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Analyzing Internet-Based
Collaborations
Azi Lev-On
Ariel University Center of Samaria
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Abstract
How can we account for the accomplishments of online collaborations? What motivates
people to contribute to them? This exploratory study catalogues the features conducive to the
success of such collaborations, focusing on the reduced costs of both individual contributions
and the social organization of production, as well as the excessively large number of potential
contributors attracted to focal collaborations.
Research shows that participants’ motivations for collaboration vary across projects,
involving a mixture of self-regarding and other-regarding motivations. I argue that when
contributions originate among a heterogeneously and non-heroically motivated following,
their vast quantity is conducive to project success despite a high percentage of free-ridership.
The key challenge for such collaborations is not how to motivate the reluctant, but rather how
to find enough people predisposed towards cooperation, engage them and match their abilities
to project needs.
Keywords: Collaboration, collective action, coordination, communication, Internet
communication, Web 2.0, motivation, contribution, public goods, free-riding.
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Introduction
Over the past few years, we have been witnessing the unprecedented achievements of
numerous instances of Internet-based large-scale collaborations.
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Examples range from online
encyclopedias and dictionaries to open source software, from flash protest and petition drives
to Internet-based social movement organizations and canvassing campaigns.
From a classical rational-actor perspective, the success of collaborations relying on small
contributions by numerous participants appears puzzling. First, such collaborations are often
unable to find an effective solution to the problem of free-ridership, which is in the core of
every collective action. Indeed, they are typically characterized by high percentages of free
riders and a highly unequal division of labor (see empirical data below). Second, they
frequently lack certain features that could prevent collective action failures, such as
continuing relations among contributors, expectations of future relationships that cast a
“shadow of the future” or embeddedness of contributors in close-knit networks or
communities (Hardin, 1995). Collaborations are vulnerable to several challenges involving
provision of platforms for producing collaborative goods, attracting potential contributors,
reducing the transaction costs of their contributions and organizing production (Bimber,
Flanagin and Stohl, 2005).
The chapter is organized as follows: I begin by presenting several modal, Internet-based,
collaborative endeavors in broad strokes. I then distinguish their essential features from
non-essential ones. In the principal part of this chapter, I inquire how use of the Internet as a
hub for collaboration addresses the challenges surveyed above and portray a theoretical
framework for analyzing the “logic of Internet-based collective action” that can be applied as
a framework for subsequent investigations and for orientation of further research questions.
Next, I discuss users’ motivations to contribute to such collaborations and conclude by
suggesting future research avenues.
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Exploring Internet-Based Collaborations: Some “Poster Children”
In recent years the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon has been gaining ground, with an explosion of
sites and business models that harness users’ contributions for collaborative production of
goods in a variety of domains (O’Reilly, 2005). Some of the more familiar and well studied
instances –the “poster children” of collaboration, if you will – are now becoming household
names. These developments have become so prominent that Time Magazine named Internet
users who generate and share content online, or in short “You,” its Person of the Year for
2006. Let us begin exploring Internet-based collaborations by examining several familiar
cases.
1. SETI@home: A UC Berkeley-based project for analysis of extensive quantities of
radiotelescopic data, representing a particularly renowned and successful peer-produced grid
computing effort. Chunks of data are sent to volunteers’ personal computers for processing
and the results are then returned to the hub and integrated into a database. This form of grid
computing does not demand much from contributors other than software downloading and
installation, as all other actions are conducted automatically in the background. With
hundreds of thousands of individual daily contributions, SETI@home is considered a great
success. Benkler (2005) argues that the project generated the infrastructure for the fastest
supercomputer in the world. Furthermore, the platform used in this project, BOINC (Berkeley
Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is now applied in multiple initiatives that
require massive processing power, replicating the original distributed business model for
protein folding studies, long-term weather prediction and climate change, disease control and
vaccination, pulsar searches and more.
