I've been thinking a lot about how to change some disturbing trends in the Drupal community and find ways to ensure that Core & Contrib in particular are better supported by the community. I've been exploring reward systems, gamification and other tools to try to change community participation. @Tim.Plunkett essentially introduced me to the thoughts of @seriouspony and it's got me thinking even deeper about how to help shape the community.

I don't think there are any silver bullets in approaches. I do believe that we're going to need to experiment to find out what works for this community over the long haul.

In @seriouspony's first hour long podcast she talks about the dangers of giving rewards for things that have intrinsic motivations.

The danger of focusing on extrinsic motivation is that of getting users addicted and you have a Skinner box. This isn't healthy for the individuals or the community.

Where There is Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is when you’re driven to do an action because the action itself provides pleasure.

There are fortunately lots of reasons why people participate in Drupal for intrinsic reasons. I think the intrinsic ones can fall nicely into Dan Pink's ideas around motivation.

Mastery

  • Becoming a better coder
  • Learning new skills

Autonomy

  • Being in control of a project
  • Ability to follow an interest of one's choice

Purpose

  • Contributing back
  • Contributing to a collaborative community

All efforts should be made not to add Extrinsic motivators to things where there is already a solid Intrinsic motivator that is presently driving community contributions.

Places Where we often don't see Opportunities for Intrinsic Motivation

  • Writing documentation
  • Writing SimpleTests/unit tests
  • Answering support questions

Where Extrinsic Motivation Might be Needed

Anything that is a routine task where there is no real creativity or where no intrinsic motivations are available.

  • Cleaning up the issue queue

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets CreditAttribution: nevets commented

I like answering support questions :)

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
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Primary language English
CreditAttribution: mgifford commented

@nevets - That's great! There are actually lots of reasons why this can add value to peoples lives and make it more worth while. It's very concrete when you can address someone's real life problems and give them a fix. It was actually occurring to me earlier today what it would be like if there was a team of people who had a dashboard block with lists of new people to Drupal who are asking their first question. What would it be like if we could make sure that everyone's first support question had a satisfactory response. Not that an answer is given immediately, but someone helps guide them through shaping their question, replicating the problem, providing a screenshot, whatever. It would probably do a lot to see that there is a good introduction to people to this community. It would probably also be pretty rewarding.

The list above wasn't very good. Started off with thinking about listing intrinsic vs extrinsic activities. There are a lot of tasks though, if approached properly, could be either personally rewarding (or not) just based on how they are approached.

It can be fine to provide reward mechanisms for things that have no intrinsic rewards, but finding those items can be a challenge. I wanted to jot down some ideas to consider this and get feedback from people like you.....

I think there is a lot we can do to provide opportunities for educating our community about how things like documentation can be Intrinsically rewarding... However, I think we need to be regularly asking people and encouraging them along.

Do you think you could summarize to someone else why you find answering support questions rewarding? Is it as simple as, "I like to help others"?

rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
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Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk as a volunteer commented

Hi,

As we are looking to place more issues describing the governance of the CWG here (as opposed to the actual activity of the CWG), I’d like to do some “tidying up”.

Can you please describe what actions are needed to close this issue for you?

Thanks

Rachel, CWG

rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
Primary language English
Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk as a volunteer commented
Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)
rachel_norfolk’s picture

rachel_norfolk
Primary language English
Location UK
CreditAttribution: rachel_norfolk as a volunteer commented
Related issues: +#2871769: Discuss ways to encourage more valuable contributions through issue crediting
gdemet’s picture

gdemet
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Primary language English
Location Chicago, USA
CreditAttribution: gdemet at Palantir.net commented
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Closed (outdated)

I sympathize greatly with many of the sentiments expressed in this issue, and the CWG has discussed the need for our community to better support intrinsic motivation in several past sessions going back to DrupalCon Dublin.

However, given that there has been no activity on this issue for over a year, I'm going to go ahead and close it out for now.