Sharing Our Take-What-You-Want Story
Gratipay ran a pilot project in take-what-you-want compensation—the practice of letting workers directly set their own salary—for almost two years. Lately we’ve been consolidating the lessons we’ve learned from this experiment and sharing them with the world, ahead of reimplementing take-what-you-want based on our experience the first time around.
Following a successful foray in the collaborative economy at Platform Cooperativism, Gratipay was represented at two events in France in May. The first was OuiShare Fest in Paris, alongside three other innovators on a panel entitled “New Ways of Measuring and Distributing Value: Experiments and Stories.” The second was a workshop convened by the Catalyst Collective in Lille, which has experimented with take-what-you-want in an entrepreneurship program for at-risk youth.
Around the same time, OpenSource.com published the first of a two-part series about open hiring and compensation at Gratipay. The second part followed last week.
Next month, we’ll be represented at the Abstractions software conference in Pittsburgh (Code & Supply hosted a warm-up conversation last week).
Take-what-you-want is the most interesting thing to emerge from our first four years. It’s a promising solution to the problem of distributing money within open communities of work, which furthers our mission to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We’re excited to share the results of our initial experiment with take-what-you-want, and we’re looking forward to offering it again on Gratipay in the future.
