably be sub-tasking the hell out of this (a bus factor milestone in github is a really good way of doing this).

[patcon]

I like the idea of doing a "drill" where chad intentionally gtfo's for a week, and we see how we can handle that. So perhaps we could make a milestone for that?

EDIT: Clarified, as I originally misread @pjf's comment as "This does ** strike me as premature optimisation."

[rummik]

This could be interesting :P

[patcon]

heh. for better or for worse, I created a milestone: whit537 Murder Mystery Week

[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! 😞 💃