What motivates the open-source community?

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Many of us will have been involved in a free-software community that ran out of steam, and either ended up moribund or just plain died. Some of us will have gone through such cycles more than once; it's never nice to watch something that used to be a vibrant community in its death throes. Knowing what motivates the sort of people who get heavily involved in free software projects is really useful when trying to keep them motivated, and a systematic approach to understanding this is what Rina Jensen, Strategist at Mozilla, talked about at FOSDEM 2017.

Mozilla talks a lot about promoting innovation and opportunity on the web, and the organization does care a lot about those objectives, but the realities of day-to-day life can interfere and make working toward them tedious. The thinking was that if Mozilla could help make the experience for contributors better, then the contributors could make Mozilla better — but doing that required understanding how things could be better for contributors.

Study

In order to study the problem, Mozilla identified 26 open-source and maker contributors around the world; 15 were active, while 11 were classified as potential contributors. 88% were male; ages ran from 15-44, with peaks at 20-24 and 30-34. The geographical (and consequently cultural) distribution was genuinely broad; Australia and Antarctica were the only unrepresented continents, and if there was any concentration it was in Europe. Although many of the early participants were from the Mozilla community, the project tried to move out past those borders.

All of the participants were interviewed at length, and asked: what motivated you? What was good, when things were really good? What kept you going when things were bad? The interviews were framed as open-ended conversations, to try to elicit concrete examples of participants' contributions in real-life situations and uncover the tacit motivations behind their behaviour and reactions.

The study found that there are five main motivators for contribution. There's learning, the desire to find stuff out; community, that there are people to be served by doing this; cause, that there is some larger goal to be served by doing this; recognition, that community members and beyond can know who I am by what I'm doing here; and tangible goals, that what I do should produce visible results. We're all different; we value different things that we get from the activities to which we devote ourselves. But the project identified four main contributor types, each of which found different subgroups of the five rewards to be most motivational.

Some are independents. These tend to be younger people, often students; they value tangible goals and recognition most, while cause and community are not as important to them. Others are leaders. These tend to be older people, often professionals; they value recognition, cause, and community, while learning is not particularly important. Then there are fixers. These span all ages, but tend to be professionals; they value tangible goals and learning, while cause and community are less valued. Finally, there are the citizens. They again span all ages, and again tend to have professional backgrounds; they value cause and community, while recognition is not as important.

How to attract contributors?

Now that we understand that contributors often fall into one of these four types, how do we attract them to our project? Jensen stressed that "projects must showcase the value exchange". She acknowledged with apology this horrible business-speak, but felt the point to be both of paramount importance and often overlooked: you need to ensure that the benefits of participating in your project are spelled out early, and repeated often — reiteration is key. It's not that you should be all things to all people; more that if your project is especially good at certain of the five motivators, you want people who are going to value those to know that you have strengths in those areas.

Frequent, reinforcing communication on how to get involved helps ensure that once contributors find their desires fit what you offer, they don't drift off because they can't find out how to get into the tent. Easy-to-start activities help new contributors get going and make a difference immediately, and things as simple as laptop stickers or project sticky-note pads can make them feel noticed and welcomed. A larger culture of positive recognition helps people feel that, when they make a difference, it will be celebrated.

It's never too early for your project to start connecting with its community. For this, direct human interaction is more valuable than digital interaction; piggybacking on events like FOSDEM is an excellent way of accomplishing that. Transparency is important; it's possible that some information needs to be confidential, but unless it really does, it should be open and accessible.

I asked about the degree of statistical rigor in the study. Jensen was clear that the study was intended to be qualitative, and felt that statisticians can tell you who and how, but not why. I feel that putting things on a good statistical basis helps you know how sure you should be about what you think you know, whatever that is. But we didn't need to discuss this further, because Mozilla has teamed up with Harvard University to try to take the study further; increased statistical rigor is expected to be one of the fringe benefits of the collaboration. Anyone who would like to dig further can read her original presentation [PDF] in its entirety. It's fascinating work, and comes from a direction that perhaps isn't explored enough or understood well in many free-software communities.

[Thanks to the Linux Foundation, LWN's travel sponsor, for making this article possible.]

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