Some of those who've contributed greatly to different creative fields seem to have idealistic motives. They see room to make a difference, and they contribute where they can. The research literature also has plenty of apparently selfish motives by those who would change an industry. And of course, there's happenstance occurrences that have led to social betterment.

I ran across a recent article and model that examined the motives of those contributing to Wikipedia to see what their motives may be. These authors posed some intriguing questions - such as what the relationship might be between long-term contributions to Web 2.0 data and personal motivations.

Model of Contribution Motives

Their model looks like this.

Model of Contribution Motives (Wagner and Prasamphanich, 2007, p. 5)

"First, individuals who identify themselves as individualist, short-term oriented and not believing in the effect of their contribution on others are labeled as 'selfish'. If, however, they declare a long-term focus in their motives, they do potentially rely on the cooperation of others (to reap the benefits of their investment) and thus may have a weak altruistic motivation. We therefore label this group as weak pragmatic altruists (yet recognize their altruism would be weak at best). Those who believe in the effect of their actions on others, even if they admit a selfish interest, are categorized as pragmatic altruists, as their views match with the notion of reciprocal altruism or the principle of tit-for-tat. Among them, those who have a short-term focus are labeled transactional, as they expect immediate reciprocity. Those with group motives (lower half of the figure) are separated into two groups, altruists and strong altruists, based on their belief in the impact of their actions on others" (Wagner and Prasarnphanich, 2007, p. 5).

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 motives seem mixed and potentially muddy. For many, they contribute because this is one way of getting affirmations, of belonging socially, of participating in a professional life, or this is just something to do.

Considering personal motives is intriguing, none-the-less. And people's motives likely do have implications for the quality of what they contribute, how often they contribute, and how long they stick with it!

Wagner, C. and Prasarnphanich, P. (2007). Innovating collaborative content creation: The role of altruism and wiki technology. Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. p. 5.