Bring Gratipay in for a landing #1196
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OC are also good people. https://opencollective.com/opensource could be a good destination for the $100k stuck in our escrow. |
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Wow. What a day… @clone1018 Can you clarify how you envision the first option you listed? |
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It might be obvious but I'll say it anyway: everyone here is welcome to join the Liberapay team. We work mostly the same way as Gratipay with a few exceptions (e.g. we use IRC/Gitter instead of Slack). |
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Either of the first two options is agreeable to me, but I am not spending gobs of time. Option 2 seems possible under the assumption that 1) non-personnel expenses can be covered* ("hobby" status project for all involved) and 2) Gratipay exists under maintenance status (no huge new features), also meaning that #1160 is dropped. I don't know how much time is spent on offline issues, however; stuff like #1164, bookkeeping, and annual business paperwork are non-trivial tasks. _* This is not happening right now. According to the budget, we need $92 a week and we're only getting ~half that.
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Or: distribute it to existing receivers on Gratipay, in gratitude for their patronage, and to soften the blow of us shutting down. 😞 |
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@Changaco No concrete ideas, at it's simplest phase we could just point all of our customers to LiberaPay. At it's hardest phase we could actually migrate over profiles. @whit537 What are we legally allowed to do with our escrow? @mattbk It seems dealing with taxes/finances/legal is a giant time sink. |
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I just need a timeline so I can let people know if they ask via Support. The people with privileges to run payday are who I'm looking to for guidance; will it happen tomorrow or are we donezo for regular business right now? @Changaco, I'm interested as well in how the first option would work. Building a migration pathway to Liberapay would be helpful. |
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@whit537 Do we need to worry about escheatment for the escrow account? Talking to my boss about it, as he understood it, we would be required to try and give the escrow back to the initial givers based on the state they live in. |
That makes sense to me, since the money is in escrow for them to use on Gratipay. |
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I suppose we could make it relatively easy to migrate to Liberapay, kind of like liberapay/liberapay.com#259 but deeper (i.e. we would transfer more data from Gratipay). |
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From http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/operating-agreement:
I propose that we dissolve Gratipay on December 31, 2017. Let the discussion and voting period begin, @clone1018! :-) |
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Before I cast my vote: I'd like to hear thoughts from @mattbk , @EdOverflow , @rohitpaulk , @JessaWitzel , and any other contributors from our team I'd also like to hear any integration proposal from @Changaco |
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We should talk to a lawyer about this. I've got someone I can reach out to ...
Sent. ☝️ |
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I expect disposing of the escrow to be the hardest part of shutting down. I guess let's see if we can get into a conversation there and see what happens before planning too much further. December 31 could very well be impossible. However, even if we have to keep a shell open for years to deal with escrow, we can stop processing new payments much sooner. Soooo I'd like to amend my proposal: I propose we:
October 25 is when this vote closes. |
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Here's a sketch of a timeline assuming the proposal passes on October 25:
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@mattbk You said “I'd like to see it continue”, but what is it exactly? The Gratipay 2.0 platform? The Gratipay project/brand in general? Something else? It would be useful to have a clear understanding of what everyone here wishes to save. |
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That's an excellent question. Perhaps I'm more attached to the brand than anything else, but I couldn't tell you exactly why. If Liberapay can serve the same purpose, maybe I should let Gratipay go.* Mostly I've enjoyed working on a project with other people, and it's been a project that seems helpful to other people. That's not enough reason in itself to keep things going, and I hoped that was clear. Nostalgia and sunk-cost fallacy? _*Speaking as an american user, the bar for giving via Liberapay (15 euro+fees, paid ahead of time) seems higher than that for Gratipay ($15 + fees, paid after tips accrue), but I think I'm being provincial. |
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The currency difference between the two platforms is in fact a major obstacle. I was hoping to work on multi-currency support in Liberapay in the first half of 2018, but @whit537's proposal is to shut down Gratipay before the end of 2017, so the first half of 2018 is too late. I am willing to shift my focus to currencies (liberapay/liberapay.com#182). We may be able to pull off basic support for US dollars by the end of November. Alternatively we could keep Liberapay in euros and run Gratipay separately in US dollars, but I'm not sure this is a good idea. I have mixed feelings about the possibility of keeping the Gratipay brand alive and distinct from Liberapay. (I don't know if I'm expressing my thoughts clearly enough here, as always feel free to ask for clarifications.) |
