2.0 Feedback

[Sirjazzfeet]

Thanks for the invitation to the 'pivot'. I was confident from the transparent discussions and the values articulated that you were heading in the correct direction. 2.0 appears a nice step forward.

The unique selling point for us using Gratipay is clear, it's the closet thing to a real ideological alternative, the line of thinking which currently dominates our lives. There are similar services with cooler features and slicker functionality, and it's easy to get swept away with their instant gratification and short term self-aggrandization, but they appear a manifestation of a disempowering ideology, which is ultimately not useful. I'm glad to see 2.0 move further away from this ideology, to create something which doesn't just look or function new on the surface, but offers new technology from it's core.

The ideology of Gratipay seems at it's most simple, represented by it's heart logo, Love. You see other companies with such logos, Airbnb, but arguably this amount to propaganda given their systems and management. With Gratipay the same can't be said, it refuses to take a profit and works democratically, distancing itself from an ideology that unnecessarily pit's self-interest against collective-interest.

Gratipay not only refrains from profiteering, but enforcing collectivism, i.e. either through extracting wealth through taxation in order to improve the platform for everyone, or by embracing corporate structure to get stuff done. Many of your competitors appear to do both, which gives them a short term advantage in the resource and organisational department, which they can translate into providing a better service. I guess the challenge for Gratipay is to compete against high levels of resources and organisation without embracing exploitation, extraction and greed. If Gratipay can do this then it's cooperative nature will mean that for-profit will then struggle to compete, similar to Wikipedia.

Gratipay 1.0 offered liberation and flexibility, which got the exploitation and/or coercion out the way. However from a systemic context this provides the type of atomistic individualism and market logic that is compatible with neoliberalism and consumer choice. Therefore in order to make a difference in the world and to survive, Gratipay has to move away from individualism and towards greater collectivism. This move paradoxically benefits the individual when interests are aligned as they are, rendering a large amount of old conflict obsolete.

2.0 seems to be a good advancement along these lines, towards a system that matches it's ideals. I'd personally like to see far greater collectivism, whilst protecting individuals. Technological advancement is driving precarious conditions because the Reciprocal Feedback Loops of our economics are too individualistic to be applied to our collectivised environment, including open source culture. We need greater social logic and less market logic. Good work, looking forward to seeing the changes online.

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[elliottw]

Not sure this is the right place after reading the post, but it does say feedback.

Anyway, I have a slight aversion to each team needing an "owner". For my coworking space, I'm trying to build a place that is completely flat with no organizational structure, and I think that's inline with the gratipay vision, but I don't think having an owner is, and I think it leads to a slightly less robust organization if there is any bottleneck.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for the feedback and encouragement, @Sirjazzfeet!

I guess the challenge for Gratipay is to compete against high levels of resources and organisation without embracing exploitation, extraction and greed. If Gratipay can do this then it's cooperative nature will mean that for-profit will then struggle to compete, similar to Wikipedia.

Well said. Wikipedia, Mozilla, Linux, etc. have shown us that global-scale enterprises rooted in voluntary collectivism (collaborative individualism?) are possible. Gratipay asks: how can we make this the norm?

I have a slight aversion to each team needing an "owner".

@elliottw Hmmm ... the main driver for the new "owner" concept on Gratipay is that we don't want to allow funds to pool indefinitely on Gratipay, because that starts to make us look like a bank, and we want to steer clear of that (cf. #938). The "owner" is simply the user account that receives whatever money is left over each week after payroll.

For Catapult I believe you're mostly intending to use Gratipay for payments and not for payroll, correct? That is, you're looking to collect voluntary membership dues to fund the space, yes? In that case, having the ~catapultpgh user account be the owner for a Catapult team should work, no?

[elliottw]

We are mainly looking at Gratipay to collect donations, yes, but long term I am stepping away as "manager" of the space and would a decentralized structure. The problem with this is that the banking systems are not setup for 50 people to have various amounts of access to a single account.

The sort of work around I had in mind for this was for different members of the space to take responsibility for different space needs that also tie in financial needs.

For example, I could be in charge of our internet. I pay myself 150 dollars a month, I pay internet that is 140 dollars a month, I make 10 dollars a month for helping out the space.

