It's fun to read through their bug tracker and read discussions with their payment processor and look at debates on how different corporate minutia should be handled.
Even if you're not interested in Gittip (and I am, I think it's a very interesting funding model) the open company model that they follow should be quite inspirational.
The really inspirational part, to me, is the follow-through. A lot of people pay lip service to openness, but very few actually commit to it. I really love the idea behind Gittip, but I'm even more impressed with the way they're doing it.
Agreed. I chatted with Chad Whitacre (the creator of Gittip) recently and was impressed with how "all-in" he is on this. He's receiving 100% of his funding through Gittip, taking in no outside contributions and even doing no outside consulting work. He should certainly be lauded for this, few have the commitment to execute. I assume at some point either Gittip will be bringing in enough money to allow him to do this forever or he'll have to bail/get a side job. Not sure how long that'll take but I really hope he succeeds!
The full story is a bit more complex, but, yes: my wife and kids and I are sacrificing financially so that I can work full-time on Gittip. When I work on Gittip part-time, it flatlines. When I work on Gittip full-time, it grows. I'm grateful to have consulting work available to me, but at this point I'm so wrapped up in Gittip that I really just can't concentrate on other work.
I'm netting almost $200/wk on Gittip right now (thank you!) and if that gets to $800/wk by the end of 2013 I'll be the happiest kid in America. Gittip will be almost born. I'm encouraged that that's only a 4x increase.
That said, if Gittip works for me it'll only be because it's working for many other people as well. My focus in the next month or three is going to be on roughing in the features like communities and projects and funds and friend-finding that will help Gittip work for everyone and will get money moving through the system. Then the focus will shift again to building up the contributor community around Gittip, once the pieces are in place to actually get people paid for working on Gittip.
Gittip is almost a year old. If it's going to fly, we'll know within another year. I'm hopeful! :D
I wish Gittip all the success in the world but I'm afraid this is a big barrier to getting anything written about the company, and that can only hurt. It's not only TechCrunch that's going to balk at this, I can't see any news organization wanting to get scooped by their own source. I don't think taking the other party's needs into account when running a business is necessarily bending your principles. Maybe recording the call for release after the story comes out is a way to meet in the middle.
If reporting a 'scoop' was the only kind of valid journalism then I might agree with you, but it isn't and the fact that TC relies on that form of journalism so heavily is reflective of their shortcomings rather than issues or barriers for Gittip.
Journalism is also about providing a narrative that provides the reader deeper understanding of a topic in question. There's easily space for that kind of journalism to exist in conjunction with the raw data of individual conversations that take place to generate that narrative. In the same way that data journalism takes data available to anyone and makes it palatable I would expect the same could easily be done in this case if the journalist felt the story was engaging enough.
Nyah, I love what this guy did and how he's sticking to his principles. It's smart too: his approach itself becomes newsworthy vs. swimming with the rest of the fish.
Classy way to hande the TC reply too. It was clearly a d--k response, but he didn't even comment on it. Just put it out there (in the spirit of openness) to let others draw their own conclusions about the way TC handled it.
TechCrunch's relevance has long been on the decline anyway. Soon enough they'll be begging for stories.
As I understand it, part of the point of Gittip's policy of openness is that there are no scoops. Scoops occur when only one party has important information (usually that someone else would rather keep hidden), and that's not supposed to happen.
I don't think taking the other party's needs into account when running
a business is necessarily bending your principles.
This sentence is sufficiently vague as to be basically content-free. Of course any given action on the part of gittip isn't "necessarily" bending their principles, until it is. Here, if Techcrunch's "needs" include having a scoop, then accommodating that need would bend their principles. QED.
And hey, the whole thing got them on the front page of HN. It's not the first time. It may be working.
The thing about techcrunch's response is that the guy doesn't even try to make something work. If Ycombinator and other start ups decided to stop doing anything with techcrunch it would be over. Obviously TC has clout, but that doesn't mean they should piss in the well and ignore a great story. They should have capitalized on the fact that Chad stuck to his guns and seen if they could make it work. The could have posted the video themselves and tried to be innovative. Instead they wasted his time and treated him poorly.
Gittip is a great concept and Chad has done an amazing job building community based on the ideals of the community. He has created something that has value. I'm glad Techcrunch doesn't get to leach off his innovation and creativity.
I would've been happy to look harder for a compromise, but clearly he wasn't interested in wasting his time with me. And why should he? TechCrunch has no shortage of stories. Gittip is peanuts.
He could've participated in the open call just to see what it was like, and there is a story there in and of itself. If TC was interested in tech journalism, they would have agreed to it, but sadly they're interested in page views and maintaining their "too good for you" image.
