“The concept that people would do work without being paid may be mystifying in the economic context of scarcity we live in, but in a condition of abundance people become more willing to contribute to others. Open collaborative design therefore goes hand-in-hand with abundance; they feed off each other. This is shown in Maslow’s pyramid.
Abraham Maslow’s well-respected theory of motivation – contributing to open collaborative projects fulfils the human needs to belong, to be esteemed, to know and understand, to actualize one’s potentials and abilities, and to transcend oneself by contributing to something greater.
***It is interesting to note that scarcity-based economies focus on man’s two lowest needs: security and physiological needs, while in a situation of Post-scarcity the lower needs are a non-issue, so the higher needs come into sharper focus.***
It has been shown again and again and again in psychological studies that extrinsic carrot-and-stick motivation is effective only at tasks that require no insight or creativity i.e. mechanistic tasks. For more information See this post on the Science of Motivation. But our society is moving towards automating more and more of these tasks, so that the jobs left for people to do are the ones that require dealing with ambiguities, thinking laterally and finding creative, non-obvious solutions. For these tasks, only intrinsic motivation is effective, with extrinsic rewards and punishments usually leading to lower performance. This may be surprising (it certainly flies in the face of traditional notions of incentives) but it has been proven again and again.”
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Open collaborative design involves applying principles from the remarkable free and open-source software movement that provides a powerful new way to design physical objects, machines and systems. All information involved in creating the object or system is made available on the Internet – such as text, drawings, photographs and 3D computer-aided design (CAD) models – so that other people can freely re-create it, or help contribute to its further evolution. It is essentially the same principle that is used to progress scientific knowledge, however in reality it is much more open and transparent than much of contemporary scientific research. Read More about Open Collaborative Design
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