gittip is a company that allows individuals to receive recurring donations for their work, identified by their accounts on Github, Twitter, and/or other sites.
By early 2014, many prominent tech feminists -- including Shanley Kane, Ashe Dryden, Lynn Cyrin, and others -- as well as organizations (such as CallbackWomen) had begun to derive significant income from gittip. At one point, Kane and Dryden were among the top five users in terms of weekly income received via gittip.
In May 2014, Shanley Kane (among others) pointed out that Gittip's philosophy of "radical transparency" was potentially hazardous for marginalized people -- among the very same people who were making the most use of gittip at the time.
Later in May, a gittip community member sent Chad Whitacre, the founder of gittip, a long letter of advice that specifically warned him that retweets of criticisms of the activist recipients looked like endorsements of those criticisms. (The letter was private until June.)
Shortly thereafter, Chad Whitacre, the founder of gittip, responded positively to (CW: Hacker News) a comment on Hacker News calling gittip "a joke dominated by professional victims" because women use it.
In June 2014, Whitacre published a hit piece on his blog in which he effectively called Kane -- who had recently been forced to make her Twitter account private due to death threats and other harassment -- a bully. Kane deleted her gittip account, losing a significant source of income, and Dryden began looking for alternative funding mechanisms.
Very soon after this, the letter of advice that specifically warned Whitacre about how retweets of anti-activist comments appeared, dated to May 21 (before the Hacker News interaction), was made public on this wiki.
This wiki has a list of people and organisations who transfered out of Gittip.
Lessons
The gittip crisis is an example of the way in which men in tech only support meritocracy when it favors themselves. The success of Kane, Dryden and other feminist activists in using the site was taken as proof that there was something wrong with the site or that they were cheating, rather than as a meritocratic outcome.
It also shows the perils, for feminist activists, of depending on infrastructure that is run by people with no interest in supporting feminism (and, often, an interest in opposing it) and that thus fails to take their needs and unique circumstances into account. Of course, to a large extent, such dependence is unavoidable. (Also see Nothing about us without us.)
Commentary
- Why I'm ending my short experiment with Gittip, or: why we can't have nice things part 2,039 by Sky Croeser