The Crowdsourcing Blog

In the last post we saw that incentives in crowsdourcing don’t always have to be monetary. So I’d like to delve deeper into this, since this is a really interesting topic and not that much discussed.

Particularly we’ll look at this great paper I found via Mike Arauz. It’s a paper by Daren C. Brabham, a candidate and graduate teaching fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, that talks about types of incentives, citing the example of Threadless.

In this qualitative research done by interviewing 17 users of the service, Daren saw 5 different types of motivation: the opportunity to make money, the opportunity to develop one’s creative skills, the potential to take up freelance work, the love of community at Threadless, and fifth curious one: “addiction”.

Mike did a great image on this, that helps visualize it better:

The first two are fairly obvious, but the others (and particularly the last one) strike me as very interesting.

Hone my Skills and be part of the Community: these two are somewhat similar. This kinds of communities on crowdourcing services are a bit niche in the sense that you find specific kinds of people there (sort of), with specific skills. So having that knowledge, it’s natural that they would provide more constructive feedback than say on very diverse community say Youtube, and people feel more at home because of shared interests. This way, users keep coming in order to have feedback from their peers (which is also more valuable than in a diverse community since the users know what they are talking about), and to return to a place they feel like they fit in.

Addicted to Participating: the most interesting aspect of this study, and while Daren tries to understand if the term is used in the pathology sense by the users, or how it could be harnessed to a non-government organization, he doesn’t focus much on the game mechanics aspect of it. These have been discussed elsewhere, and many times include badges for indivisual acomplishments, point systems and the like. In broader terms, it’s even been said that the friends one has on social networks works like a game mechanism, so every indicator (number of comments, number of requests) can work as an addictive element to keep you going back to the site over and over.

Also, in many cases, a game involves interaction between players, so element that taps into our social needs (belonging), and esteem needs (”I won points, I’m good”).

So making a connection to our previous post where we had a presentation that talked about Maslow’s theory of needs, the first ones on this study (money and work related) seem to be more like in the bottom of the pyramid, where the needs are of survival and security, and these last ones (part of community and addicted participating) in the top of the pyramid, related to social, esteem and self-actualization needs.

In all this, one thing is for sure once again: if you’re looking just for monetary incentives in crowdsourcing, you’re missing a big part of the picture.