 Hey everyone, thanks for showing up. I'm Gordon Hap. I'm at Red Hat. I wrote a book on open source last year and One of the coolest things about writing that book was I got to read a whole bunch of research and this talk comes out of that Why do we contribute to open source now? We I mean the individual we I mean there's a whole other discuss But why companies contribute, but this is about why we individually contribute and It really comes down to motivations and there's several different kinds of motivations extrinsic intrinsic and That big long pair of words. So I might go through each of those extrinsic well, this is a pretty obvious extrinsic motivator here and This is probably the best known one the Sort of the idea here comes out of psychology as something called drive reduction theory Academics are great at coming up with bizarre terminology for things. It goes back to about the 1940s or so Money is a big one Drive drive reduction theory is this sort of idea You know is you get out of balance because you're hungry So you eat something and I guess you back in balance and money is kind of an indirect proxy here But it's an example of the way that you can kind of get back into balance But other things are like career advice gang raises gang promotions or examples here and The contributing open source plays in here because there's actually have been studies They have said that developers can signal their talent through open source software unopened repose stories But this obviously doesn't explain every type of motivation out there There's also intrinsic and this evolved from some other psychological theories Self-determination theory specifically and the most obvious is just fun You know, I like doing this. You're probably not playing and you're say your softball league after work Be for career advancement. Certainly not for money, but because just like doing it another big Intrinsic motivator is altruism. You know why might someone say help out at a soup kitchen They're doing it to Help other people and okay, maybe they're also doing it to feel good about helping other people But at the end of the day, it's for altruistic reasons another thing that Psychologists sociologists talk about is the idea of kinship amity Essentially, it's informal gift economy within a group. So you see this in families for example Why do you have grandma over for Thanksgiving dinner? Well, it's something you kind of Have to do as sort of part of belonging to your family group Um the open source research here is a bit of a mixed bag Altruism seems to be more important when you have students and hobby programmers For professionals. Yeah, it can be a motivator, but they mostly have to be otherwise Satisfied at the same time and fun can also be a motivator at least for tasks that developers enjoy Finally there's this idea of Mixing sort of these different types of moa bears and these really falls into External motivations that don't have an explicit carrot and stick so things like peer recognition things like Learning although people mean different things by that are simply Scratching your own it's something that's sort of helping yourself in some way So what does this mean for us? Well, don't expect those Non-extrinsic motivators to carry too much to the load don't expect people to work for free Just because it's open source without paying them or other types of relatively formal recognition Amplify some of those non-extrinsic motivators. So help people learn For example the editors at open source.com is now that Peer reputation of red hat. We have a peer recognition system reputation system and recognition system where people can give awards to their co-workers and Finally motor verus can be counterproductive if you over rotate on them effectively So scratching your own itch But just for that maybe once they've done what they want to do They're not going to help you. So don't don't over rotate on that. So with that. Thank you. This is This is some research that I used and these will be published That you can refer to for the source of some of this information