Erik Moeller wrote:
I also believe there's a better solution to the problem of volunteer motiviation than the one you suggest, and that is the building of group identity from the start. This is what WikiProjects on Wikipedia do, for example.
It's a separate issue, but I think a solution to some cases of developer motivation would be to have good documentation and modular code so people can work on parts that interest them. I know I personally have had ideas I'd be willing to implement in the past, but my brief digging led me to the conclusion that I'd basically have to read through and understand the entire MediaWiki codebase before I could usefully add anything to it, and at that point I decided that while I was interested, I wasn't *that* interested. A bunch of the people proposing various extensions and whatnot on meta seem to be in the same boat---they could code up bits and pieces, but don't know how to hook into the larger codebase.
Of course, this is another "plan with no implementation" --- writing the documentation and cleaning up the code would require me to read and understand it all first, which is exactly what I wish to avoid, as I have other projects I'm supposed to be working on full-time. =]
-Mark