run a "Back the Stack" campaign

[chadwhitacre]

This is a marketing ticket.

I'm looking for people willing to go public as trying to find a living on Gittip. I want to do interviews and have nice photos and generate some buzz.

Slogan for this campaign is "Back the Stack."

Target audience is people in software companies that depend on software that we write.

Who's in? The more the merrier!

/cc @alex, @pelle, @stephenmcd, @steveklabnik, @jezdez, @jtauber, @mitsuhiko, @mtamizi, etc., etc.

All are welcome. :-)

[steveklabnik]

I'm not gonna be quitting anything, but I did put a realistic 'get my life salary on gittip' number in.

[stephenmcd]

Same here. I have a family to feed so I don't see myself quitting my job any time soon.

To make a living from continuing the development of the free software I've built is my dream though - so let me know if there's anything I can do to help you to help me :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, to clarify: You don't need to quit your current gig up front to be part of this. I needed to quit in order to have time to work on Gittip itself. The idea though would be that you want to transition over some period of time to primary income from Gittip.

[chadwhitacre]

Also note that I'm looking for 50 hours a month of contract work to feed my family and pay my mortgage while I build funding. :-)

[stephenmcd]

Also I'd be very flattered to be profiled - I think this would be mutually very beneficial.

[chadwhitacre]

@stephenmcd Agreed. Let's do it.

[chadwhitacre]

For the record, I believe @mtamizi may be able to help us spread the word amongst the Y Combinator community. I would expect some good fruit there, as YC companies a) make lots of hay off of, and b) "get" open source software.

[ryao]

@whit537 asked me in IRC to consider posting here.

Feel free to interview me. I maintain ZFS support in Gentoo Linux. I also help improve Gentoo's Clang support and I hack on Gentoo FreeBSD.

[eraserhd]

Alrighty, I'm in.

I've tried the screencast model (copying off of @garybernhardt), but it leaves very little time for writing software if you are bootstrapping off of a day job. I spent 3+ hours per week recording and editing, as well as time collecting ideas and working with people. And really, I don't like making screencasts. I'd rather make softwares.

I've tried the product model, wincing as I put up a landing page for closed-source vaporware. sigh But as I solved the problems I was trying to solve with that closed-source product, I made a vim plugin and improved some ruby gems. And it became more and more obvious that the closed-source thing was a contrived tack-on - not technically necessary at all.

This is so close to what I'd like to do.

[chadwhitacre]

I think this is going to be stronger after #66 lands. Is that a cop-out?

[stephenmcd]

I think the relationship between the two is fairly minimal, but getting your branding sorted out properly is probably more important than the campaign idea in this thread. So prioritise away :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@stephenmcd Here's a first draft of your "Back the Stack" post:

http://blog.gittip.com/private/28595064070/tumblr_m85n9gOQgq1ryzw25

To be honest I think we need a better picture of you. We need one with you looking straight at the camera, and we need to be able to crop it to 500 x 335. I have usesthis in mind for the pic dimensions, though since we're asking for money in this series we want the tone of the portraits to be straightforward, confident, and direct (not goofy like ahem certain usesthis portraits ;-) ). We can always go back and re-style text with CSS, but if we don't get good pics off the bat that's much harder to fix later. I think it's in our collective best interest to have a certain professionalism and consistency to the posts in the Back the Stack series.

Do you have a better picture you can send me?

I think the text is perfect. :-)

[stephenmcd]

Wow, awesome :-) I'll try and rustle up a better photo.

[chadwhitacre]

@stephenmcd P.S. When do you expect Mezzanine 1.2 to drop? As discussed it would be great to coordinate. How do you want to time it? Do you want me to put up the blog post a day or two after the release? Or do them both at once? Or ... ?

[stephenmcd]

Hopefully within the next few days - I've been side-tracked a bit moving house.

I think a couple days after the release would have the best effect.

[chadwhitacre]

Cool. Let's aim for that.

[chadwhitacre]

@stephenmcd is live:

http://blog.gittip.com/post/28595064070/back-the-stack-mezzanine-and-cartridge

Who's next?

