There has been a lot of talk in the Drupal community recently about Gittip. Gittip is a way to donate money to people who are doing good work. The part that really makes Gittip different from other donation or crowd-funding plans is that it is set up to provide regular, weekly payments. One-time gifts are great, but a steady source of income is what a lot of people really need, especially folks who are mostly unemployed and working essentially for free on projects you care about. A few weeks back we had Alex Pott on the podcast (Episode 23: Alex Pott and Working on Drupal Core) to talk about his work, and the fact that he has been self-funding himself to be able to focus on Drupal core. We think this is a really, really important conversation in the Drupal community, and definitely recommend you listen to the podcast for more insight.
In addition to talking about this issue though, Drupalize.Me also wants to take a stand and get involved. To that end, we've set up our own Gittip account, and have started donating to Drupal people we appreciate. We've set a weekly budget that we can use, and the team decides together who will get our bucket of money. We're going to regularly assess our weekly budget and increase it as we can. Right now we are donating to Drupal folks, but that doesn't mean that we can't, or won't, look at other open source projects and people who we admire. We're currently the second "top giver" for the Drupal project, after MaxCDN, but we do hope that more companies will follow our lead, and we certainly invite others to knock us from our perch.
You'll be happy to know that Alex did indeed reach his goal ($475 per week) so that he can continue to work full-time on Drupal 8. It's so great to see the community pay it forward, and support the people who are dedicating so much of their time for us.
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