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March 28, 2006

Reaping the rewards in Open Source

We live in a rewards society. Do this and you'll get that. Work hard and your boss will give you a bonus, some additional options or a better position. Want your kids to do their homework or tidy their room - you “motivate” them by letting them watch TV longer than usual afterwards. Buy two - get one free. Fly this airline and collect your bonus miles. The list is endless.

Motivation is increasingly channelled through the carrot dangling in front of us. However, psychologists tell us that constant rewarding is a bad thing. Attention shifts from the thing we were doing to the reward we will get. We lose our motivation to work at our job and our attention shifts to working out how we can best get the next reward.

True Open Source communities work differently. The reward to be gained by committing code, documentation or time isn't tangible. If you're lucky, then there will be an email of recognition, a pat on the back or link in a blog. But that's it. There is no rule as to how much reward you will get (if anything), what you need to do to get that reward or the frequency of rewarding. Community members are motivated by what they do, not the reward they hope to get from someone else.

Now however, Open Source communities are increasingly becoming reward societies. Companies start paying committers if they fix this bug or add this enhancement. Bounty-systems are being suggested to get people to fix bugs. Committers are rewarded with a highly-paid job in a shiny new Open Source startup if they do good work. VCs are prepared to reward Open Source ventures with lots of carrots. Open Source ventures are being built with the reward of being bought out by an incumbent software vendor. The list is growing and all this influences the underlying communities.

If this trend continues, then the motivation inside the communities will shift from scratching the itch, to working out how best to reap the next reward. This will fundamentally change how Open Source communities work.

I’m not judging this as either a bad or a good thing and indeed I don’t think that judgement is really important. It is however something that we need to take into consideration as Open Source slowly morphs into “something else”.

Actually, the above isn't strictly true as the reward of recognition is something that motivates many Open Source community members. At the same time, this reward is given by a peer and after you have done something out of your own motivation. The reward of recognition isn't traded inside the community to get people to do something. Compare how we present the reward of "more TV" to our kids upfront to get them to do something or how your boss dangles the bonus-reward in front of you at the beginning of the year - "if you reach this goal by the end of 2006, you will get this amount".

Posted by Matthew at March 28, 2006 10:39 AM

Comments

Posted by: Bertrand Delacretaz at March 28, 2006 02:08 PM