Motivation

Joining the Project

The groups have finally settled, the projects are slowly being picked, and Team Obsidian is officially a team. The more we talk about what we are going to be doing for the project the more excited I become. We have almost finished writing out our milestones for the project, including where we want to be at the end of the semester (hopefully we can show it off at POSSCON to some people I know who are going to be there). We hope to have a few people from outside our group interested in the software as well as a contributor or two. We are actually going to host a party if we get someone from outside the college interested in the project during our development semester. So far my section of the project is setting up/help set up our communication channels. This includes the a Google group for the developers as well as an open group for people to ask questions. The other thing that I helped with was the initial setup of our IRC channel. Eventually Micah and I will have a bot in there to do some basic functionality stuff (kicking people and controlling our op powers so we don't scare people away).

Daniel Pink/Clay Shirky on Motivation

Lately I have been reading a lot of Daniel Pink. The two books specifically I have been reading are "A Whole New Mind" and "Drive". Originally I read A Whole New Mind because the department chair recommended it to me after my interest in teaching was discussed one day and while it is a good book it isn't one I want to talk about today. I feel like I can relate Drive and another book Cognitive Surplus (by Clay Shirky) easier to software projects and open source, so that is what I'll do. Now, I love watching videos online about anything that might might be informative or entertaining, and normally these come in the form of TED talks. These videos normally help me figure out how I would want to run my company one day. Dan Pink's talk about "the surprising truth about what motivates us" was turned into a RSA-Animate video, and I feel like anyone who runs a software development company (or any company for that manner) should watch the video and understand what motivates us isn't as straight forward as you think. The three key elements that he deems important for better performance and personal satisfaction are: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. With these key items I can see why the open source community continues to grow. We have the ability to choose what we want to work on (autonomy), we can continue to get better at our craft (mastery) and every software product we create has a higher reason for existing (like Wikipedia and Ushahidi) which gives us our third element, purpose.

Now while Daniel Pink does hint at open source, most of his video and book deal with how to motivate people within a company. This is a good thing as companies can work on open source software and make a profit, if only to get the idea of money off the table, so employees can stay focused on work. Just make sure you learn about the different ways open source can possibly make a profit (of which I'll talk about in a later post, but for now read the Magic Cauldron from my favorite book that I seem to talk about way too much for my own good), but seeing as how Obsidian is not for profit, and the people who are working on it are not getting paid (except by a grade, but I can safely say we are not even thinking about that, the project is much too interesting) I am more interested in the idea of Cognitive Surplus (video) to help us get people interested on working on the project. The idea of Cognitive Surplus is that people now have the means to use their free time in a more collaborative environment, as well as pointing out the generosity that people have to create for their fellow man. The cool part about our project is the fact that we are working on a tool that will help other people who create software. Imagine during an interview and you ask them how they test their software, "Oh we use Obsidian to unit test our code". I would just sit back and chuckle silently while I tell them I was on the team that helped make that open source. 

Knowing the factors of how and why people choose to collaborate on open source software is going to be very useful later on when the project is officially released online for people to play with. I believe gaining momentum by showing people the output of Obsidian and getting input from people early and often will only help the software grow.