On Tue, January 31, 2012 10:54 pm, don kretz wrote:
People respond to feedback.
Positive feedback produces positive reinforcement; you'll get more the next time. Negative feedback produces negative reinforcement; you'll get less.
Stop and think what kind of day-to-day feedback the DP workers get.
From PG they get very little or no feedback. From DP they get little or no feedback, and when it comes it's weeks too late.
My immediate reaction to this statement was, "what a bunch of Dale Carnegie bunk." My second reaction was, "maybe some people are motivated by positive feedback, but not me." My third reaction to this statement was, "Hmm, there's a real kernel of truth in there." All this got me thinking, so I thought I'd share my preliminary thoughts. I'm not sure my conclusions are cohesive yet -- I'll need some time to flesh everything out. People want to feel valued. They want to feel like the world is a better place due to their efforts. Sincere praise helps people feel valued. (Insincere praise can also help people feel valued but only if you can convince them that it was actually sincere). Most people will feel they are valued, even in the absence of recognition, if they feel that they created a high-quality work product that is available to others (to a large extent the pirated versions of current books have much higher production values than those of PG books, and those people are very careful not to be "recognized"). Most people feel valued if their work is accepted. Acceptance by a group is evidence that the work is of value, and that it will be available to others. One might say that acceptance is a substitute for the kind of personal standards implied in the foregoing paragraph. Most people feel their efforts are valued if they are empowered. If I can do my job without obtaining permission for every detail or being subjected to constant second-guessing I will believe not only that I am trusted but also that my efforts are worth the trust. My involvement with Distributed Proofreaders was very short (their processes didn't make me feel valued) so I can't speak knowledgeably about the user experience there. But as for PG, it fails my just about every measure. I won't go through and illustrate these points with the many anecdotes that have surfaced over the past few days; that is left as an exercise to the reader. I will say that the existence of the apparatchiks that jealously control the contents of the PG repositories is particularly troublesome. I can certainly sympathize with Mr. Adcock's tirades; it would appear that his experience in trying to be an individual contributor to Project Gutenberg has been an endless stream of "you have no value" messages. Soooooo.... On Tue, January 24, 2012 3:08 pm, Joshua Hutchinson wrote:
I'd love to see the PG corpus redone as a "master format" system (and the current filesystem supports "old" format files in a subdirectory, so if someone wanted to get the old original hand-made files, they could). I'm not particularly wedded to any master format. Hell, if someone came up with a sufficiently constrained HTML vocabulary that could be easily used to "generate" the additional formats necessary, I'm good with that.
But before anyone will start doing this work, there needs to be a consensus from PG (I'm looking at you, Greg!) that the work will be acceptable. A half-assed "master format" system is no master format system at all.
In support of Mr. Hutchinson's vision I would like to see a system where master formats are created through crowd-sourcing. Everyone should be empowered to submit changes without having to go through a gatekeeper. The current state of the repository should be open to the world at all times so a contributor will know that their work will forever be available to the public at large. I would follow the SourceForge model where files can be updated, but changes will never be deleted; everyone will always have the option to go back and get a previous version. A clear set of standard should be developed so people can /know/ they are doing a good job, even without a "pat on the back." I don't know that this group could ever be expected to give sincere praise, but at least we could all agree to be respectful. I don't expect Project Gutenberg as an organization to change its institutional behavior, to value its volunteers more (or at all). But just maybe we could get this side project going with a different set of parameters as an example of just what could be accomplished.