Radar 33

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Roadmap (what?)

Short Term

Embarrassments:

• can't edit teams (Team Basics)
• not using immutable ids (use id as primary key instead of username gratipay.com#835)
• widgets are broken (Radar 31 #389 (comment))
• escrow imprecision (Radar 31 #389 (comment))
• Security 9 (Radar 31 #389 (comment))

Long Term

[chadwhitacre]

:-(

https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on-airbnb-6bff8d600c04

[chadwhitacre]

Bringing over from @mattbk at #395 (comment):

Flexget included a link to a great blog post about contributing without being a coder: http://blog.smartbear.com/programming/14-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source-without-being-a-programming-genius-or-a-rock-star/

[techtonik]

I am trying to recover some focus and therefore I will ignore AirBnB casualty for now.

First, what is that deal with going to Flask? If I remember correctly, Aspen is a file system router. What Flask will be there for? Also, do simplates care about where they are in filesystem hierarchy? Because if they care, how can Flask tell them that? Also, how do we ensure that our simplates can not read/write outside of our project directory - does Aspen has any sandboxing mechanism at all?

[techtonik]

I see if I can create setup script for grtp.co. Right now the problem is to configure network in my LXC container to test things out.

[chadwhitacre]

First, what is that deal with going to Flask? If I remember correctly, Aspen is a file system router.

No. Aspen is a web framework. It includes a filesystem router and the simplates file format, along with its own request and response objects and a WSGI application. The proposal on AspenWeb/pando.py#526 is to let go of the request and response objects and the WSGI application.

What Flask will be there for?

Request/response processing as a WSGI application.

Also, do simplates care about where they are in filesystem hierarchy? Because if they care, how can Flask tell them that?

There will be mechanisms in the new Simplates library to specify a filesystem root for simplates, and a shim to enable Simplates to work with Flask.

Also, how do we ensure that our simplates can not read/write outside of our project directory - does Aspen has any sandboxing mechanism at all?

Nope, no sandboxing. Simplates are not user-writeable.

[chadwhitacre]

Let's talk Roadmap! In my Platform Cooperatives write-up, I shared that I think we have six big pieces of work ahead of us:

1. legal foundation for payments addressed in Gratipay 2.0
2. community management addressed in Gratipay 2.0
3. accounting (adopt a process for reconciling books #367)
4. governance (adopt a cooperative operating agreement #72)
5. legal foundation for payroll (figure out ~user's relationship to Gratipay #242; entangled with governance)
6. tech debt (e.g., switch to immutable primary keys gratipay.com#3617, join 'em AspenWeb/pando.py#526)
7. product development
8. marketing

How should we think about these? How should we update our roadmap? How do milestones and queues relate?

[kzisme]

@whit537 would the Platform Cooperatives write-up be worth turning into a Medium blog? Just a thought :)

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme I was thinking we might link directly to the GitHub comment but a Medium post probably makes more sense. Good idea! :-)

[mattbk]

+1 for a positive blog post!

[chadwhitacre]

Brainstorm: We should write bylaws (#72) and sort out governance (#404) for Gratipay itself, so that we can bring back payroll for Gratipay as quickly as possible. Once we have payroll flowing again for Gratipay, we'll be able to move increasingly quickly to build out the product for others.

[chadwhitacre]

Or: it doesn't matter how much capital we have (#405) if none of us can take any of it!

[mattbk]

Interesting conversation going on here: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/658748957250596864

[mattbk]

Brainstorm: We should write bylaws (#72) and sort out governance (#404) for Gratipay itself, so that we can bring back payroll for Gratipay as quickly as possible.

So, the specific version of #242 before I changed the name of the thread?

[chadwhitacre]

So, the specific version of #242 before I changed the name of the thread?

Hmm ... maybe? I think we want to make it work once for Gratipay, but with an eye towards productizing for everybody.

[chadwhitacre]

On http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/welcome we say that owners are the subset of ~users that "buy into our mission."

[chadwhitacre]

Here's a draft of a Medium post about Gratipay at Platform Cooperatives:

"A Platform Cooperative ... Almost"

Howzat look, @kzisme @mattbk @webmaven @techtonik @mitar et al.?

[chadwhitacre]

I'd love to get a photo (#384 (comment)) before posting. Maybe let's give that one more day?

[chadwhitacre]

Post revised. Same link.

https://medium.com/gratipay-blog/a-platform-cooperative-almost-94cd5900840f

[techtonik]

The post is positive. 👍 I wish we had more clarity WRT to legal requirements. The stuff about capital is good. It may help to speed up the development. I will try to speak with banks and UNDP about that. We have some programs that are aimed at educating people about money, and there is no better tool to teach than give people the ability to play.

[kzisme]

👍 👍

[chadwhitacre]

Generous is live. They're a pay-what-you-want platform.

[chadwhitacre]

https://github.com/blog/2085-a-new-look-for-repositories

[chadwhitacre]

Picking up from @webmaven's comments at #384 (comment):

Related to Platform Cooperativism in concept (and there seems to be some overlap in people and groups): https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/doing-more-together-together-seeding-a-collaborative-technology-alliance-82243ea30d41

Nice list of fellow-traveller orgs presented at the conference: http://platformcoop.net/schedule/owning-is-the-new-sharing-actually-existing-platform-co-ops

List of projects in the CTA: https://cta.hackpad.com/Tools-projects-and-initiatives-of-the-CTA-zJkyGIUZtEc

[chadwhitacre]

I've joined the Hylo group for the Collaborative Technology Alliance (CTA), and also Hackpad.

