Gratipay 2.0

Last month, we warned that “it will be hard” for us to survive the demise of our vendor and close partner, Balanced Payments. Then we discovered that it “couldn’t be harder”: we went out of business, due to legal concerns that came to light while migrating away from Balanced. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we have relaunched under new terms of service.

Legal concerns put an end to our old model. Business vision is driving our new model. The purpose of this post is to explain to you, our users, what changes we’ve made, and how you can get back on track as a receiver on Gratipay 2.0. But first, let’s start with why we made the changes we did.

Open Work

Gratipay’s mission is to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. When we launched nearly three years ago, we initially pursued our mission through a strong focus on giving to individuals. We talked about distributed genius grants, and celebrated individuals who were able to achieve funding milestones. However, it quickly became apparent that focusing on individuals breeds resentment, without really changing the game economically for most people. Less than a year after our launch, we introduced a Teams feature to explore a different approach.

Our Teams feature has shown exciting promise as an answer to the problem of financing voluntary projects. We have found that it clearly contributes to our mission. However, trying to pursue both distributed genius grants (or other variants of giving to individuals) and teams has led to a muddy product. Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away, and so today we are letting go of distributed genius grants, in order to focus exclusively on Gratipay Teams. We now intend to pursue our mission by gathering a network of companies and organizations of all sizes that believe in open access to work.

Why are jobs scarce when work is so abundant?

There are over five million open issues on GitHub. That’s a lot of work! Certainly, the work available on GitHub requires a baseline of computing access and literacy, and some of it requires trusted access to sensitive data. A portion of this work falls under someone’s formal job description. But even with those caveats, there remains a remarkable abundance of work on GitHub freely available to many a sufficiently motivated individual — and there is way more of the world’s work that is not on a GitHub issue.

Can we cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love by opening up access to this abundance of work in the world, and finding a way to fund it? That’s our aim with Gratipay 2.0: payments and payroll for open work.

Teams 2.0

Gratipay’s Teams feature is our way of streamlining the process of offering, finding, and financing open work, and the biggest change we’ve made is to increase the importance of this feature. Teams are now a first-class entity (they used to be just a special kind of user account). Most significantly, instead of giving to other users, now you can only give to teams. However, teams don’t carry a balance. They redistribute all of their money each week to an owner and zero or more members, which are all regular user accounts.

Furthermore, we’ve implemented an application and approval process for new teams on Gratipay. We want the teams receiving money on Gratipay to understand our mission and our brand values, and to be on board with the concept of open work. Therefore, our application asks these four questions:

1. What product or service does your team provide?
2. What is your revenue model?
3. How can other people get involved with your team?
4. How do you share revenue with contributors?

The application process includes a public comment period, during which the Gratipay community can weigh in with feedback to help applicants improve their application. This comment period also serves to ensure that teams on Gratipay are aligned with our values and accepted by the community.

Here are the more mundane changes we made along with narrowing our focus to teams:

• Configuring PayPal as a payout route is now self-service (previously you had to email support to have us set this up for you).
• We dropped bitcoin (here’s why).
• You can no longer pool money indefinitely on Gratipay. The team owner has to have a working bank or PayPal account configured for a team to receive payments at all, and team members must have a working bank or PayPal account to receive distributions from the team.
• We removed personal funding goals, since the focus of giving is no longer on individuals (and we’ve removed goal from the tip.json API).
• We removed the tips.json API, since that was scoped to users. We’ll add a parallel API for teams in the future.

There are more known issues with the transition to Gratipay 2.0 that we will be working to resolve in the coming weeks. A couple highlights:

• Closing accounts is currently disabled to prevent further payouts under our old terms of service. We will bring it back once it is modified to fit our new terms of service.
• We are still finalizing our revised Payroll feature for distributing revenue to multiple team members in addition to the team owner. As of today, only a team’s owner can receive payouts.

Getting Back On Track

Our hope and intention is that the majority of current Gratipay users will be able to move their payments to a new Gratipay Team if they so choose. If you received money on the old Gratipay, and want to receive money on Gratipay 2.0, here is what to do:

1. Apply for a Gratipay Team. If you need help filling out the application, please ask us on GitHub. We’ll be happy to help.
2. We will review your application. We are hoping to quickly approve as many users of the old Gratipay as possible. The criterion is whether you are offering open work that is consistent with our mission and brand.
3. If we approve your application, we will migrate the weekly payments from your Gratipay user account to your new Gratipay Team, and you’ll start receiving them as the owner of the team instead of receiving them directly. Your next payout will include any balance you’ve accumulated on Gratipay to date.

You have until August 19, 2015 (90 days) to migrate your incoming payments from your Gratipay user account to a new Gratipay Team; this will also pay out your current balance. On that date, we intend to clear all remaining payments to Gratipay users, and to clear the balance of any user that is not an owner or member of a team, by refunding the money back to the sources it originally came from.