On Oct 3, 2006, at 11:40 AM, David Brake wrote:
One of the most interesting findings (for me at least) of the last Pew survey on weblogging was that the top motivation for it was the expression of creativity.
Similar results have been found as motivators for participation in free and open source software projects. They doesn't speak to the underlying theoretical drive or need for creativity, which was the point of your query (although some of the references might), but surveys of open source software developers have consistently placed creativity as a primary motivator, much higher than the more commonly referenced reputation. In fact the best surveys have gone on to show that those that participate for creativity (and learning) have higher levels of contribution than those motivated by, for example, ideology, or even the need for the product itself. However, as yet there has been little acknowledgment that these findings line up closely with the bias that should be expected towards 'reasons that make me look (for feel) good' rather than 'reasons that make me look selfish, or out for glory' etc. Were there any efforts to control for that type of response bias in the Pew survey? I imagine that that type of control is quite hard in surveys, and probably studies that use direct observation and/or discourse analysis, or maybe even experiments, might be needed to firm up these findings? FLOSS motivation survey results: Lakhani, K. and Wolf, R. (2003). Why hackers do what they do: Understanding motivation efforts in Free/F/OSS projects. Working Paper 4425-03, MIT Sloan School of Management. http:// opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf Hars, A. and Ou, S. (2002). Working for free? Motivations of participating in FOSS projects. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 6(3):25–39. Ghosh, R. A., Robles, G., and Glott, R. (2002). Free/libre and open source software: Survey and study floss. Technical report, International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht: Netherlands. http://wwww.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/ Luthiger, B. (2004). Fun and software development (FASD) study provisional results. Progress report, Univrsitat Zurich. http:// www.isu.unizh.ch/fuehrung/blprojects/FASD/ To be fair this article questions those findings a little (but reputation is more likely to have value in the well known Linux project): Hertel, G., Niedner, S., and Herrmann, S. (2003). Motivation of software developers in open source projects: an internet-based survey of contributors to the linux kernel. Research Policy, 32(7):1159–1177. Cheers, James Howison Doctoral Candidate Syracuse University, School of Information Studies http://floss.syr.edu http://james.howison.name