There's a distinction between truly supporting a person, and being part of a long tail of "oh well here's a few cents." I see us trying to feel out how to work with those two cases. My current thinking is that the long tail of support for an individual will come via their association with various projects, groups, companies, brands--whatever we want to call them. Here's the ticket where we're tracking this:
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/27