The thing that makes catapult different from most coding projects is that our revenue should be 90 percent goods and services and 10 percent labor. Having a bank account with "rolling access" as the membership churns seems extremely problematic and tedious. So the work around is to lump labor and costs together and assign those to people.

[elliottw]

Sorry, to use ~catapultpgh as the owner and have the remainder of monies go into that account, is essentially kicking the can down the street. We will still have to find a way to have a shared bank account with rolling member access to pay bills.

I was also going to suggest a feature where new teammates could start at a different pay if accepted by the community. I'm trying to get someone to clean for catapult and it's a hard argument to say "well clean this week and make a dollar, clean next year and make 200 dollars!"

I'm not sure if the things I want are completely inline with your vision, but with the shift to teams, it does seem like we're getting closer.

[Sirjazzfeet]

Ye wasn't sure if this was in the correct place, perhaps email is better for general feedback.

@elliottw same here, prefer to have the funds in a collective account for the sake of democracy.

Not sure how this fits with the law, but perhaps a solution to keeping team balance could be to use tracking (virtual transmission) rather than transmission (physical transmission).

I don't think it matters too much where the money actually is, perhaps it's preferable in an account owned by your team, for flexibility on interest investment, distributed security and payments outside of team. So a work around could be to keep showing the team balance and keep adjusting it automatically, despite money being withdrawn straight into bank account. Amount shown can be edited by team member, which would require transparent logging and description of changes to balance. This could improve collective organisation by transparently tracking expenses and their relation to team amount. The IOU of the balance would simply be the responsibility of the team, rather than gratipay and it's provider, and such decentralisation of responsibility could also improve resilience of the network.

[chadwhitacre]

The IOU of the balance would simply be the responsibility of the team, rather than gratipay and it's provider, and such decentralisation of responsibility could also improve resilience of the network.

Maybe this is the better architecture here? Build a separate product for collaborative management of a single bank account. Gratipay then becomes an input into "CollabAccount" (or whatever). Could Loomio be extended in this direction, with decisions triggering release of funds?

[elliottw]

Another simpler idea:

instead of the kids eat first/double your income each week,
team decides on distribution, if team is size=1 then it's a no brainer
if no one makes a decision funds are split equally?? or some slightly smarter algorithm
I think the algorithm with which teams distribute funds has more social impact than most other parts of the app. I'd be curious about a model like "older kids look after younger kids" which I guess would be little like trickle down economics, but now that I type it, it doesn't sound so great.

For me personally with @catapultpgh, if we get approved, the biggest issue is that our work is much chunkier than in an open source coding project. Someone wants to clean the entire space each month, but currently they will be doing that for 1 dollar a week etc etc.

[chadwhitacre]

instead of the kids eat first/double your income each week,

Copied with a +1 to #1660.

For me personally with @catapultpgh, if we get approved, the biggest issue is that our work is much chunkier than in an open source coding project. Someone wants to clean the entire space each month, but currently they will be doing that for 1 dollar a week etc etc.

I think step one for @catapultpgh is collecting enough in membership dues to cover expenses. That's the biggest difference I see between {coworking ,hacker}spaces and open-source projects: expenses are waaaaaay higher, and they represent the biggest immediate funding need. No? And, in that case, taking expenses out before distributing remaining income as wages for labor would seem to be a more significant need (I guess that also falls under #1660).

Honestly @kaguillera and I should probably just stop in for a visit in a month or two once most of this upheaval is behind us, and we can talk with yer whole crew about what Gratipay has to offer and what @catapultpgh needs. I love that coworking/hacker spaces are turning out to be a significant part of Gratipay 2.0. Here's to meatspace! 🍖 🚀 🌠 👾

[elliottw]

Yes Chad, expenses are by far the majority. Right now there is about 4k a month for expenses and 500 or less for labor.

The one thing I was thinking of doing was splitting catapult fees so membership is donation based through gratipay, but "real estate" costs real money, but I think the long term goal is that our business is decentralized AND completely viable through donations.

I'm pretty sure we can hit our expenses once we flip the switch, it's just that the UI is pretty difficult for non-technical (i went to school for HCI so could help out threre), and I will probably have to walk people through the UI.

[chadwhitacre]

We were making some progress on the UI front but then all this Gratipocalypse floo-flah took over. Very much looking forward to getting back to product improvements, would love to work with you on that. :)

[elliottw]

Awesome!