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2. Clickworkers: A NASA-based project for identification and mapping of craters on the
surface of Mars. As in the @home family of projects, data is broken down into small chunks
and then sent to volunteers for processing. In this case, however, volunteers need to perform
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some simple and straightforward tasks, typically of a few minutes’ duration, manually
mapping craters on computerized maps (Benkler 2002). The organizers of this collaborative
scientific effort suggest that it aimed at answering two metascientific questions: “Is the public
ready, willing and able to help science?” and “Does this new way of powering science
analysis produce just as good results as the traditional way?”
(NASA Clickworkers Study
2005) They suggest that the answers to both questions are affirmative.
3. Project Gutenberg: Digitization of public domain texts offers an outstanding example
of peer production of information-rich goods, entailing non-trivial contributions and some
organizational work to integrate them. The addition of each new text to the collection is a
collaborative work: Some volunteers scan texts or parts thereof, while others proofread the
scanned pages. As of January 2007, Project Gutenberg had processed about 20,000 books. As
in other peer-produced projects, the proofread texts are available for everyone to download
with no charge. Another ambitious project aiming at popularizing the enlightenment spirit is
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, with versions in numerous languages, in which entries are
contributed, commented on, discussed, revised and edited collaboratively by volunteers. As of
January 2007, Wikipedia included more than 1.5 million articles in English alone.
The same organizing principles apply in the production of various content-based projects
such as dictionaries, topical peer-produced databases of photos, video clips, sports, tourist
information, municipal guides and more. They are also typical of consumer sites at which
people post, for example, the names of commercial establishments offering the best prices on
given items, mashup maps that enable people to edit, add content and produce dedicated maps
(of local attractions, transportation, places open late and so on), collaborative journalism in
which “citizen reporters” contribute and comment on news stories and so on.
The hallmark of Internet-based collaboration is the production of massive and
exceptionally complicated information-rich projects. Most famous among them is LINUX, an
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operating system considered highly reliable that dominates certain software markets. LINUX
is a massive-scale project, integrated from numerous contributions of software modules,
comments, documentation and bug fixes by a vast number of programmers worldwide. Rough
estimations of the number of contributors to the development of LINUX come to several
thousands, probably tens of thousands, although far fewer developers contribute the bulk of
its code and are much more active than others in discussion forums supporting the project.
The LINUX operating system is available for anyone to download, install, modify and
redistribute under the terms of the GNU public license. These properties place LINUX and
similar projects “at the worst end of the spectrum of public goods” (Weber, 2004, p. 9).
Kollock (1999, p. 230) calls it an “impossible public good.”
LINUX production mechanisms constitute an intriguing topic that has been detailed
elsewhere (Kuwabara, 2000; Moon and Sproull, 2002; Weber, 2004) and extends far beyond
the scope of this study. In the present context, let me emphasize that unlike other peer-
produced projects, that comprise mechanical contributions and relatively straightforward
organizational functions, the LINUX Project and similar endeavors require contributions that
demand some expertise, may be extremely costly and entail highly complex integration.
It is often argued that first and foremost, novel Internet-based organizing capabilities
promote organization of the unorganized and disorganized. Still, Internet-based collaborations
may be initiated by a myriad of other players such as media outlets, governmental
organizations, labor unions, interest groups, political parties and even individual
entrepreneurs. Note that the innovative SETI@home and Clickworkers projects have been
orchestrated by UC Berkeley and NASA, respectively. The BBC initiated another famous
project for climate change modeling. But although the content is contributed to such projects
by ‘the many,’ they are often organized by ‘the few.’
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Making Distinctions
Three essential properties are common to all projects described above: (1) Use of the
Internet (particularly the Web) as a common platform for coordination and collaboration;
(2) Reliance on numerous agents for contributions that vary in nature and scope both within
and across projects; (3) Typically enabling participants to offer small-scale contributions.
Obviously, many offline endeavors have also been produced using the small contributions of
many volunteers, even centuries before development of the Internet, but global convergence
on the Internet as a clearinghouse for collaborations enables many more such projects to
materialize at dramatically reduced costs.
This study focuses on projects that incorporate the three “essential features” noted above,
namely distributed, Internet-based projects integrated from many small contributions. Projects
have additional features that, to be Hegelians for a minute, may be labeled “accidental”.
Although sometimes conflated in the literature, for analytical purposes, these additional
features should be kept distinct from the three “essential” properties.
