Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts

05 June 2010

What's the Point of Hacktivism?

Thanks to the Internet, it's easy to engage in big issues - environmental crises, oppression, injustice. Too easy: all it takes is a click and that email is winging its way to who knows where, or that tasteful twibbon has been added to your avatar. If you still think this helps much, try reading Evgeny Morozov's blog Net Effect, and you will soon be disabused (actually, read it anyway - it's very well written).

So what's the point? Well, there are various things that such hacktivism can achieve, nicely laid out in this piece by Ethan Zuckerman called "Overcoming apathy through participation? – (not) my talk at Personal Democracy Forum". But there was one idea that I particularly liked - not least because I hadn't come across it before:


If we assume that activism, as with almost everything else online, has a Pareto distribution, we might assume that for every 1000 relatively passive supporters, we might find 10 deeply engaged activists and one emerging movement leader. And if the contention that participation begets passion, this particular long tail might be a slippery slope upwards, yielding more leaders than the average movement.

Astute readers will have noted that this is one of the reasons why the open source methodology is so successful: it allows natural leaders to emerge from participants. We've seen how amazingly powerful that is, not least in empowering people who in the past would never have been given opportunities to show what they can do. And that, for me, is reason enough to carry on with this hacktivism lark, in the hope that something similar can happen in other spheres.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

13 April 2007

Open Source Motivation

Well, strictly speaking, it's about the motivation of those in open source:

Open source software has enabled large system integrators to increase their profits through cost savings and reach more customers due to flexible pricing. This has upset existing ecosystems and shuffled structural relationships, resulting in the emergence of firms providing consulting services to open source projects. This new breed of service firm in turn lives or dies by its ability to recruit and retain appropriate talent.

For such talent, in particular for software developers, life has become more difficult and exciting at once. Developers face new career prospects and paths, since their formal position in an open source project, in addition to their experience and capabilities, determines their value to an employer. Economically rational developers strive to become committers to high-profile open source projects to further their careers, which in turn generates more recognition, independence, and job security.

Nothing startlingly new, but some nice graphs. (Via Slashdot.)