Keynote: Jana Gallus: Motivation and Incentives: An Evidence-Based Approach To Community Management

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Slides:  https://chaoss.github.io/website/CHAOSScon/2019NA/slides/Gallus_CHAOSSconf_20190820.pdf

Standard economic incentives and contracts of limited use

- Motivation crowding out (intrinsic and image motivation)
- Tasks cannot be contracted (creative, complex, prosocial)
- Budget constraint

* I am not saying we should not use monitary reward, just that it is difficult (ie. you stop , they sto)

One of the most prelevant forms of non-economic incentives  ("Recognition") in the forms of awards. : blood donors medal, open badges, quenns award for voluntary service as examples.

What works - data driven approach to community management using field experiments
- Gitlab
- Top Coder
Gitlab

1) Supporting People's motivations
Wikipedia has a problem with editor retention, as many do. The question is what tools do we have to help newcomers remain active.

Can symbolic awards help retain newcomers on Wikipedia?

The award page

- each month I would scape newcomers, and do some scraping and criteria (avoiding vandles, not prioritizing volumne)
I did a control experiment, 1 group got an award, the other did not. about 4000 people were part of this.

Major takeaways:

This purely symbolic ward, no offline implications, increased the share of newcomers remaining active in the month following the award by 20%
Also after 5 quarters, the two groups continued to be different. 

IMPLICATIONS

SYMBOLIC AWARDS CAN BE USED TO SUSTAINABLEY MOTIVATE CONTRIBUTORS
* Effecton willingess to do tedious maintainance tasks
* Awards foster confidence & identification


Teams miss out on high quality contributions.

one important reason: self-stereotyping.  which is rooted in beliefs
-> not about motivation 
-> not about lacking the knowledge (training scrreening)
-> Not about discrimination - though that may be on top
-> Not (only) about confidence.

Can Recognition correct Beliefs?

-> Experimentally very publiccness:
-> public feedback 
- Virtual award
- F2F ceremony 

Focused on collaborative, computer-mediated work on math tasks in the lab.

There seems to be value in F2F ceremny

Implications

Self steriotyping among high ability women produces gender gap in contribuors when working on male typed tasks.
Recognition increased confidence to contribute  
The form of recognition matters, F2F ceremny closes the gender gap

Public award seems to increase legimty trust and awards signal.

"Seeing the audience gives strenths in the signal"

LIMITATIONS

Control, Prospective and Retrospective.  (award has increased the number of absenses.

Recognition is intuitively appealing

but it can bakire

->crowding out motivation
- strategic taining, multi-tasking
-> Hubris
-> Envy

Needs to be designed carefully, dont' forget:
-> (don;t forget that are Tasks are less visible_
-> People to have already made effort.