Involuntary/paid vs. voluntary/unpaid contributions
Contributions to collaborative projects are often voluntary and free. In some instances,
however, agents are paid for their contributions, while in others contributions are not even
voluntary. For example, certain contributions to open source software are provided by
employees of hi-tech firms with a vested interest in such software’s success. Alternatively,
some distributed canvassing campaigns involve volunteer contributors, while others offer
monetary compensation. The essential point common to paid and voluntary Web-orchestrated
canvassing campaigns is the ability to divide the campaign into a large number of individual
efforts, whether or not the contributors are financially compensated for their efforts.
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Although the compensation issue is immaterial to the explanation of Internet-based
collaboration success provided below, the discussion focuses on cases in which contributions
are voluntary and free because they are more pervasive and more puzzling.
Task assignment
In many cases, individual decisions about contributions are made independently and
privately; there is no authoritative allocation of tasks, nor are tasks assigned using market
mechanisms. Instead, organizers post lists and contributors match themselves to tasks and
choose where and to what extent they wish to contribute. In other cases, however, projects are
organized in a rather centralized fashion, as in Internet-based campaigns or in the crater
mapping project, in which organizers select which tasks to assign to contributors.
Open/closed final product
The final products of collaboration are often open and available to all. As no one may be
excluded from using them, such products are essentially public goods, although they could be
appropriated by a firm or a group (i.e. become club or private goods). For example, an
organization could use the Web to solicit donations or to compose a knowledge database
using the efforts of contributors while retaining rights to the final product. Alternatively, a
governmental organization could ask the public to help develop vaccines or decipher
transmissions “@home” (using methods similar to the ones described earlier) yet announce
that the final product would be closed and unavailable to the general public, including the
contributors. Because of their prevalence and status as public goods, this study focuses on
collaborative instances in which the final product is open to all – contributors as well as
anyone else.
Online/offline
In some cases, such as Internet-based encyclopedias and other collaboratively-produced
databases, contributions are generally information-rich and do not require much legwork by
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contributors or organizers. In others, however, many or most of the contributions involve
actual physical efforts, even if the organization of collective action is Internet-based, as in
Web-organized marches and demonstrations, ride-sharing platforms and meetup groups.
Although the last instances of collaboration are ostensibly distinct from the others, they share
the same distributed organizing principles; the key difference is that they use the Web as an
infrastructure for coordinating the minor efforts of numerous contributors that take place
mostly offline.
Internet-based collaborations may not only involve much more action “on the ground”
than online, but also may not even require inclusive or near-inclusive Internet access by the
contributing agents. For instance, the Zapatista Movement in the state of Chiapas in Mexico
had been the first in which the Internet played a central role, although Internet connectivity
was almost non-existent in the region at the time.
Availability of Community
Many collaborative projects do not rely on managerial hierarchies or markets to organize
production, nor even on communal conventions to encourage contributions. The last point is
of particular interest, as peer production is sometimes contrasted with governmental and
commercially-based production but conflated with community-based production.
Community-regulated governance is based on norms of cooperation and trustworthiness
towards “insiders,” rewards to followers and sanctions against nonconformists, made possible
by dense relationships among members (Hardin, 1995). Although repeated interactions and
even strong social pressures are behind certain collaborative projects, they are not to be
considered inherent features of all such endeavors. Many projects are based on contributions
by individuals who did not know each other previously and have no prospects of a shared
future and no supporting community. Even when collaborative projects introduce discussion
forums and social networking tools, a sense of community need not emerge. Hence the logic
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of communal-based governance cannot be applied as a rule of thumb to explain each and
every successful Internet-based collaboration (Lev-On, 2007).
