The currency of open-source

In this post, I explore how open-source communities can motivate their membership by utilizing recognition as a currency.

Let’s start with what, I think, is a fair assumption. There are few people who are paid to work on open-source software. I have to imagine those numbers get significantly worse when you rightfully include community organizing as open-source contributions¹. In our capitalistic society, it’s fair to ask, why do we voluntarily give our time and energy to provide something for free?

Understanding the answer to that question is critical to the success of open-source software. Communities generally need to move in the same direction, and their leaders are the ones responsible for doing so. Understanding the people’s motivations is necessary to understand how they can be helped, which also supports the community.

Motivations to participate in open-source

I put together a short list of some of the motivations to participate in open-source. My purpose was to see which of the motivations are extrinsic or intrinsic and which can be influenced by others.

1. Recognition:
   • Public acknowledgment and reputation building
   • Commit access, speaking slots, mentorship roles
   • Provide status within and outside the community
2. Individual Development:
   • Skill building and learning new technologies
   • Intellectual curiosity and problem-solving satisfaction
   • Portfolio building for personal goals
3. Purpose/Values:
   • Belief in open-source philosophy/free software
   • Belief in the specific project’s mission
   • Desire to give back to the community
4. Self Rewards:
   • The satisfaction of solving interesting problems
   • Seeing your code used by others
   • Helping specific individuals with problems
5. Practical Needs:
   • Getting bugs fixed in software you depend on
   • Influencing the direction of tools you use
   • Scratching your own itch
6. External Pressures:
   • Employer requirements or encouragement
   • Academic/research requirements
   • Professional necessity to stay current

While some of these drive open-source much further, they can’t all be influenced by open-source community leadership. They can’t control whether you derive joy from seeing your code used in the public or what your raise is at your day job. Of those motivations, only recognition is something that can be utilized as a reward by community leaders.

Recognition as currency

Doling out recognition as a reward allows it to act as currency for the project. It can be withheld and dispersed as needed to incentivize and reward people for participating in a way the leaders’ think is beneficial.

The other motivators are too intrinsic and out of the leaders’ control, making them unsuitable as currency. A community leader can’t instill curiosity or make people feel inspired. Those are dependent on the individual’s own nature and personality. Similarly, people deriving satisfaction from seeing their work in use by others isn’t something the community can directly manipulate. And the belief statements aren’t something that can be given to a person. Those are grown or developed over time based on a person’s own experiences.

Recognition is well suited to be the currency of open-source, as it’s something that is generally desirable and can be distributed by the community.

Why is currency needed

A currency is needed for open-source to help move people in a general direction. Without it, the community is left to form consensus among themselves.

My favorite metaphor for community consensus is the amorphous blob. In my mind, it’s a large object with shifting boundaries and an impossible-to-determine center of mass.

In a community, each person has their own understanding of what the community’s purpose is, what the challenges are, and how to solve them. This tends to mean everyone will move in different directions as they try to solve those problems. Things get even more chaotic when the community has an outside force enacted upon it, where people react to it in various ways.

This blob is difficult to work with because you can’t grab it to pull it. It’ll squeeze out between your fingers or around your arms. If you try to push it, the immediate section will move in your direction, but then there’s that other unseen section that moves in the opposite direction². Simply put, the blob can’t be picked up and moved like a box could.

So how does the blob get moved? Well, as mentioned earlier, each person has their own understanding of what the community’s purpose is, what the challenges are, and how to solve them. The leadership of the community can use its answers as edges for the blob.

For example, the leaders of a community have an answer for what the community’s purpose is. This defines a rigid boundary for the blob, giving it some shape. Like an edge. While this isn’t a box, a partially shaped entity is still easier to grab and move.

How currency can be used

Setting aside the blob metaphor, let’s go back to the reality that every community faces certain challenges. They may vary from recruiting new members, to improving infrastructure to raising funding. Each of these challenges, at its core, requires someone to do the work.

Now the community could wait for a person whose relevant skills and availability align with one of the earlier mentioned motivations. In fact, this is probably how most problems are solved by open-source communities, waiting for the right people to come along at the right time. Unfortunately, this makes solving specific problems at specific times arduous.

Instead, the community could use the open-source currency of recognition to find people to solve the challenges.

By providing clear expectations on the reward of recognition, it allows community members to better evaluate whether the challenge is personally beneficial for them. When the community communicates its needs so that membership can identify the areas of overlapping benefits, everyone wins.

Closing thoughts

While open-source will always be primarily driven by intrinsically motivated individuals, recognition is a tool that can be used to help direct those efforts. It serves as a signal to the community of the priorities and can be used to reward efforts that should be reinforced. Understanding the utility of recognition as currency can help leaders of communities move forward together.

If you have thoughts, comments or questions, please let me know! You can find me on the Fediverse, Django Discord server or via email.