If the decision by others is to shut down Gratipay, I think this (Liberapay operating Gratipay in the US) would be a stopgap, but if Liberapay multi-currency could be roughed in around the same time it wouldn't be necessary. Again, it may not be an issue for most users. @whit537, @clone1018, would Liberapay count as an "official" alternative in the the "we're shutting down" announcements? It's the most closely related alternative out there, and the personal connection is there as well. In essence, what's the best thing we can do for current Gratipay users? |
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I'm up for whatever causes the least inconvenience to existing users on the platform. It wouldn't be cool for projects like jsbin to lose the $100/wk they currently receive. If we had enough income to cover expenses, I'd vote for putting Gratipay into 'maintenance mode', like Bountysource did. Now that we don't - I think merging with liberapay is a good option. :) |
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@Changaco I care less about keeping the Gratipay name alive and going and more about the user experience. If there's some avenue for helping our customers move their expectations to another platform, I'm definitely in favor of that. |
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Okay. My main concern is possible disappointments. It would be bad for everyone if Gratipay users migrated to Liberapay just to find that the differences between the two platforms are problematic for them. Support for US dollars would be a significant step towards minimizing this risk. Here's how I can see the migration process working:
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Round 1 account cleanup: done!
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Heard back from HackerOne and submitted their close request form. |
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Donorbox:
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PNC suspended because of too many failed login attempts (mine). 😞 |
No, we use Cloudflare.
No, we try to avoid Google.
No, I think it's not useful enough to Liberapay at this point.
I'm not sure about this one. It seems to me the account's history could also be a liability. (Related issue: liberapay/liberapay.com#424.)
No, I think. I've started building a mailing list feature directly into the Liberapay webapp.
I was going to say "we can't use Braintree because we're not in the US", but https://www.braintreepayments.com/products/braintree-marketplace now says "Availability: All countries Braintree supports", so we have a new option for liberapay/liberapay.com#374. I don't know if it would make sense for Liberapay to reuse Gratipay's account, but I guess it can't hurt to have access to it? |
I think this would actually be hard to transfer. It would mean attaching a different bank account, which would require a review from Braintree. I think really we'd also need to switch out the legal entity associated with the account, and at that point it'd probably just as easy to start a new account for Liberapay. |
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HackerOne is disabled. |
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Decision taken on #1217:
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:~)
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Moving to #1218 for specifics on asset transfer to Liberapay. |
What was the final count on this, @Changaco? |
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It's more complicated to count now that migrating from Gratipay isn't the only way to open a USD account. I think 66 accounts were created through the migration tool: select p.kind, count(*) from (select distinct on (participant) participant, type from events order by participant, ts asc) x join participants p on p.id = x.participant where x.type = 'gratipay_import' group by p.kind;
kind | count
--------------+-------
individual | 47
organization | 2
group | 17
(3 rows) |
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I've recovered access to our PNC account. |
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I've deleted our 1Password account. |
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I've disabled our HackerOne account. |
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I've turned off renewals for these domains:
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I've transferred the following to my personal account:
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I've transferred the |
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I've transferred Gratipay's legacy DNSimple plan to my personal email and credit card (for use on @AspenWeb). The last remaining recurring payment is the PNC fee. |
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I closed the PNC account and deposited the money in our savings account at New Alliance, which already existed. Every account at New Alliance has both a checking and savings account—we're using checking for escrow and the savings account had the minimum of $20 in it, so now it has $491.26 with the deposit from PNC. |
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Heard back from Donorbox, closed account. |
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FYI I'm hoping that I find a full-time job "soon," and that having a start date for a new job will motivate me to work on bringing Gratipay in for a landing. |
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@chadwhitacre Message in IRC:
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I periodically check {chad,support,vendors}@gratipay.com and have not seen anything. Can you direct them to email [email protected] and I will keep an eye on the spam filter? |
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Just sent a test message and it appears to still work. |
https://medium.com/@chadwhitacre/after-gratipay-idelic-f8466936774 |
https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/dissolve-pennsylvania-llc.html |
After five and a half years, I'm throwing in the towel: #1069 (comment). I'm willing to work through the end of the year to bring Gratipay in for as smooth a landing as we can.
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