The accomplishments of Internet-based collaborations, especially the “difficult cases”
characterized by voluntary, unpaid peer contributions, no authoritative task allocation, open
access to the final product and no communal or organizational background, appears somewhat
puzzling. Given the inherent difficulties of endogenously-organized collaborations and the
clear incentive to free-ride, one would expect such projects to be marred by collective action
problems. The concerns are that individual rationality and narrow self-interests would lead to
mutual free-riding behaviors that in turn impede the success of collaborative projects. Such
concerns are backed by empirical evidence of low contribution rates and highly unequal
division of labor in many of the collaborative projects studied. For example, scholars report
such findings in collaborative software production (Adar and Huberman, 2000; Mockus,
Fielding and Herbsleb, 2002; Lerner and Tirole, 2002; Osterloh and Rota, 2004; Weber,
2004); Wikipedia (Voss, 2005); review, recommendation and reputation systems (Dellarocas,
2003), grid computing (Holohan and Garg, 2005), discussion groups (Butler et al., 2002;
Wasko and Faraj, 2005; Sproull, Conley and Moon, 2005) and even guitar tab sharing sites
(Chesney, 2004). A related and prevalent phenomenon is “lurking,” i.e. passive reading of
discussion forums while contributing rarely or not at all (Kollock and Smith, 1996; Preece,
Nonnecke and Andrews, 2004; Sproull, Conley and Moon, 2005).
Note that I do not argue that all collaborative online projects succeed despite such
difficulties. The many that fail to get off the ground seem to fit the logic of collective action
(Olson, 1965). This study seeks to understand the relatively few projects that defy the logic
and succeed.
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Analyzing Online Collaboration
Considering the above empirical evidence and theoretical concerns, the success of
Internet-based collaborations is all the more remarkable and their study highly worthwhile.
The following brief analysis of the mechanisms of collaboration is divided into four sections
(cf. Bimber, Flanagin and Stohl, 2005), each addressing a distinct challenge facing Internet-
based collaborations: (1) Providing platforms for collaboration; (2) Locating and recruiting
contributors; (3) Creating an appropriate context for encouraging contributions and (4) Peer
governance and regulation mechanisms that may be necessary for organizing the collaborative
endeavor.
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The key components of this analysis are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Challenges to Large-Scale Collaborations
Platform provision
Large-scale convergence on Internet communication protocols and naming conventions
generates a common public and global infrastructure for massive interaction and organization,
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with comparatively limited entry costs and gate-keeping possibilities. Such features enable the
Internet to function as an ‘organizational hub’ for collaboration. Convergence on the Internet
as a shared communicative space is necessary but insufficient to explain the success of
particular projects, however. Moreover, it appears that the costs incurred by efficacious
groups of entrepreneurs that establish collaborative platforms significantly decline in several
respects, three of which are discussed below, namely the costs of setup, templates
(collaboration software) and communication and organization among entrepreneurs:
Setup
Collaborative projects, like other informal Internet-based associations, benefit from the
relative straightforwardness of establishing online presence. For obvious reasons, including
avoidance of costly bureaucratic formalities and red tape (Geser, 2001), the costs of
establishing associations that operate mostly online are dramatically lower than those of
conventional associations.
Templates
Templates may be required for message boards, discursive spaces, mailing lists, search
applications, calendars, photo galleries and so on. Organizers of collaborative projects do not
have to create such templates from scratch, as they can capitalize on the work of others and
use dedicated (and often free) software packages.
Coordination and communication among entrepreneurs
When a group of entrepreneurs uses the Internet to organize collective action, it also
benefits from a dramatic reduction in communication and coordination costs, partly because
communication is nearly independent of distance and often transcends traditional obstacles,
although other factors are involved as well (see below). Consequently, the number of people
needed to establish the collaboration infrastructure decreases significantly (Kollock, 1999).
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Attracting potential contributors
Availability of clearinghouses for collaboration is not sufficient for immediate attraction
of contributors. Entrepreneurs and advertisers realize that even if they build the infrastructure,
the target audience will not necessarily come. Like any association, a collaborative project
must attract and retain contributors. In the following section, I argue that a number of factors
reduce barriers for entrepreneurs soliciting potential contributors to emergent Internet-based
collaborations.
Emergence of focal collaborative sites
Given the vast scope of the Internet, it is a key challenge for users to find information of
real value to them without being swamped by information overload. Next, I show that a small
number of sites emerge as a “self-organizing index” to the huge online space and function as
hubs for organizing collaborative projects.
