 All right tough act to follow Not feeling good right now That was amazing room. Just want an inspiration to so many so many people not just in this room, but outside of this room as well How's everyone doing? Come on. How's everyone doing? That's more like it. All right So it's just wonderful to be here at the at the open source summit So many friends so many so many members of the open source family and so many new faces as well I'm particularly excited as as Jim mentioned that we're gonna be this week running the open community Button the open community conference Which is which is a conference that I've been working in conjunction with my friends of the the Linux Foundation around Which is designed to provide best practice and guidance for how we can build powerful and engaging communities We did this last month at the open source summit in LA and it was a great success I'm really proud to bring it here And I want to say big thank you to all of you submitted papers and also to those of you submitted papers that that didn't get in We had a huge number of submissions So I work as a community strategy consultant And I work with a bunch of companies across all kinds of different sectors around how to build Communities either externally around a product or a service or Communities inside of a company that are designed to optimize how we work together and reduce silos One of the questions that I get repeatedly is how do I motivate people into action? Like how do I get people to do the things that I want them to do and this is not really a question that just pertains specifically to Communities this also applies to how we build businesses and how we encourage our Employees to kind of work together and work efficiently as well as well as to our you know As well as in our families as well. This is my son Jack who is not hacking cars right now But how do we encourage our kids and our nieces and nephews and everybody else to kind of work together in Interesting and effective ways so today I want to talk about incentives the psychology behind why we do things and how we're incentivized And then a framework that you can think about how to apply this now it all starts like many things with one of these a brain Most of us have got one of these in our heads And the brain is basically divided into two approximate areas one side is the Conscious intentional thought right so we interpret the world around us and we make decisions based upon that stimulus But the other part of the brain is completely subconscious It's almost on autopilot and it influences so many of our behaviors What's interesting is that we are irrational with this side of the brain We make irrational choices, but we're very consistent in those irrationalities and how we make those decisions So that gives us a bit of a framework a scaffold in which we can think about how we design communities And how people fit together and I want to share four key principles here four elements that really kind of go into Why we make the decisions that we do and how we can harness those for how we how we build incentives The first one is that fundamentally we all strive for acceptance in some kind of capacity So when you build a community, this is the one of the Ubuntu developer summits that we ran in Florida When you join a community or when you join a company or when you're part of your family You want to be accepted But ultimately you want to get to a stage where you feel a sense of belonging Because when you feel a sense of belonging when you're part of something you stick around there for a long period of time and what this tells me is that Because we strive for that acceptance when we design that set of incentives It has to be a consistently connected set of incentives that keep people around for a longer period of time And then ultimately what you get the byproduct of that is that sense of acceptance that sense of belonging The other thing that's interesting here is that status plays a critical role here as humans Status much as many of us will want to deny this is important to us It's one of the reasons why airline mileage programs work It's one of the reasons why people care about their job titles and moving up in their careers Is that we want to be recognized for the things that we contribute the critical thing here? Is that while building status into communities and companies is fine? It has to be built on a platform of equality But we don't reward people because of their skin color or because of their sexuality or because of their gender or any other Differentiator we don't reward or deny people what we do is we build an environment Everybody can succeed and accomplish that status equally So the second piece here is that we're a fundamentally reciprocal species like if you if I do something for you You're gonna feel like you you need to do something back for me as well a good example of this is gifting so for example if I if I Gave Ruben a present he would feel a natural kind of inclination to kind of repay the favor in some kind of way and If while Ruben's on his world travels and speaking at conferences He met a company and he referred them to me and said hey, you know, you should talk to this guy He can help you build a community I'd feel a reciprocal inclination to kind of repay the favor back to Ruben as well so Reciprocation is at the heart of how we build incentives as well is that you design something where if you do this then this will happen And that's another powerful force that we need to harness The third is that we form habits and the way in which we form those habits is with repetition so in 2008 I moved to California and Spoiler alert I Didn't really care that much about health or exercise or eating well, right? I was a Pretty unfortunate human being in the sense that I was lazy in terms of eating in terms of exercise My wife who many of you in this room know is the opposite of that Like she eats kale like I've never seen anybody eat kale in large in large quantities So she got me into this habit of well, maybe you should go out and exercise a little bit more So I started exercising start going running swimming cycling and then as I did that I started doing it more and I had to think about it had to really intentionally go out and exercise and then did a Little bit more and before you knew it Exercise was just something that you know, I thought of well when am I gonna exercise today, you know It just became part of the habit and it's because we do it over and over again So then you don't have to think about it becomes habitual the general thinking here is that it takes around 66 days to develop a habit So what that teaches us as well is if somebody joins our community or joins our company that first 66 days is critical We have to design an incentive path that keeps people motivated and moving forward until participation and Collaboration is part of the norm. This is something I experienced a lot with my clients Particularly for companies who are kind of working in a slightly older fashion They want to kind of bring open source into their companies is getting into the habit of things like peer peer review around code And collaboration participate in an open communication channels The fourth is that most of us I'm going to censor as we've got some children in the room Most of us have a bit of a BS radar. Okay is that when we look at the world We we want we want to be treated in authentic ways This is one of the reasons why you should never thank anybody with a computer when you get one of those automated emails thanking you for something We just discount it doesn't really mean anything But if you get if you get a thank you from it from a human being from an individual it means a lot So as we do this we have to design these incentives in a way that is authentic that is personal That is human because that's what's going to keep us moving forward. We can't compromise that the minute we compromise this The whole thing falls apart So these four principles and this is just for there are many of these principles in how we in how we design communities Again act as that framework, but it also acts as a as a as a lens in which we can look at how we build these kinds of communities as well Now the question is okay So we've got this sense of what we should focus on like how do we do it like how do we actually