"The people who are giving do so because they expect something in return."
I believe they don't. Gift tips have no strings attached on either side. It's like employment at will, where either party is free to call it off at any time.
"[E]ither the receiver is tied to that nebulous expectation of production, or they can take a break and risk losing whatever funding they received before and the resulting need to build that up again."
I think it's a matter of telling your story openly and transparently. If people see me working productively for a year and then I blog about how I'm burned out and plan to take a break for a month, I would expect my funders to understand and not totally bail on me. I mean, I could set up visits around the country and have a nice vacation and still keep the story rolling. If I'm finding my living on Gittip I have to have a relationship with my anonymous funders and trust them. The Internet lets us have a relationship with the anonymous crowd.
Gittip wants to make it easier for receivers to tell their story. See:
I believe you when you and others say they don't expect specific results and no-strings attached, I just feel like it is human nature that when we give something of value, particularly money, we expect something in return. That's because money is inherently tied up into the idea that you get something of value for it. I'm not sure you can really break that. Perhaps it is a non-issue in practice.
The site is http://www.kodefund.com. It is somewhat of a Kickstarter only for open source projects, and you can also do a "reverse" project which helps you to get both funding and someone else to work on your idea, whether a library or bug fix or whatever. I've tried to further distill some of the ideas here: http://www.kodefund.com/about/. I agree that it is someone else's thread, so that is the last time I'll link it here.
I do like your open dev model. It is interesting to see problems so quickly turn into issues that anyone can work on.
I've had users sign-up, I've had someone say it works on the Google DNS, but you aren't the first with DNS errors. I'm hosting it on gandi's DNS, I wonder what I'm not doing right.
I believe they don't. Gift tips have no strings attached on either side. It's like employment at will, where either party is free to call it off at any time.
"[E]ither the receiver is tied to that nebulous expectation of production, or they can take a break and risk losing whatever funding they received before and the resulting need to build that up again."
I think it's a matter of telling your story openly and transparently. If people see me working productively for a year and then I blog about how I'm burned out and plan to take a break for a month, I would expect my funders to understand and not totally bail on me. I mean, I could set up visits around the country and have a nice vacation and still keep the story rolling. If I'm finding my living on Gittip I have to have a relationship with my anonymous funders and trust them. The Internet lets us have a relationship with the anonymous crowd.
Gittip wants to make it easier for receivers to tell their story. See:
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/133
This is really WFP's thread, but I'm interested in seeing your site.