Research shows that skewed distributions, such as power law distributions, are ubiquitous
online. Such distributions have the property that a small number of instances are very
common, while the overwhelming majority of instances are very rare. This regularity appears
to obtain across a variety of cases. For example, Hindman, Tsioutsiouliklis and Johnson
(2003) found that power laws characterize the distribution of inbound links to political
Websites, having analyzed sites addressing six political themes: Gun control, abortion, capital
punishment, Web pages focusing on the U.S. Congress and President, and general political
directories. In all cases, they found a power law distribution of inbound links, i.e. a few sites
linked from many sites, with the vast majority of sites remaining obscure. This distribution is
explained as a consequence of ‘rich get richer’ dynamics, occurring primarily because of
preferential attachment of new outbound links to already salient Websites (Huberman, 2001).
Such distributions have profound implications for Internet-based organization, as they
significantly alleviate the problem of finding one’s way in the massive online labyrinth. A
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narrow set of relevant focal sites emerges and users with similar tastes, economic interests or
hobbies may easily converge onto them. The emergence of focal collaborative sites allows
entrepreneurs to focus their attention on a small number of sites for purposes of mobilization
and organization and enables potential contributors to locate relevant initiatives easily.
Easy location by interested parties through push technology
Once an organizational hub is located and accessed, users may subscribe to mailing lists
or information feeds so that information gets pushed to them, i.e. sent to their E-mail
addresses or distributed to them in some other Internet-based or offline fashion. Thus,
individually-tailored information about relevant projects may be pushed and received easily
and promptly by interested parties who, in turn, remain relatively passive.
Fast information flow
Finally, timely and relevant information received by interested parties may be forwarded
to relevant third parties and reach them easily. Using the Internet, it is easier than ever to
establish referral or social networks in which members create profiles and link them to those
of other members. As people often link to others who share similar interests or concerns,
information about emerging collective actions may reach not only people who demonstrate
some interest in a particular topic but possibly those in their referral/social networks as well,
rendering online information dissemination highly effective.
Encouraging contributions
Next, I highlight two related factors as keys to understanding Internet-based collaboration:
The transaction costs of contributions and the gains accruing from the ability to amass large
and excessive pools of potential contributors to focal projects.
Reduced transaction costs of contributions
Several authors have commented on the changes in the costs and benefits of contributions
to collective action brought about by the Internet, especially with reference to
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information-rich goods (notably Kollock, 1999; Geser, 2001). The main points appear
straightforward:
The Internet relaxes traditional obstacles for communication, often rendering it virtually
independent of physical, topological, and national boundaries and cost-independent of
distance, so that projects may attract contributors from various regions or countries. As a
rule of thumb, weather conditions are irrelevant online.
Internet communication does not require face-to-face interaction, co-presence or
geographic proximity.
Contributors can send messages simultaneously to a large number of individuals, using
pre-compiled mailing lists, for example. The cost of sending a message is often
independent of the number of recipients and the marginal cost of sending it to additional
recipients is negligible.
Internet communication has both synchronous and asynchronous capabilities.
Contributors may become involved, at will, in one-to-many or many-to-many
communications.
These features simplify contributing to a cause one considers worthy. Furthermore, in
some cases, the organizational or group contexts within which contributions are made further
support the decision to contribute, especially to information-rich goods. For example,
consider contributions to discussion groups. According to Sproull, Conley and Moon (2005)
and Subramani and Peddibhotla (2004):
Assistance is solicited from numerous individuals predisposed to take an interest in the
relevant topic. In many cases, people can consult lists of frequently asked questions
(FAQs) and locally-compiled reference materials.
While the need for help is visible, the person on the receiving end may remain invisible,
enabling people to seek help without risking public exposure.
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At the sending end, contributors may often maintain their anonymity if they desire to do
so.
Potential contributors may not be influenced by beneficiaries’ characteristics and are thus
kept from acting on their prejudices and refusing to help others, as may happen offline.
People may choose to contribute as much as they wish to whichever aspect of the project
they wish and may leave at any time without committing to additional contributions.
