{"id":208,"date":"2006-09-19T17:51:50","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T15:51:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=208"},"modified":"2006-09-22T13:14:43","modified_gmt":"2006-09-22T11:14:43","slug":"of-bounties-donations-and-summers-of-code-influence-on-volunteer-participation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=208","title":{"rendered":"Of bounties, donations and summers of code influence on volunteer participation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stuff like the Google Summer of Code, the GNOME Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006, the Sourceforge donations system, or Dunc-Tank<\/a> (an experiment to see how targeted fund raising can improve Debian) are generally considered a good ideas. However, experiments have shown that sometimes, paying volunteers decreases<\/strong> the overall participation. Luis Villa<\/a> wrote about this a few months ago, and summarized like this:<\/p>\n

When people do things for their own intrinsic goodness (i.e., for reasons other than payment), introducing payment can reduce the amount of invovement.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I urge you to read Luis Villa’s blog entry about this<\/a>, and specifically the Motivation Crowding Theory: A Survey of Empirical Evidence<\/em><\/a> paper.<\/p>\n

Update (22\/09) :<\/strong><\/p>\n

The point of this blog entry was “You should read this, it could help you make your own opinion about this stuff.”<\/em>, not “Dunc-Tank bashing.”<\/em>.<\/p>\n

About Dunc-Tank specifically, I don’t think that it desserves all the criticisms it has gone through recently, because :<\/p>\n