[FM Discuss] the nature of authorship

[Emma Jane Hogbin]

Adam,

Sorry for the delay. I've been trying to switch my email client from
Gmail -> Evolution and accidentally deleted every email that was part of
a "conversation" where one email had been marked for deletion. On the
plus side, I have a lot fewer emails now. :)

I think you mean the "romantic" version of the term where an author sits
holed up in a room for years on end writing the perfect manuscript only
to have it rejected a million times before becoming an overnight success
because the Lulu.com version that was used to submit to publishers was
included in Oprah's book club? And I think you're asking what incentives
FM should offer potential authors to get more contributors?

If I've read your question correctly, the answer is: motivators and
their rewards depend on the individual. To try and lump all authors into
one stereotype is a bit dangerous.

Let's go back to the beginning though and define some terms: "Motivator"
is the set of reasons to engage in a behaviour; the "reward" is the
incentive that is offered to repeat the desired action/behaviour. If the
rewards do not match the motivators for that person the person will not
be "motivated" to continue. Motivators and rewards may both be internal
or external. I'll refrain from drawing a matrix and just point you to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation

I have contributed to free documentation for the following reasons:
- support debt payment (a programmer has asked me to contribute
documentation to their project as a thank you for their technical
support on how to use their toolkit)
- self-preservation (it took me a long time to learn XYZ and I want to
have the notes available for myself)
- community (I like to meet other authors and people who document)
- bad documentation makes me twitch (I'm one of those people that fixes
homonyms and apostrophes for fun)

My free contributions to documentation aren't really motivated by
self-promotion. I do other things to promote myself. But once something
has been "branded" with my name, I protect it carefully as I don't want
others negatively affecting my "brand."

So if you wanted to provide a reward system that appealed to me there
would need to be the following elements:
- outstanding community debt, including a direct request from an
external source (e.g. user or programmer)
- topics that were used by me in daily/typical workflow
- collaboration with other interesting people with comparable, yet
diverse, work experiences
- existing work for me to modify, rather than creating from scratch
(this is because if I am creating from scratch it becomes part of my
"brand" and therefore I will want to protect it).

I'm not sure if that entirely answers your question, but maybe it
clarifies how to rephrase the question to get the answer you were hoping
for. :)


regards,
emma





On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 14:57 +0000, adam hyde wrote:
> interesting...Emma, what would you consider to be a motivator to
> collaborate for those attached to the notion of authorship?
> 
> adam
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 09:57 -0400, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Andy Oram <andyo at oreilly.com> wrote:
> > > FLOSS Manuals encourages participation by recognizing contributors. I don't think that most of them have a strong vision of what the book should be, and such people would have trouble contributing no matter how you organize the work and the resulting material. Some people might do more if recognition were more precise.
> > 
> > Aha. And there be the discussion of motivating factors. :) Andy, you
> > felt "threatened" by others contributing to your chapter and so you
> > were motivated to make your own improvements. That is an external
> > motivation.
> > 
> > Different kinds of recognition attract different kinds of people.
> > Leader boards, barn stars, karma points are a few of the ways that
> > online communities give external rewards to contributors. When the
> > results are tallied and displayed as a leader board people who are
> > motivated by competition and "first", "top" and "best" will flock to
> > the project. Tallied results keep those who need an external motivator
> > attached to a project. In this environment, competitions are
> > successful and can attract new competitors. But there always needs to
> > be an external motivator as part of the reward system.
> > 
> > Tallied results do not, however, necessarily attract those who like to
> > work collaboratively or have other "internal" sources of motivation.
> > Internally motivated behaviour requires no threat ("don't touch my
> > chapter") or reward ("you got to the top of the leader board!").
> > Although the numbers of people who are attracted may be smaller,
> > internally motivated individuals are more likely to stay committed to
> > a project because they provide their own rewards.
> > 
> > The trick, of course, is to provide the right motivations for a range
> > of people so that you attract and retain largest number of productive
> > contributors. And also to be aware of the contributors you are losing
> > by adopting one dominant style of motivation.
> > 
> > regards,
> > emma
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> > http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net