While the above presentation is highly abridged due to space considerations, the point is
clear nonetheless: Factors such as invisibility of both help-seekers and help-providers and the
organizational contexts within which assistance is provided render certain Internet-based
environments especially conducive to contribution.
Attracting a large and excessive number of potential contributors to focal
collaborations – The power of numbers
A second key factor in understanding contributions to focal projects is the large and
excessive number of potential contributors attracted to these projects (Benkler, 2002).
Collaborations may grow very large in size, involving very large numbers of individuals who
choose to participate in exploring and discussing themes in which they share an interest.
Collaborative projects may incorporate large pools of “local experts” (or “professional
amateurs”) who function in various capacities. In open source software production for
example, they contribute to development of the product, test it, integrate other contributions
or generate documentation. The ability to attract a large and excessive number of potential
contributors is critical to the success of collaborations in several different contexts:
Some projects (such as grid computing or distributed proofreading) require the
cooperation of non-experts with minimal skills. In such cases, a large number of lay
persons may indeed generate enough contributions to sustain the project.
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Other projects involve more costly contributions by local experts or agents with private
information (examples: collaborative journalism, movie databases, trip advisors, product
recommendation sites). In such cases, the larger the contributor pool, the greater the
possibilities of locating agents with local expertise or private information –not simply
recruiting anyone but engaging the right people for the project.
Finally, some complex projects require a division of labor in which contributors are far
from being substitutable, as different agents specialize in different aspects of the project
(as in peer production of open source software). In such cases, the more contributors, the
higher the probabilities of finding experts across various (or all) aspects of the project.
The availability of large and excessive pools of potential contributors enables
collaborative projects to succeed despite the often highly skewed distributions of actual
contributions and the high free-ridership rates. Such projects typically exhibit an increasing
return to scale and the large number of people who take an interest in them – even without
actively contributing – engenders a lock-in on the product (Weber, 2004). For example, a
collaborative project like Wikipedia benefits from a large readership, even without insisting
that readers contribute. Discussion groups gain attention and prominence when numerous
lurkers access and read them, even if just a few actually contribute the majority of postings
(Sproull, Conley and Moon, 2005).
Mechanisms of peer regulation and governance
What remains to be explored is the organizational mechanisms of such peer-based
collaborative projects and the difficulties they address, such as division of labor among
contributors, intake and integration of individual contributions and introduction of quality
control (Benkler, 2002, 2005).
Although any attempt at mapping the organizational methods of Internet-based
collaborative projects would essentially amount to proposing a new theory of organization,
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which is far outside the scope of the chapter, let me comment on a feature that is common to
many Internet-based collaborative projects that engenders efficient organization, namely the
enhanced self-regulation and governance capabilities of collaborative institutions that
aggregate large amounts of individual selections and generate social choices. Such institutions
allow agents to perform tasks collaboratively and seamlessly, such as generating reputations
based on the performance of buyers and sellers, providing keywords to describe content
(collaborative tagging), editing and rating content, moderating discussions and generating
meta-moderation (moderating the moderators) and producing reviews and recommendations
of products and services. For example, in collaborative information filtering, agents’ ranking
choices have immediate design consequences, as user ranking determines collaborative
project portal customization and presentation of opinion pieces, with portals according
priority to articles that agents found especially interesting and relevant. In other words, the
availability of content is determined by its popularity and people are first exposed to
information highly regarded by relevant others.
Motivations
One last theme that remains to be explored concerns the motivations behind contributions
to collaborative projects. Recall that the elements of successful collaboration noted above
sidesteps the motivation issue and highlights instead two related factors: the transaction costs
of contributions and the gains accrued from the ability to amass large and excessive pools of
potential contributors for focal projects. Such factors relax but do not eliminate the free-rider
problem at the core of every collective action (as demonstrated by the empirical research cited
above). Contributions still take time and effort; many people are waiting for their favorite
collaborative project to get off the ground with the help of others, seeking to benefit without
actively contributing. Apparently, the issue of motivation remains open for discussion.
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In effect, the above analysis is blind to the question of motivations. I do not intend to
make any assumptions about motivations or to generalize from the idiosyncratic features of
particular projects. I also seek to avoid arguing that all motivations to contribute to
collaborative projects are incentive-compatible or even directly or indirectly self-regarding.
