Gittip is a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by. Gifts are weekly. The intention is for people to depend on money received through Gittip in order to pay their bills, and bills are recurring.
Gifts come with no strings attached. You don’t know exactly where your gifts come from, and the maximum gift from one person to another is $100 per week.
Gifts are public. The total amount you give and the total amount you receive is public. Participants on both sides of the equation are rewarded publicly for their participation.
You can sign in to the site with Twitter (and a few other options) and you can find people either by browsing Communities on Gittip or directly by searching for them using their Twitter handle.
the Gittip home page
Gittip has a minimalist interface. The intention is to provide a channel for small continuous donations to arrive at those who need them, mainly people who work to make the world a better place by their own unique personal contributions. To give money, you have to pay in through a bank tranfer, by credit card, or by sending some bitcoins. If you are on Gittip and you have inspired others to give to you, those receipts are accumulated in an account and you can either withdraw the funds or you can pass them on to others, giving in turn to those who need assistance in their work.
Gittip is described as an Open Company
Open companies are situated within the wider movement of free and open culture. Gittip itself provides a way for anyone building free culture, including employees and participants in an open company, to be reciprocally gifted by a community of like-minded individuals. The idea is that employees of an open company, along with all those who share in the wider task of building whatever it is the company “owns” (really it’s a commons) would receive the money they still need to pay their bills via Gittip or similar means.
Gittip is 20 months old and has 2376 active users.
1522 participants gave money in the past week.
1257 received money.
More than 25.000 people have joined Gittip, but the majority seems to be just looking around or “QUIETLY WATCHING THE GITTIP WORLD” as the saying goes.
If you have money and would like to give some – even small amounts – every week to some deserving activist, coder or changemaker, check out Gittip.
There are over 800 communities on Gittip, some of them only potential as each community starts with one member… The largest ones are interest groups ranging from various programming languages to writers, educators and musicians. Some communities are location based and others are of people sharing a common interest.
Start exploring Gittip here