Motivation of Open Projects Volunteers

More info is always good, especially when it's about open source. So here's what sounds a worthy endeavour:

My name is Zbigniew Braniecki and I'm a sociology student at Leon Koźmiński Academy in Warsaw.

The goal of this survey is to extend our knowledge about nature of volunteer participation in the Internet open communities. To learn why people participate and what keeps them going.

It will allow us to better understand how open communities (should) work and who the people building them are.

The survey is made of two parts, socio and psychological. It will be most helpful if you make it to the end.

The whole survey will take you no more than 12 minutes to complete.

Thank you for your help. The results will be publicly available on the Interent.

Digg This, It's Groovy

Digg.com is a quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomenon: a by-the-people, for-the-people version of Slashdot (itself a keyWeb 1.0 site). So Digg's evolution is of some interest as an example of part of the Net's future inventing itself.

A case in point is the latest iteration, which adds a souped-up comment system (interestingly, this comes from the official Digg blog, which is on Blogger, rather than self-hosted). Effectively, this lets you digg the comments.

An example is this story: New Digg Comment System Released!, which is the posting by Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) about the new features. Appropriately enough, this has a massive set of comments (nearly 700 at the time of writing).

The new system's not perfect - for example, there doesn't seem to be any quick way to roll up comments which are initially hidden (because they have been moderated away), but that can easily be fixed. What's most interesting is perhaps the Digg sociology - watching which comments get stomped on vigorously, versus those that get the thumbs up.