Clay Shirky on the four primary factors motivating participation

Hi folks,

I am going to cross-post this to multiple discussion pages here (Community Health, Reader Conversion and Quality) – hope that's okay with everyone. This is just a quick note, intended to be supportive and encouraging.

This morning I was at a little conference in Berkeley where Clay Shirky was speaking. And some of what he said was 1) applicable to the work you're doing here, and 2) suggested to me that you folks are on the right track. So I thought I'd share it :-)

Clay was talking about hobbies, which he says historically have been practiced in private – alone, or with family/friends. (Forgive me for equating Wikipedia to a hobby: let's assume we're defining hobby very very broadly.) Clay said that when hobbies were practiced primarily in private, there were two major intrinsic personal motivations for participation:

1) autonomy (nobody assigned me to do it, I wanted to do it)

2) competence (I am good at it, and by practicing I get better, which is fun)

Since the advent of the internet, “hobbies” have moved into the public sphere – they are now practiced in large groups, often with strangers, and the output is visible to others. Clay said that when that shift happened, two additional major intrinsic social motivations for participation developed:

3) feedback (I get more useful feedback than before, which helps me improve faster, which makes me happy)

4) reputation/respect (I can show off, and be publicly rewarded/honoured for being competent)

I thought this was really interesting, and particularly germane for the Community Health group, which has been talking about rewards. It's a pretty good framework, I think, for thinking about how to attract and retain project participants.