[chadwhitacre]

This group will create (and adopt when already available) standards, schemas, and protocols to enable interoperability amongst collaborative software tools. This group will also promote user-centered design amongst our member tools, and help to generate a common UI/design language for the ecosystem towards this end.

[chadwhitacre]

@webmaven Wanna keep an eye on that for us and keep us informed as it develops?

[chadwhitacre]

Here's a roadmap update. Not perfect but hopefully better. Color code:

• red—external forces that we're under
• yellow—administration
• green—product development
• orange—marketing
• blue—capitalization

[chadwhitacre]

Let's say for Gratipay we adopt some rule like, "We pay you as a contractor for up to 6 months if you're in the U.S. or 18 months if you're outside the U.S. After that we pay you as an owner."

[chadwhitacre]

That gives @rohitpaulk et al. time to jump through the hoops of becoming a co-owner of a U.S.-domiciled cooperative.

[chadwhitacre]

And they can still get paid in the mean time.

[chadwhitacre]

(Perhaps we also have a dollar cap: 18 months or $18,000 or something like that. A Q for the Ls.)

[chadwhitacre]

We add @rohitpaulk to the Gratipay Team with withholding of 0% (he's a contractor).

[chadwhitacre]

After a year or whatever, he gets his paperwork all done and we can promote him to an owner (yay!).

[chadwhitacre]

Now his withholding is set at 35%.

[chadwhitacre]

Do we care to force Teams to use payroll?

[chadwhitacre]

Do independent contractors still get to take-what-they-want?

[chadwhitacre]

Back over to gratipay/gratipay.com#3433 (comment).

[chadwhitacre]

Let's see how this goes: naspeh/mailur#4. O.O

[chadwhitacre]

We should do that 128 times and see what happens: #412.

[chadwhitacre]

Or 64. Or 32. Or 16.

[chadwhitacre]

gratipay/project-review#87 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#118 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#115 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#114 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#113 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#117 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#116 (comment)
gratipay/project-review#108 (comment)

!m @webmaven 💃

[techtonik]

Until we have payroll, we're vaporware. We're only half a product.

What is the other half? =)

Who needs another payments solution?

Everybody.

There's gillions of those.

Paypal and ... ?

How the heck are we gonna get back to payroll?
Both in general—it's our core product!—and in particular—we have to pay ourselves!
Teams on Gratipay have to be legal entities in order to use payroll.

That's the core problem. We need to find out WHY getting money and sharing money is illegal. Why all of the sudden we need to pay $500000 for the license (or where is the proof, BTW?)

The internet full of people who can not read English and people who do have time to read. People who don't want to know about all that and people who can't remember anything. Those regulations are overly complicated up to paralysis.

There must be root cause, but the picture is so complex that we need to rely on vision to store the pieces of the puzzle. Right now all we have is just a lot of text. How about we try to illustrate all the hard stuff we have now? How about we try to approach art communities to help us with visualizing the stuff? Starting from WHY sending money from one person to another through Bitcoin or through Gratipay is illegal and finishing with complete picture of system that is legal with separate strips explaining WHY.

If we have drawn roadmap on out main page, we could bring more hope to people waiting for such platform to appear and more people following. Explaining legal problems of Gratipay 1.0 is hard - I tried several times, but the truth is - I am not a lawyer and I fail time after time to explain what is money transfer license, why laws require us to need it. So, we may have a simple map of Carribean and a detailed one, more suitable for navigation in The Sea of Legal Wreckage we are currently in.

[mattbk]

Is this not embarrasing to anyone else?

Maybe I'm too focused on the immediate future. Maybe there are always "more fish in the sea" when it comes to teams (or people, since that seems to be on the table again) who will want to use Gratipay. I've said before that there is likely enough space for multiple recurrent payments systems, which I guess means there are enough teams/people without needing to accept every last one...but Gratipay is rebuilding, which means focusing on what needs to be done to get and retain those initial teams, IMHO.

[webmaven]

@techtonik 👍

[mattbk]

Not trying to be negative for the sake of being negative.

[webmaven]

@techtonik:

How about we try to illustrate all the hard stuff we have now?

I'm willing of doing the illustration/infographic work, if we can at least brain-dump, outline, or mind-map 'all the hard stuff', along the lines of the information captured in the mind-map in this post: https://www.codefellows.org/blog/this-is-why-learning-rails-is-hard

Subsequently, we can write up a blog post that incorporates the final illustration.

[rohitpaulk]

^ 👍

[techtonik]

Is there any online tool for writing mindmaps? Or better a human readable format like blockdiag? I started documenting competencies for grtp.co here -- gratipay/grtp.co#107 (comment) and it may worth to record it in some JSON file that could be rendered automatically (and where you could mark the spots you're proficient with).

Here is Rails Competencies for reference:

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme Here's a nice one: https://twitter.com/nathanairplane/status/667564949258960897. :)

@mattbk I'm not embarrassed, no. There's a lot going on there, though, so it's certainly possible to read it multiple ways. I appreciate @webmaven stepping in.

[kzisme]

@whit537 Sorry! I've been working WAY too much these past two weeks (and will be working this Friday as well)

Sent out another tweet including our post about the conference 😸

[chadwhitacre]

!m @kzisme
!m @techtonik
!m @rohitpaulk
!m @webmaven
!m @mattbk

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)