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the process:

• Email me a write-up and a nice hi-res photo. See @stephenmcd's (link) for inspiration.
• The write-up should describe what part of the software stack you'd spend your time on if you could, and your experience and story to date. Note that teaching, advocacy, etc. are valid contributions to the stack.
• I'll crop the photo to 230 x 230 and post a private blog post for you to review before going live.

My email is [email protected].

Who's up next? @eraserhd? @fijal? @jnoller? @steveklabnik?

Once we get four or five of these out there, and hopefully in coordination with the redesign (#66), we'll put together a dedicated landing page showing everyone involved. The more the better. We want this to be a real way that a significant chunk of open source software gets made.

[kennethreitz]

I'm in the same boat as @steveklabnik

[chadwhitacre]

@kennethreitz @steveklabnik How do we navigate the line between traditional employment and Gittip funding? I'm hearing this from other quarters as well and clearly it's a challenge. Can we find some middle ground between the all or nothing it seems like we face?

[kennethreitz]

@whit537 Achieving your salary on gittip gives you ultimate freedom.

[chadwhitacre]

@kennethreitz Sure, but we need bees to start buzzing for the swarm to move.

[chadwhitacre]

What I mean is, people are saying, "I can't have my name attached to #backthestack because my employer wouldn't like that." Can we inspect that attitude?

I mean, what's my worst-case scenario?

Let's say I attach my name to #backthestack, and it gets traction, and my employer notices. Here are the possibilities I see, sorted by severity:

1. My employer realizes that it might lose me, and offers me a raise and/or more time to work on open source.
2. My employer does nothing.
3. My employer starts subtly thinking less of me.
4. My employer asks me to disassociate from #backthestack.
5. My employer asks me to disassociate from Gittip.com entirely.
6. My employer fires me.

1 is clearly a win. 2 is a wash. 3 through 5 kind of suck. 6 is pretty much rocket fuel for my funding effort.

That's 50% suck, which I admit is a lot. :-)

If every bee who could fly, did not try to fly, the others, too, would never be stirred, and the swarm would never change its position. […] But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees.

Who else wants to be an innovator with @stephenmcd? 🐝

[kennethreitz]

What kind of employer would do that (3–6)? These places exist? If so, you should quit immediately.

[stephenmcd]

Just to keep things on track:

@whit537 is asking for volunteers to spend 5 or 10 minutes putting together a few paragraphs about their open source work and why they think gittip is a great idea.

@steveklabnik and @kennethreitz have said they're not about to quit their day jobs, which honestly no one expects.

Let's not get these two concerns mixed up, they're really not related.

@kennethreitz would you be interested in a post profiling you, to go towards this campaign?

[freakboy3742]

Count me in. I'd love to be able to focus more energy on contributing to Django.

[kennethreitz]

Count me in as well :)

[stephenmcd]

Boom! Awesome :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@ryao If you want let's set up a Skype interview. We can see if that works better than you-write-a-blog-post. My Skype nick is whit537.

[chadwhitacre]

Oh that makes me happy.

Thank you @freakboy3742 and @kennethreitz, and @stephenmcd for popping the question!

This is going to be so fun. :-)

[steveklabnik]

It's also not that my employer would be upset by #backthestack, it's that the work I do is incredibly fulfilling, and I wouldn't even really want to quit anyway.

That said, my massive student loan debt means any extra money helps, which is the only real reason I'm accepting money through gittip in the first place.

[chadwhitacre]

Here is our backlog of people who have said they'll join #backthestack, but for whom we haven't run a story yet:

1. ryao (wants to do phone / email interview?)
2. kennethreitz
3. whit537 (I guess I'll stick my neck out too :-) )
4. jnoller (twitter)
5. tito
6. fijal (twitter)
7. hansent
8. zzzeek
9. erikrose

Here's the stories we've run so far:

1. stephenmcd - Mezzanine and Cartridge
2. aclark4life (opt-in via twitter) - PythonPackages.com
3. freakboy3742 - Django

Again, here's the process:

• Email a write-up and a nice hi-res photo to [email protected].
• The write-up should be a few paragraphs about your open source work and why you think gittip is a great idea.
• I'll crop the photo to 230 x 230 and post a private blog post for you to review before going live.