incentivize people? How do we design these things to get people participating? To me the way in which we do this is the first thing we need to do is to understand Kind of the the anatomy of an incentive Okay, so what goes behind it and I think of an incentive is having three core components the hook the reason and the reward Okay, so as I go through this think about this within the context not just if you're running a community But also again your organizations your local communities and you're in your local area Whatever it might be or even how you apply this to your kids the hook is is Essentially what is what triggers the incentive and this is all about measuring effectively how people participate in different ways, okay, so The way I tend to think of incentives is that people participate in a community or in a company and then based upon what they do it triggers a series of different incentives and So if you continue working if you continue doing good and interesting work, essentially you get new incentives that keep you moving forward It's kind of like a video game that as you go through a video game More and more and newer challenges are presented to you and it keeps your interest it captures your interest until you build that habit Now for us to do this. Well, we have to measure a contribution We have to understand what a contribution is and how we track that now most people when they do this They tend to track the action the thing that you did okay So I said earlier on that what we want to build here is significant and sustained contributions Okay, and when you track actions you track the sustained contributions people doing things for a long for a longer period of time The problem with this is that while you can track people posting to a forum or submitting pull requests or translating strings or You know running events or speaking events You may get people who do a lot of that work, but it's not very good So what we should also track is the validation of the action as an example when you submit a pull request That's an action But if that pull request gets it gets code reviewed and merged into the master branch Then that's a validated action is that we know that it was good and therefore we can count on that as being a good contribution to the community It's critical that we track both of these things and a significant number of the metrics kind of tracking platforms Only track the first one and we have to focus on the second one as well as an example One of my previous clients is a company called hacker one. I was actually just chatting to Ruben's family about this And what's interesting about this is there's a public point system that they use here And they track reputation and signal So reputation essentially hacker one is a platform where you can submit vulnerability reports around popular products and services so You know someone might hack Starbucks and they submit a report if that report is valid They get seven points if it's complete garbage, then they get minus seven points and there's a graduation between the two So the reputation tracks the total number of points But the signal tracks the average number of points for a typical report. So it gives us a real good definite differentiator between High contribution and the quality of that contribution and there's loads of ways in which we can do this Co-contribution review event organization translations governance. These are the kind of things that we should be thinking about Now let's talk about the reason So the reason is essentially why would someone do something? What are we asking them to do and we need to pick things that influence and encourage positive behavioral patterns and contributions we want to design incentives that trigger the right kind of behavior and I tend to think of two ways of presenting these I call them submarine and stated Incentives now a submarine incentive is basically a random act of goodwill that's completely programmed Okay, so as an example if you're tracking some of the work that somebody's doing and you want to incentivize them in some way One thing you could do is a simple thing is send them a t-shirt now I would do that when they've Interessabated seven to ten times they've been around long enough where they're doing some interesting work Where they're on that verge of like do I continue? Okay, it's kind of like getting two weeks into a new diet at that point You're really thinking about the cheeseburger at that point So submarine incentives if we design all of the if we design a bunch of these submarine incentives We pre-program them in but they come from humans So we notify a human of this particular incentive what we get then is That kind of roadmap and it builds that habit Now stated incentives are a little different. These are Very much stated if you do this thing then we will do this thing for you A good example of this is if you go to a coffee shop and they give you a little card and you stamp You know a little coffee cup each time you buy a coffee and then when you get to ten you get a free coffee There's no ambiguity around that if you get ten if you buy ten coffees you get a free one Okay, and that's good. We also see things around you know campaigns and competitions if you do this thing then you could win this prize Both are important and and both are different ways in which we can in which we can deliver this now Some of you may be thinking okay, that's good But how do I choose the incentives that I want to focus on? It's difficult for me to provide some general guidance here because it has to be specific to your community or to your organization For it to be authentic like I said people got a BS radar So we need to pick things that are very much attuned to that particular area not just throwing out swag at people However, the way I tend to think of this is as you're choosing them Think about the value that you want to bring in that incentive Not just from the community or from the organization's perspective, but also from the individual if you can pick an incentive where The individual feels a sense of personal growth and benefit But then the organization also feels a sense of personal growth and benefit then you've got a good incentive on your hands And then the final thing here is The reward like how do we reward some so we've measured something. It's triggered incentive What they've done is they've done that the goal of that incentive Successfully now we need to reward them in some way. There's two types of rewards in the world intrinsic and extrinsic and We tend to think mostly in a lot of the communities that I work with Around the extrinsic swag physical things physical items that you can send people obviously this is expensive You have a limited set of funds that you can spend on this kind of stuff Shipping anyone who's run a crowdfunding campaign will know that shipping is an absolute freakin nightmare Okay, so shipping is a is difficult sat locks off certain regions of the world because it's very difficult to ship to them So there's benefits to this But to me the real value who are the intrinsic rewards? This is essentially Rewarding someone with your approval with your validation and it gets to that acceptance pattern that I mentioned earlier on Just a single thank-you email from the CEO of a company or the founder of a project a Highlighting someone in a blog post or social media sending them an invitation to something an executive I'm inviting people to an executive call with the executive team having a direct like one of things I like to do with some of my clients is when you reach a particular status level is you get an email address that goes directly to the executives of the company and those executives will respond within 24 hours immediately you get that highlight you get the bat phone Testimonials referrals these are all different ways in which we can we can build that sense of sense of validation so in conclusion When thinking about how we incentivize people focus on acceptance reciprocation habit-forming and Building authentic make most importantly be authentic measure effectively incentivize based on shared value and reward effectively And I'm gonna be speaking in a little bit more detail. This is kind of interesting to you I'm gonna be speaking in calm into 1115 today to to go into a bit more depth about this. Thank you everyone