On 3/5/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
You cannot oblige anybody to work a specified number of hours per week unless they are getting something out of it. That something may still be intangible, like personal satisfaction, instead of money; pure altruism is unlikely to be enough.
What's the difference between having personal satisfaction as the only reward and pure altruism? Even if there's a philosophical difference, there doesn't seem to be a practical one.
That said, a common intangible reward for volunteers is status in a hierarchical system. Everything2 has its experience system. Slashdot has its karma system. The volunteer fire department has probies and drivers and officers etc. The Wikimedia community has some hierarchy, but not a lot, and there are strong feelings that it not be used as a reward. It'd be perfectly possible to require all admins to commit to 2 hours a week of some particular duty to stay admins, and many people would still sign up for adminship, but the culture of Wikimedia is such that this would probably cause a huge backlash.
Anthony