Gittip is a platform for sustainable crowd-funding. It allows you to set up a small, anonymous, weekly cash gift to a person who is doing great work. Gittip launched six months ago, and currently has about 550 active users, exchanging about $1,400 per week in gifts. At launch, Gittip required an account on GitHub (a social network for programmers) in order to sign in. Now, it’s also possible to sign in using a Twitter account, and to pledge support to any Twitter account.
This change is important because it significantly expands the number of people that you can pledge support to using Gittip. GitHub is approaching 3 million total users, and Twitter announced today that they have 200 million monthly active users.
Giving to someone on Gittip is a way of saying thank you, and also a way to support future work with no strings attached. Now you can use Gittip to pledge support to musicians, artists, writers, activists, organizations and anyone else with a Twitter account whose work you feel is important and inspiring. Here are just a few examples to get you thinking about who inspires you:
- KvonBengtson is pursuing open source space flight.
- lisakristine is photo-documenting global slavery.
- rstevens is the author of Diesel Sweeties.
Once signed in with Twitter or GitHub, you can connect the other kind of account, too. If you accidentally create two Gittip accounts, you can merge them together by connecting both accounts to the same Gittip profile. All tips are moved to the new account.
Requiring an account on one of these networks in order to join Gittip helps to prevent fraud. It also helps with security, because it keeps Gittip out of the business of storing passwords (for now).
Per our roadmap from a couple months ago, the next priorities for Gittip are:
- Implementing payouts to non-US bank accounts
- Landing a visual design refresh
- Partnering with RubyGems.org
- Increasing code contributions
Now go find someone awesome in your Twitter feed, and Gittip them!
Chad Whitacre is the founder of Gittip.