Understanding Volunteers Karen Pauley I'm interested in the Open Source phenomena. That is the phenomena that makes intelligent people work for free. It's not surprising that both the business and academic worlds also want to know how this works. Businesses have been taught that in order to get and retain the best people they need to pay a good salary and provide a variety of benefits. But that is obviously not the reason why people participate in Open Source projects. Most Open Source projects are composed of volunteers and by definition a volunteer is someone who works for something other than financial gain. So, why do people volunteer to take part in an Open Source project? And once your project has volunteers how do you keep them? After all, there are so many different projects out there to choose from. And not only that, there is more than one type of voluntary organization to join. Charles Handy, in his book "Understanding Voluntary Organizations", defined three broad categories of voluntary organizations: mutual support, service delivery, and campaigning. All three exist in the Open Source world. For mutual support we have user groups, like Linux User Groups (LUG) and Perl Mongers, where people come together to meet other people like themselves. These organizations require minimal management, and anyone can join. The service organizations, on the other hand, require a lot more management and not everyone can join. These organizations may need their volunteers to have a very specific skill set, and even make them apply for their posts. One of the defining characteristics of a campaign is a leader. In the Perl world at the minute there is a campaign called the "Iron Man Blogging Challenge". This is being run by the Enlightened Perl Organisation (EPO) and being lead by Matt Trout, a charismatic Perl Monger who likes to rant loudly at people during conferences. Just like the mutual support organizations anyone can take part in this campaign (well, if they want to blog about Perl). Now that we know we have different types of organizations in which people can participate, what are the things that motivate them to take part? Aristotle said that "all men seek one goal: success or happiness". Since he made that statement lots of research has been carried out to discover what motivates people. Research on the motivators behind working on Open Source has built on the work on the voluntary sector and the motivators that drive job satisfaction. It has been suggested that one of the main motivators is ideology. People join your project because they believe in what you are trying to achieve. If, however, you come to a project because you agree with the ideology there is no research to show that this motivator translates into actual work. The other problem with ideology is that if you dig too deep you discover that even though you have similar ideologies to the people you are working with that their viewpoints on many things will be different than yours. If ideology is all you have it may not turn out to be that useful beyond getting people interested in the first place. You need something else to get them working and to keep them interested. Research on the motivations of Wikipedians has shown that for them fun is the most important motivation, and it certainly makes sense that people would want to do something for fun - especially if lots of their other needs are being met. One other important motivational factor, that some believe has been under-rated, is the need to learn, create, and impart knowledge. Open Source projects can be viewed as learning media, just like books, and in some ways could be considered an ideal learning environment. You can view the source, see the documentation, and join a variety of online communities. The "openness" of an Open Source project can also be about the open procedures that allow people to gain experience in social skills alongside the knowledge of how to write code and build systems. Experienced members of the community can impart their knowledge to newcomers: as well as helping the newcomer this can help the experienced member feel useful and respected. There are also more personal motivators. For some it's very important to have the respect of others and to have the feeling that they belong to a group or a community. There has been so much written about the "geek" stereotype that there must be some truth in it. Being different from the people you grow up with can be difficult and finding a place with like-minded people, to work on something you enjoy, can be a relief. We need all the help we can get when it comes to creating a successful project. This does sometimes mean delving into the world of management and trying to find ways to better understand people. Motivations are tricky things. ItŐs hard to know what our own motivators are, never mind those of other people. If you created the project your motivations may be different than the volunteers who sign on to join you. You may be building something that you think would be really useful, something that you believe in enough that you are willing to go through a lot of pain to achieve. ItŐs important to be aware that the motivations of others who take part may not match your own and that their pain thresholds may be set at different levels. Take the time to think about the projects you either created or work on. Why would anyone want to give up their Saturday nights to spend time working on this? Is it fun? Do you continue to learn new things in a supportive environment? Do you feel like you are part of a community? Everyone who volunteers for a project has a set of expectations that they want to be met, but not necessarily a set of expectations that they can express. The more you know about the motivations of the others on the project the easier it will be to create a productive environment. Bibliography Cialdini, R.B., Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, New York, HarperCollins, 2007 Chorng-Guang Wu , James H. Gerlach , Clifford E. Young, An empirical analysis of open source software developers' motivations and continuance intentions, Information and Management, v.44 n.3, p.253-262, April, 2007 Clary, E., Snyder, M., Ridge, R., Copeland, J., Stukas, A., Haugen, J., and Miene, P. Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: A functional approach. J. Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998), 1516-1530. 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Powell, A., Gabriele, P., Ives, B., Virtual teams: a review of current literature and directions for future research, ACM SIGMIS Database, v.35 n.1, p.6-36, Winter 2004 Volunteering, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteering Accessed 10th September 2009 Yunwen Ye, Kouichi Kishida, Toward an understanding of the motivation Open Source Software developers, Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Software Engineering, May 03-10, 2003, Portland, Oregon