Gratipay

= "Gratipay's mission is to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love".

URL = https://gratipay.com/

Description

Chad Whitacre:

"Gratipay is a payments startup with a mission to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We are pursuing our mission with a product that offers weekly recurring crowdfunding for open organizations. Most of our customers are FLOSS projects, who use us as one of their donation options. A couple key customers are co-working spaces. We've been around for about four years, and we've processed over $1,000,000 on behalf of about 1,500 customers.

One of the most unique aspects of Gratipay is that we don't generate profit simply by "skimming 5 percent off the top." Instead, we're funded on our own platform just like the rest of our customers. Moreover, from the start, we have tried to operate as openly as we responsibly can. The payments industry is a heavily regulated one, not known for its affinity with open culture. Despite that, we have innovated in areas such as product development, partnerships, public relations, and security — and, of course, hiring and compensation." (https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/5/employees-let-them-hire-themselves)

Discussion

Open Hiring at Gratipay

Chad Whitacre:

"Gratipay operates on the assumption that "jobs" are a mechanism for creating artificial scarcity, something imposed on the infinite abundance of available work in the world. The dignity and pleasure of work is a basic human right. When we talk about cultivating an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love, an important aspect of our vision is a world in which everyone has ample opportunity to freely participate in meaningful communities of work.

Open source is just the beginning. We envision a world in which economic activity and voluntary labor merge into one.

This is notoriously difficult because of money's propensity to introduce extrinsic motivation into voluntary organizations, thereby "crowding out" those who had been acting out of intrinsic motivation and ruining what made the organization attractive to volunteers in the first place. Solving this problem means answering two questions.

First: Who gets to participate? Who has a right to a portion of the money in a given project or organization? At Gratipay, we wanted to find a way for open organizations to retain the porous boundaries and wonderful, welcoming inclusivity of open source projects, rather than reverting to the elitist hiring practices and rigid boundaries of the traditional firm. The solution is a fairly natural extension of existing open source best practices (as we'll see in a moment when we discuss Drupal).

The second question is the harder one: Who gets how much? Once you're "in," who decides how much of the available money is yours? I plan to lay out the specifics in a future article, but Gratipay's basic answer is pretty straightforward: you do! In the same way that "pay-what-you-want" gives the customer control over the amount they pay an organization for a product or service, the "take-what-you-want" system we discovered gives workers direct control over the amount of money they receive for their labor.

Take-what-you-want is a promising solution to the problem of distributing revenue without poisoning intrinsic motivation. Together with open hiring, it may unlock the possibility of a new, more harmonious relationship between the individual and society.

Open hiring and take-what-you-want are not mere theory. During a two-year, boot-strapped pilot, Gratipay saw 100+ organizations distribute almost $50,000 to 300+ individuals. Two organizations drove 72% of the dollar volume in our pilot: Drupal, and Gratipay itself." (https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/5/employees-let-them-hire-themselves)

More Information

• see also Liberapay, a recurrent donations platform.