By now you may have heard of gittip and wondering "why should I bother?"

Gittip is a way of donating small amounts of money to people who inspire you. That's an important point here. Peter Rabbitson, the maintainer of DBIx::Class, made a strong plea for people helping one another on gittip, but I'm going to make a slightly different argument for joining gittip, one that won't cost you a penny.

As of this writing, there are 855 communities on gittip. Currently only 18 communities, the top 2%, show up on gittip's "communities" page.

Perl is the 19th largest community.

That's right. We're one away from being on their front-page of largest gittip communities. Gittip is getting more press lately and even John Resig, the creator jQuery, is pushing hard for people to join gittip. As gittip grows, more and more people will be seeing who the top communities are and Perl is one place away from being in that list. Currently we need just over 40 people to join that list to claim our place (we'll need a lot more to maintain it). That will help to show people that:

Perl is alive and well

Perl has a thriving community

Joining is free and you can sign in with your Twitter, github, bitbucket or openstreetmaps accounts. If you do decide to sign up, just join the Perl group on gittip and you can ignore it after that if you want, or alternately, you can donate small amounts of money to support those whose work you want to support.

Remember, this is free and very little effort. However, by doing so, you can know that you've done your part to help support the Perl community just by raising our visibility. I've joined gittip and I look forward to seeing you there.

Thank you.

Ovid