Incentives

DRAFT

Incenting Sharing, Participation and Contribution: What Works?
This page was inspired by an email exchange with Joseph Cloonan, Airbus, the original source of the Personal Network drawing exercise Appendix A in our article.

Connected intelligence only works if people see value in connecting, participating and contributing. Does it?

JA:** Guessing what you are considering but if I think about the usual participation statistics for online groups every day people derive value by simply reading, lurking and learning, serving as an audience for those who do contribute. In "Wealth of Networks" Yochai Benkler provides an interesting table [|showing degrees of contribution iin Chapter 3] that describes degrees of contribution. Is this what you had in mind?
 * JEFFREY-Can it also work if people just want to get something without contributing?

JA: It seems to me incentives work at a number of levels including to share content and ideas, but also to adopt and participate in a new knowledge sharing environment and technology. For example, I've heard Andrew McAfee describe Jay P. Rangaswami's Dresdner Kleinwort push to get people using a wiki, There disincentives were used to discourage use of existing ways and support transitions e.g. JP announced he would no longer respond to emails on particular topics. He would only pay attention to what was posted via the wiki

JA: So if you are running a project and need to gather information that is accessible to all, how do you encourage participation to ensure project success?
 * JEFFREY-This seems like an attempt to force people to change behaviors and habits, which does not seem very collaborative. That is like people who will not network unless through Facebook or LinkedIn, both of which require accounts to use. Come to think of it, so do wikis! To force people to use a certain technology reminds me of crossing one's arms and pouting unless people play by my rules (which are, of course, not open to discussion).**

Please use this space to share thinking about incentives that work and ideally specific examples.