Hi everyone, At our last meeting[0] efly and I had a good chat about the initiative to give away stickers for people who contributed to QA[1]
The short version: It didn't help us gain new contributors, so we won't be continuing the program into the Wily cycle. The long version: Stickers are fun, and I thought that a giveaway would be a fun way to reward our QA contributors and encourage other people to get involved. I've since learned a lot about motivation and realized that my assumptions were way off. Essentially, studies have proven that "carrot and stick" type motivation works for physical, mechanical work (make x number of widgets,do more data entry, file a busywork report) but in today's world where most work is problem solving and creativity-based, it fails to motivate effectively and actually does harm. The Candle Problem is one of the experiments often cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_problem (see the section of the article on Glucksberg). Our work on QA is not mechanical, make-more-widgets-faster work, it's problem-solving. You need to go through the test cases thoughtfully and it takes creativity, knowledge about Xubuntu and effort to report bugs effectively. Ones that are reported without thought just to get your stats up on the QA tracker are not helpful, as they don't get to the bottom of what the bug is reporting, making the report useless to us. As if the numbers didn't speak for themselves (we didn't really see a rise in contributors), most of the people we contacted about their winning of the stickers were surprised. One nearly declined to take them at all until he decided he'd give the stickers to people he knew. Stickers are not why people contribute to Xubuntu QA, they want to help us and give of their time to support an operating system that's important to them. This is reflected in other research that I learned about that explained that monetary and "stuff" rewards for creative work actually do harm to otherwise philanthropic deeds because they devalue them. Gosh, I got this all wrong! Now, how to move forward: We still need to increase participation in QA, but we need to think of better ways to encourage participation. Acknowledgement and recognition given by members of the Xubuntu team should be part of this. Perhaps an email from the project lead thanking them for their work when we notice someone is doing a lot of testing, or mention that they've done good work on social media or a profile of them on our site. These kinds of surprise, non-mechanical tokens of gratitude go much further than some stickers they won for competing for most tests completed. Speaking for myself, these kinds of non-stuff rewards certainly have motivated me in the past. Thoughts? As a final note, if you want to learn more like I did, I recommend reading Drive[2]. The book itself is a quick read (under 300 pages with TONS of references, footnotes, etc) but led me down the rabbit hole of other motivation research. The recommendation of this book came to me from Robert Collins, who I know from Ubuntu stuff and now work with on OpenStack. [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Meetings/Archive/Minutes/2015-05-12 [1] http://xubuntu.org/news/help-the-community-with-testing-and-win-xubuntu-stickers/ [2] Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us http://www.danpink.com/drive/ -- Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2 -- xubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/xubuntu-devel
