Gittip has acquired the Shields project.
Gittip is a platform for giving money every week to awesome people and teams. We launched in June, 2012, and we currently have 1,600 weekly active users moving $5,300 per week.
Shields is a great example of an awesome team that should be able to use Gittip for its funding. Having Shields in-house enables Gittip to discover the pain points of, and drive best practices for, funding a team on Gittip. (Gittip itself is also funded on Gittip, but that’s a special case.)
What is Shields? Shields is an effort to standardize the metadata images that have become common on open-source READMEs over the past couple years. Here is an example from the Ruby on Rails README:
Olivier Lacan started the Shields project in January of 2013, when he grew frustrated with the inconsistency across the status image implementations of various services. Olivier saw that a professional and consistent design across all of these services would be in the best interest of open-source developers everywhere, so he opened Photoshop and began building PNG images. Joined by Nicholas Acker and others, PNGs from the Shields project have since been adopted by Travis CI, Code Climate, Gemnasium, Gemfury, and Coveralls.
Gittip founder Chad Whitacre met Olivier during Heroku’s Waza conference in February, 2013, and eventually got involved with the Shields project’s effort to build Shields.io, a high-performance, on-demand web service for dynamic metadata images. Shields has clearly demonstrated demand with its static PNGs. Shields.io will make it easy to offer Shields to many more project metadata providers, and will remove the burden of hosting status images from participating providers.
Olivier will continue to manage the Shields.io project within Gittip. The repo has been moved from Olivier’s GitHub account to the Gittip organization, and has been renamed from “shields” to “shields.io” to indicate the emphasis on the web service going forward. We’ve set up a Shields_io Twitter account and a Shields team on Gittip.
True to our shared love of openness, the agreement for Gittip to acquire Shields was reached over the course of two live-broadcast video conferences (one, two), and was submitted for final approval to our respective communities through our issue trackers (one, two). Here’s a screenshot of Chad and Olivier finalizing the deal:
As Olivier says, “I believe making Shields a part of Gittip will bring about even more amazing contributions to this project.” We’re delighted to welcome Shields to Gittip, and we look forward to launching Shields.io and providing even more useful project metadata to the open-source community!
Visit the repo to help build Shields.io.
Use Gittip to help fund the team behind Shields.io.