Greetings, program! This is a blog for the Gittip gift economy project. You can read more details on the About page on the site itself, but the basic idea is that it’s a system for giving crowd-funded gifts to people who make the world better, so they can make the world better still.
Take John Resig. He’s an open source programmer and the author of the jQuery JavaScript library, currently working for Khan Academy. I actually ran into someone at a conference this past weekend who had just learned about jQuery at the conference(!). Suffice it to say that guy is late to the party, because pretty much the entire web programming community depends on jQuery. Imagine if Resig had applied himself to building a social network instead. And yet, while I’m sure he draws a nice salary, he isn’t a billionaire. What if you could anonymously give John Resig 32¢ a week, just to say thank you? Now you can.
What if 10,000 of us gave John 32¢ a week? I would trust him to do awesome things with it. Wouldn’t you?