Gittip - Github crowdfunding

The John and Kathryn McArthur Foundation scholarship, also known as the “ geniuses grant, ” is $ 500,000, paid in installments over five years, and is awarded annually to several dozen people who have, according to the foundation’s experts, the potential for outstanding creative achievements in their field. Among the laureates of this award are Tim Berners-Lee, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Matthew Stallman, Max Roach and many other people of various professions. The peculiarity of the award - laureates often find out that they were awarded an award, after the fact. In order to receive this grant, you do not need to submit an application or participate in a competition. The money goes to the laureates without any special efforts and without any conditions.

In the image and likeness of the “grant for geniuses”, Chad Whitaker created the Gittip crowdfunding service. Any owner of an account on Github can become a member of a kind of “mutual aid fund” - pay the authors of the projects you like or receive money yourself. How it works? Just log in to gittip.com through GitHab and link a payment card to your account. After that, you can enter in the search field github-name of the person you want to help financially, and if this person has already joined the fund, he will receive the amount you have chosen every week. If not, it will be listed as potential recipients. Naturally, no one collects any money without the knowledge of the recipients themselves - everything is fair. Money is transferred only to activated accounts. If you wish, you can even exclude your name from all lists. In the future, an opportunity is being considered to send notifications to potential recipients, just as social networks offer to send invitations to friends who have not yet registered.

Unlike traditional donations, the initiative comes from the one who wants to give money, and not from the one who wants to receive it. However, if Gittip has an API, you can embed widgets on your pages, and then it will be just another convenient way to collect donations, which is also not bad. Unlike Kickstarter or Flattr, money is not collected in advance, but for work already done. Fundraising is personalized, not tied to a specific project, payments are regular.

Gittip works only about one and a half months. About three thousand participants have already registered on it (a week ago it was twice less). Chad Whitaker conducts business openly - statistics is available for each participant, the source of the site is publicly available. He hopes that this model will be able to extend beyond the limits of Gitkhab. His goal is to make sure that every creative person who has achieved notable success in his business regularly receives from the community a sufficient amount of money for life. Without any conditions and obligations, just as a reward for their work.
')