[geeklog-devel] Wiki docs - motivation in general

Markus Wollschlaeger 1000ideen at gmx.de
Sat Jul 21 05:47:18 EDT 2007


I didn`t follow every posting on the wiki discussion and especially not the potential payment for writing but there was the question how people could be motivated to write. 

Motivation is a general topic not only in regard of writing the documentation. Generally money is NOT seen to be a motivator. 

http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/cbdmamam.htm
>Then do everything possible to take money off people's minds.<

http://www.businessballs.com/herzberg.htm
http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/herzberg/

To make it more practical: Charisma (a charismatic person) can be defined as 'building worlds other people want to belong to'.

Geeklog and the geeklog team / community IS such a world. What it is lacking in some regard is the visibility of the team and the work of the team.

My suggestion is to build a team page like this: 
http://www.openarchitectureware.org/staticpages/index.php/team
http://www.oscommerce.com/about/team

Yes, I consider this immensely important. 

Another step would be to make the coding work visible. When you go to the geeklog site it is hardly visible what is going on actively. The team page should display somehow what the person is doing in that week / month and possibly how someone else could assist (like the summer of cod students).

To sum it up: Build a world people want to belong to, make this visible -> people are motivated. Of course this is a task on its own.

To proove that this is not too unusual I quote from the "my profile" drupal forum settings: 

==============================================
Provide an overview of your Drupal contributions.
I contributed Drupal modules
I contributed Drupal themes
I contributed Drupal documentation
I contributed Drupal translations
I help in the Drupal support forums
I provide Drupal-related services
I attended the Drupal conference at FOSDEM 2005 (Antwerp, Belgium)
I attended OSCON 2005 or the off-site Drupal conference at OSCON 2005 (Portland, Oregon)
I attended OSCON 2005 or the off-site Drupal conference at OSCON 2005 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Europe)
I attended LinuxWorldExpo London
I attended the Drupal conference colocated with the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit (Vancouver, Canada)
I attended the Drupal conference 2006 (Brussels, Belgium)
I attended OSCMS 2007, Sunnyvale 
==============================================

You can tick each of these statements and be part of the Drupal community. It is being displayed in the person`s profile. Seems to be working.

What do you think?

Ciao, Markus



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