The promise and peril of Gittip

Gittip is an interesting and expanding financial experiment in the open-source community.

Though I’ve yet to receive a single dime through the site (and appear to be the first person in all of North Dakota to have signed onto it) – I think it’s a great idea for two main reasons:

  1. It’s focused on long-term support, rather than fire-and-forget fundraising.
  2. It anonymizes donations, which is a key concern for independent journalism and open-source design.

In my view, here are some key improvements Gittip can make:

  • Eliminate registration for donors

Online retailers found out a long time ago that requiring registration sends your customers elsewhere. Asking potential donors to register when they have their wallet open is a roadblock.

  • Add monthly and biweekly giving periods

Most people have monthly budgets.  They may take weekly trips to the grocery store, sure, but if Gittip is there to “pay a mortgage”, then its weekly structure should be supplemented by more traditional finance periods – on both the donor and recipient side.  Biweekly ought to be easy to implement.  Monthly could be kludged onto the “Nth week of the month.”

  • Integrate incoming lump-sum payments with user-defined outgoing stability

Gittip seems to editorialize too much on the donor side, when it ought to be focused more on the recipient side.  Lump-sum donations could be integrated into a sustainable structure by setting a minimum lump sum, say $120.

On the disbursement side, recipients ought to be able to customize the fraction of fixed donations they get every period, for example, the option to spread any lump sum over the next N number of periods, whether that be 52 weeks, 36 months, or even 1 if the user wants one-offs immediately.