Once we get at least six of these out there, and hopefully in coordination with the redesign (#66), we'll put together a dedicated landing page showing everyone involved. The more the better. The message we want to send is that this is a real way for a significant chunk of open source software to get made.

In six months or a year we can do a follow-up campaign along the lines of "What We Built" (#235).

[chadwhitacre]

@steveklabnik

[T]he work I do is incredibly fulfilling, and I wouldn't even really want to quit anyway.

That is, of course, totally valid.

[tito]

Can i join too? :)

[chadwhitacre]

@tito Of course! Anyone can. Just send a write-up and photo to [email protected].

[hansent]

this is awesome; I'm in.

Once we get four or five of these out there, and hopefully in coordination with the redesign (#66), we'll put together a dedicated landing page showing everyone involved. The more the better. We want this to be a real way that a significant chunk of open source software gets made.

Any idea about approx timeline on this? (Just wondering about how quickly you are wanting to get this up in order to knoe know whether there is time to procastinate on sending a bio/photo :P)

[eraserhd]

@whit537 I'm working on mine but don't like the first draft. I have it to my "editor" and guessing I'll have something in 24 hours. :)

[zzzeek]

I would definitely like to do this. I'm an independent contractor and can literally shrink or expand my hours on my open source projects as funding allows. I'd like to explore the angle of "the proportion of companies who make use of OSS compared to how relatively few of us are really developing and improving the major libraries each day", hows that ?

[chadwhitacre]

@hansent @zzzeek Awesome! Welcome aboard! :D

Any idea about approx timeline on this?

@hansent It gets done when it gets done? ;-)

I'm working on mine but don't like the first draft. I have it to my "editor"

@eraserhd Sweet! Looking forward to it.

I'd like to explore the angle of "the proportion of companies who make use of OSS compared to how relatively few of us are really developing and improving the major libraries each day", hows that?

@zzzeek Sounds great!

[chadwhitacre]

Alright team, I'd really like to make a splash with this sometime in mid September, a few weeks from now. Please start sending write-ups and photos to [email protected]. I'll start trying to contact you by email in a week if I haven't heard from you by then. /cc @aclark4life, @jnoller, and @fijal, who are not otherwise on this ticket

The goal is to have 10 or 12 open source programmers presenting a unified front that Gittip is a powerful way to make open source happen.

[aclark4life]

Will do

[aclark4life]

Done.

[erikrose]

I'm in, too. Writeup to come. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

We've got three posts up on the Gittip blog, and a couple more on other people's blogs. I'm thinking that the posts on other people's blogs are more powerful. What do you think? Do you want to keep posting on the Gittip blog, or should we encourage posting on our own blogs instead?

[jnoller]

I'd concur: personal blog entries are more powerful.

[aclark4life]

+0. Regardless of which you decide, there should probably be a link to the gittip blog from https://www.gittip.com/. As for where to blog. I'd say both; but I don't have a strong preference. FWIW there may be more "legitimacy" on gittip, for some value of legitimate. If you look at other open source projects for examples (assuming that's a fair comparison) then maybe you see various examples of featured content, suggesting that the "official" blog is the place for such things. But bottom line: a Gittip "back the stack" blog entry can be done from anywhere, and should be supported as such IMHO. If nothing else, that would free Chad up to focus on other things. Maybe if there were some way to call out such entries from gittip you could have the best of both worlds.

[chadwhitacre]

Thought from a business-owning friend that I was hanging out with last night: Come up with a "normal" amount that companies should be giving back to open source projects they depend on. The suggestion was 1% of profits. As #backthestack matures we should maybe bake in such a meme.

[chadwhitacre]

This seems to have cooled. We have some new marketing efforts forming around things like #694.

[abnor]

If anyone would like to volunteer their amazing story (or vision) of using Gittip I am here to conduct interviews! #marketing board

[abnor]

#694

Hmm, I'm going to hunt you guys down and interview you all or the Gittip report. Just as soon as I have a chunk of time.