Email updates to givers

[ericmeltzer]

My absolute favorite thing about Kickstarter, Watsi, DonorsChoose etc is getting updates from the people I donated to about what they're doing w/ my donation. A tool that would allow people I donate to on Gittip to send me messages about what they're doing would be AMAZING!

From IRC discussion it sounds like we don't have a way to contact all users of gittip, depending on what service they used to register. A minimal but useful solution to this issue would be to be able to contact all donors who ARE contactable (i.e. those who reg'd with twitter?)

There is a $120 open bounty on this issue. Add to the bounty at Bountysource.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for kicking this off, @ericmeltzer, and for the bounty! For the record, we had a feature last year called "The Horn" that was somewhat aimed at this. We killed it because, as @duckinator pointed out in IRC, it was a bit of a clusterhuck. :-)

We talked about this at length at the retreat. The tl;dr of that is that full-fledged communication features is a big engineering task and we have limited engineering bandwidth with lots of work still to do around our core job which is moving money. We discussed providing content aggregation services instead of content authoring services.

Content authoring opens the door to much more community management overhead (cf. #1425).

Backer updates requires verified emails. We have emails, we don't have verification (#2312).

Since Gittip is optimized for aggregated micro-payments, we should consider periodic aggregated notifications rather than point-in-time single updates. That shades us into something like #1022.

Lastly, this looks like a dupe of #1662. If so let's use this one I guess since there's a bounty on it and not too much on #1662?

[ericmeltzer]

Is #2312 a hard pre-req for this feature? i.e. could we just send to unverified emails the way I assume we currently do for gittip messages?

[chadwhitacre]

We don't send anything yet.

[ericmeltzer]

Ah. OK, so it is a hard pre-req then I guess.

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 6:50 PM, Chad Whitacre [email protected]
wrote:

We don't send anything yet.

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#2521 (comment)
.

Eric Meltzer
@wheatpond https://twitter.com/wheatpond
http://theopencompany.net
+1 408 874 6552

[chadwhitacre]

Sorry, I didn't answer your question directly. It's not logically required, of course. I think we kinda want email verification sooner rather than later, though. No?

[ericmeltzer]

Yeah, I agree. It'll save us a lot of headaches I think!

On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 6:54 PM, Chad Whitacre [email protected]
wrote:

Sorry, I didn't answer your question directly. It's not logically
required, of course. I think we kinda want that sooner rather than later,
though. No?

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#2521 (comment)
.

Eric Meltzer
@wheatpond https://twitter.com/wheatpond
http://theopencompany.net
+1 408 874 6552

[duckinator]

Hey! Has there been any progress with this? :)

[Changaco]

See also #2223.

[duckinator]

Hi! Has there been any progress on this yet?

[ericmeltzer]

Sort of, yes! The upstream feature of this is "set up a way to send emails
to people on gratipay" and that was shipped recently.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Marie Markwell [email protected]
wrote:

Hi! Has there been any progress on this yet?

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#2521 (comment)
.

Eric Meltzer
@wheatpond https://twitter.com/wheatpond
http://theopencompany.net
+1 408 874 6552

[duckinator]

Do you know what else would be needed to add this? E.g., from a technical perspective, is there a rough idea about how it would be done, the prerequisites for accomplishing that, etc?

I will be up-front in saying that I am considering implementing it myself so I can broadcast the fact that I am moving to another funding platform.

[techtonik]

There is a sane reason not to grow Gratipay into yet another social network. It is assumed that communication with people already happens through their preferred channels. If people can not get in touch with their supporters, that's not a fault of GP.

Gratipay could provide some support for microblogging, for messaging, for status updates, but that needs to be really well thought of.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 IRC

[mattbk]

There is a sane reason not to grow Gratipay into yet another social network. It is assumed that communication with people already happens through their preferred channels. If people can not get in touch with their supporters, that's not a fault of GP.
Gratipay could provide some support for microblogging, for messaging, for status updates, but that needs to be really well thought of.

I agree with this. One of the best things about Gratipay is that it's focused on work, not on requiring all sorts of updates for givers. In my mind the point is to help build a community around each team--and communities already have better ways of interacting with each other than something Gratipay could provide. If you're donating to a team, you ought to already be on their email list for updates.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @tswast at #236 (comment):

Yes, actually #2521 would be sufficient for my thoughts. A backer update tool could be used to share patreon-like rewards with donors.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from a representative of a top-25 Internet company:

We seek to measure the impact of our support. This helps us report back to the people with budget and show how their investment in support is paying off. It's one thing to give a developer $5K, it's another to show the impact metric resulting from it. This part is tricky since we're not looking to hire open source projects to do "work for hire" or fix specific bugs. Rather, think of how we invest in non-profits in the charity space -- we ask to measure impact to see things like "how many clients served" or "given this funding level, we can complete project X."

[chadwhitacre]

HackerOne has a great implementation of this, for reference.