[Air-l] The value of creative expression outside pedagogical contexts

[James Howison]

On Oct 3, 2006, at 11:40 AM, David Brake wrote:
> One of the most interesting findings (for me at least) of the last  
> Pew survey on weblogging was that the top motivation for it was  
> the  expression of creativity.

Similar results have been found as motivators for participation in  
free and open source software projects.

They doesn't speak to the underlying theoretical drive or need for  
creativity, which was the point of your query (although some of the  
references might), but surveys of open source software developers  
have consistently placed creativity as a primary motivator, much  
higher than the more commonly referenced reputation.  In fact the  
best surveys have gone on to show that those that participate for  
creativity (and learning) have higher levels of contribution than  
those motivated by, for example, ideology, or even the need for the  
product itself.

However, as yet there has been little acknowledgment that these  
findings line up closely with the bias that should be expected  
towards 'reasons that make me look (for feel) good' rather than  
'reasons that make me look selfish, or out for glory' etc. Were there  
any efforts to control for that type of response bias in the Pew survey?

I imagine that that type of control is quite hard in surveys, and  
probably studies that use direct observation and/or discourse  
analysis, or maybe even experiments, might be needed to firm up these  
findings?

FLOSS motivation survey results:

Lakhani, K. and Wolf, R. (2003). Why hackers do what they do:  
Understanding motivation efforts in Free/F/OSS projects. Working  
Paper 4425-03, MIT Sloan School of Management. http:// 
opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf

Hars, A. and Ou, S. (2002). Working for free?  Motivations of  
participating in FOSS projects. International Journal of Electronic  
Commerce, 6(3):25–39.

Ghosh, R. A., Robles, G., and Glott, R. (2002). Free/libre and open  
source software: Survey and study floss. Technical report,  
International Institute of Infonomics, University of Maastricht:  
Netherlands.  http://wwww.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/

Luthiger, B. (2004). Fun and software development (FASD) study  
provisional results. Progress report, Univrsitat Zurich. http:// 
www.isu.unizh.ch/fuehrung/blprojects/FASD/

To be fair this article questions those findings a little (but  
reputation is more likely to have value in the well known Linux  
project):

Hertel, G., Niedner, S., and Herrmann, S. (2003). Motivation of  
software developers in open source projects: an internet-based survey  
of contributors to the linux kernel. Research Policy, 32(7):1159–1177.

Cheers,
James Howison

Doctoral Candidate
Syracuse University, School of Information Studies
http://floss.syr.edu
http://james.howison.name