Keep up your awesome work and transparency, which is incredibly important and desperately needed in transactional businesses. Transparency builds trust.
I think an embargo would be a good place to start. Suggest that the Skype session will be reported, but only published after the article goes live. In fact, TC has a whole series of videos on their blog [1], so I can't imagine this type of interview would be too out of line.
I agree. TechCrunch has jumped the shark a long time ago, and uses the weight of its name to focus on articles that have high pageviews. This reflects extremely poorly on TC -- the TC author could've easily agreed to the open call and participated in the open initiative OP feels strongly about.
The tone of that exchange struck me as very naïve. Furthermore, the entire thing seems like “transparency theatre”, in that I suspect the only people in the world who give a hoot about what went down during the interview are the participants themselves.
Time to put down the Scoble koolaid and do transparency where it counts.
It really depends on what you're trying to do. I think running gittip as an art project / science experiment is good for them... but does missing a mention in techcrunch positively affect the outcome of their business?
Business / product design / commerce / fashion is all about making compromises to further a larger vision. Art / science is all about a POV / exploring. I think that's where it differs.
haha. Chad, I love you, but I'm never introducing you to a reporter again :)
As you know, we at Balanced are trying to encourage openness as well [1], but recently made the decision to not video record and publish (or live stream) guest speakers that come into our office. We feel this actually promotes a more honest and open discussion for the attendees. We may revise this decision, but it seems to be going well so far. We're also working on events specifically for remote audiences. Those will be recorded and published.
I actually really love the way that Balanced is finding its own definition for what an open company is. It's so much more powerful than if we always agreed on everything. And I hope you know you can call me privately any time you think I've truly gone too far, and we'll find a solution together.
Hey I don't know if you'd be up for it, but I'd love to try out this open interview format on daniellemorrill.com and we can see how it goes. Contact info is in my profile if you're interested
I met Chad Whitacre at the Gittip booth at PyCon (the heart-punching coin machine was pretty cool!). I found him to be very earnest and interested in the perception of his company.
I'm glad he felt strongly enough about the openness to refuse to conduct the interview. Hopefully the community can rally behind him in solidarity.
The correspondence reflects very poorly on the TC reporter.
It is an interesting experiment and kudos to them for having the courage to actually commit to it. I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs tried to do something very similar to this at Next Computer and it failed.
I think the openness of Next, where employees were allowed to know what every person in the organisation was earning, contrasted with the secrecy of Apple, speaks volumes about what Jobs ended up thinking about the value of openness in corporate settings. Unfortunately, as Peter Thiel points out, there are big advantages to having secrets.
That said I'm sure gittip can survive on a small scale with this kind of attitude and it probably helps given the market they're working in, I just don't think it scales long term.
Thanks! I didn't know that about NeXT. It's especially interesting compared to Apple, as you mention! Also, your comment about Peter Thiel led me to discover these great lecture notes from a class of his:
I want to find a way to combine the transparency and emphasis on personal autonomy of open source projects with the unparalleled productivity of traditional, closed corporations. It's a delicate balance.
My one comment, from being on both sides of the journalist fence, is that journalists love be the ones that break news. If you live stream an interview, how are they going to be the first to report on the details?
I love the idea of being open. Though, it seems like most journalists will only participate in this scheme if they have to interview you.
The thing is, these "open calls" are hidden in plain site. How many people are actually watching an hour and a half of me gabbing with somebody? I understand that journalism has traditionally been about "the scoop." In a world of information overload, just because something is technically open doesn't mean it's made its way into the public consciousness.
Haha, awesome. That's principles. I was impressed with the hard facts in the hiring thread too. I browsed that thread and your company is the only one I remember. :)
I think this is a neat idea but I also find it ironic that while so many people here in HN are so adamant about privacy, etc, they also think it's a great idea to livestream all of your phone calls. I suppose it's by choice, but I still think it's kind of funny.
Precisely. It's about choosing when and how to give up privacy.
The "adamant about privacy" perception mostly comes about because of all the people actively trying to expose our information to various other parties. In response, we fixate on those cases where we don't want that to happen, as an argumentative counterpoint. The times where we want to share things are simply not as interesting, since sharing is easier (technically and politically), so we make less noise about it.
Keep private things private, the rest can be transparent. Anything you say to a reporter should fall into the second category. Answering a TC reporter's questions in an open recording has far more marketing value than just answering questions.
http://blog.gittip.com/post/26350459746/the-first-open-compa...
It's fun to read through their bug tracker and read discussions with their payment processor and look at debates on how different corporate minutia should be handled.
https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com/issues
Even if you're not interested in Gittip (and I am, I think it's a very interesting funding model) the open company model that they follow should be quite inspirational.