Such claims do not conform to our intuitions, nor are they confirmed by extensive survey
work, that suggests a variety of motivations behind contribution to collaborative projects.
To explore motivations, let us first examine projects approximating the “impossible”
(Kollock, 1999, p. 230), in which the costs of individual contributions are not trivial and
organization of the final product is demanding, as in many open source software projects.
Research has pointed to a wide range of motivations behind contribution to the production of
open source software (Kuwabara, 2000; Benkler, 2002; Lakhani and Von Hippel, 2003;
Osterloh and Rota, 2004; Weber, 2004, ch. 5). According to the most extensive survey so far,
the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Survey and Study of 2,784 practitioners
worldwide, learning and developing novel skills are the key motivations of contributors to
peer-produced open source projects (International Institute of Infonomics 2002). Investment
in human capital is the primary motivation to begin contributing to open-source projects
(78.9%), and to continue contributing thereafter (70.5%). Additional motivations involve
sharing knowledge and skills (49.8% and 67.2% respectively), participating in a new form of
cooperation (34.5% and 37.2%), improving the open source products of other developers
(33.7% and 39.8%), participating in the OS scene (30.6% and 35.5%) and promoting the idea
that software should not be proprietary goods (30.1, 37.9). In Lakhani and Wolf’s (2005)
survey of 684 open-source developers, 58.7% rated work or non-work need for the software
as one of their three top motivations. Other popular motivations were intellectual stimulation
(44.9%) and investment in human capital (41.3%). Wu, Gerlach and Young (2007) surveyed
148 participants in three open-source projects and found that developers were primarily
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motivated by helping other developers, enhancing human capital and the need to modify OS
software. Hertel, Niedner and Herrmann (2003) asked 141 contributors to the LINUX kernel
about their motivations. Involvement was determined primarily by identification of members
as LINUX programmers and users, the need to improve own software, norm-oriented motives
related to the reaction of relevant others, “hedonistic” motives such as enjoyment of
programming, ideological motivation to support free software and motives related to
networking within the LINUX community. Lakhani and Von Hippel (2003) conducted a
survey of 89 programmers who provided assistance in the help forum of the Apache OS
server program. Frequent providers were motivated mostly by the importance of promoting
open source software (5.14 on an ascending scale of 1 to 7), reciprocation of past help
received by others (4.85), “because it’s fun” (4.81) and a desire to enhance one’s reputation in
the OSS/Apache community (4.71). Hars and Ou (2002) surveyed 79 developers involved in
various open source projects and found that key motivations were investment in human
capital (88.3%), “self-determination” in dealing with the environment (79.7%) and peer
recognition (43%).
Data on motivation to contribute to collaborative projects in other domains reveals a
similarly nuanced and highly contextual picture. Wasko and Faraj (2000) surveyed 342
participants in three communities dealing with computer-related issues and received 508 valid
comments regarding motivations to participate. Key motivations were obtaining information
(14.6%), learning (13.4%) and reciprocation for previously-received assistance (13.4%). In
another survey of 173 members of an electronic community of legal professionals (Wasko
and Faraj, 2005, p. 53), they found that people contribute knowledge “when they perceive that
it enhances their professional reputations, and to some extent because it is enjoyable to help
others. They contribute when they are structurally embedded in the network, and when they
have experience to share with others.” Butler et al. (2002) surveyed 385 members of various
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discussion groups conducted through listservers, emphasizing the importance of
socially-oriented motivations to participate, such as meeting people and making friends,
having fun, having others appreciate one’s participation, gaining a sense of accomplishment,
becoming known to list members and building relationships with list members.
Schroer and Hertel (2007) studied 106 contributors to the German-language Wikipedia
and found their principal motivations to be improving the quality of collective work (6.36 on
a scale of 1 to 7), grounding freedom of information (6.20), and learning (5.84). In another
study of 151 contributors to Wikipedia, Nov (2007) discovered that the top motivations were
fun (mean of 6.10 on a scale of 1 to 7), and ideology (5.59). Holohan and Garg (2005)
surveyed 323 contributors to distributed computing projects (including SETI@home) and
noted that 63.5% cited the project’s scientific contributions as a very important reason for
participating. The second most commonly mentioned very important reason was contributing
to the statistics / friendly competition (a social game among contributors). Finally, Chesney
(2004) found that the top motivations to contribute guitar tabs online were the desire to share
them with others (35%), ego boosting (13%), reciprocity (11.5%) and improving guitar
playing (11.5%).
This relatively long series of surveys shows that motivations to contribute to
collaborative projects online are extremely diverse and probably highly contextual.
Individuals may participate for a variety of reasons, such as pure or warm glow altruism,
reciprocity, helping a community or even advancing science. Other motivations are more
self-regarding, including personal gain (employees of private firms who get paid to develop
open source products, for example), solving personal problems, reputation, human capital,
experimentation and fun, ego boosting and cultivating self-efficacy.
The specifics of collaborative projects vary and exhibit a variety of features. In all
likelihood, we should expect considerable variation in the distribution of motivations across
22
collaborative projects, as different peer-produced projects demand different levels of
contributor efforts and costs. For example, proofreading scanned pages for Project Gutenberg
is not too time-consuming or demanding and contributions to reputation management systems
demand checking a few boxes and possibly writing a short textual comment. Writing
encyclopedic entries or contributing software modules, by contrast, may require investment of
a great deal of time. Taking part in the coordination and integration of a peer-produced project
is even more demanding. Other collaborative initiative parameters also vary across projects:
Some projects have an ideological orientation, while others do not; different projects demand
differential levels of computer literacy and so on. Hence we are unlikely to find similar
motivation distributions across a wide range of collaborative projects. As motivations are not
a primary driver of the exploratory model above, however, we may consider the model
sufficiently generic to apply to a variety of projects irrespective of specific distribution of
motivations.
Conclusions and Future Research
The organizational logic of production that uses the Internet as a hub to attract and
synthesize many small-scale contributions is applied gradually by many actors and
organizations to produce a variety of goods and services. The key advantages of the Internet
in such collaborations are the ability to assemble a large number of potential contributors at
focal sites and reduce the transaction costs of their contributions dramatically. It appears that
the principal challenge for entrepreneurs interested in establishing such collaborations is not
the classic problem of motivating the narrowly self-interested, but rather the creation of a
sufficiently large pool of agents displaying some initial interest in a project and the
construction of an environment conducive to contribution.
23
We have begun exploring the fascinating world of online collaboration, but there is still
much to be discovered. Researchers tend to study single projects, with little to no comparative
work available on collaborative efforts. Future studies may not only examine the distribution
of motivations within particular projects but also include a comparative dimension,
demonstrating how and why motivation distributions vary across different types of projects. It
is also interesting to learn how the identity of a project’s organizer influences participants’
motivations by comparing similar projects initiated by different agencies, such as commercial
firms, government institutions and civic organizations.
Most studies have focused on projects involving software development and on a few “poster children,”
with almost no academic attention to collaborations in areas especially intriguing from a social scientific
perspective, such as health care, local community action, environmentalism and crime fighting. Lessons
learned from such successful Internet-based collaborations may enlighten us about the possibilities of
establishing and sustaining participatory democratic governance through the Internet, inform us
concerning strategies to encourage contributions and allow us to predict which projects are most feasible
and how the wisdom of the many may be channeled towards socially beneficial goals.
24
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NOTES
1
The chapter is an abbreviated and revised version of Lev-On and Hardin (2007).
2
For current data, see www.boincstats.com.
3
Empirical work on open source software (OSS) production displays skewed distributions not
only within but also across projects. Krishnamurthy (2002) has demonstrated that while a few
projects attract a lot of attention and contributions, the majority receive very little of either.
Hunt and Johnson (2001) show that most open source projects listed in SourceForge, the
repository for OSS projects in development, fail to attract sufficient support for
implementation. Whether this finding applies to non-OSS projects as well is still to be
determined.
4
For a more comprehensive discussion, see Lev-On and Hardin (2007).
