what do distributed book digitizers want?
over on his fadedpage forums, rfrank asks "what motivates users?" it's an excellent question, one that deserves a thoughtful answer... so here's my take on it, which i give partly because i have some disagreements with _some_ conclusions that roger has come to. i phrased these all in an affirmative way, so this could be used as a mission statement (e.g., for my own site, or by others), although the reverse-phrasing will often have made more sense to people... (for instance, "i do not want to be asked to do _unnecessary_ work.") i'd guess that most people would approve of most of my items, so i'd be interested to hear if anybody would challenge any of them... *** what i want as a distributed book digitizer... i want to proof, yes. i want to format too. i want to finish pages. i want to finish books. i want to smooth-read. i want to do a great job. i want to do necessary work. i want to select what i work on. i want to have unambiguous rules. i want to know if i am doing a great job. i want to know when i am making mistakes. i want to see solid proof if i've made a mistake. i want to receive fair credit for work i have done. i want to work in a system that's very transparent. i want to work with others who're doing great work. i want to know my energy is being used productively. i want to know how to improve the quality of my work. i want to know exactly what data the system has on me. i want to be able to challenge the system if acts unfairly. i want to let the world know when i have done a great job. i want to let the world know when i have done a lot of work. -bowerbird
"what motivates users?" What motivates me is creating books which are posted for other people read. If other people don't want to read it, then I am wasting my time. If other people would read it, but it never gets posted, then I am wasting my time. If I work on other people's projects, but those projects never get finished then I am wasting my time. If a bunch of self-appointed "high priests" [of technology] stand between me a getting something done, this demotivates me. If I can do it faster myself, I will. Good tools -- or at least not horrible tools -- motivate me. Bad tools -- tools that waste more of my time than tools I can pick up just about anywhere on the internet -- such tools demotivate me. New technology motivates me. Another thing that motivates me is spending $15 for a current generation book for my Kindle from Amazon and while reading it happily finding many times the amount of errors in it than would be tolerated by either DP or PG. And realizing books written today are not necessarily any better written than books written in the past. Old technology and being forced to follow standards abandoned as a mistake by the mainstream computer industry by about 1980 demotivates me. ----- For reference, I have two books still stuck in DP each of which has by now cost me many times the effort of doing the book entirely on my own. There are another 66 books I have helped work on at DP which have not been posted, some of which are about three years old. Stated in its simplest terms: DP is very good at starting books. DP is not very good at finishing books. The tools are not good. And volunteers' time and effort is not respected.
At 03:09 PM 26/03/2010, you wrote:
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For reference, I have two books still stuck in DP each of which has by now cost me many times the effort of doing the book entirely on my own.
good grief man did you even work on your own books as they went through the system? You moan and groan about it, yet your two projects went through all 5 rounds faster than many other projects. (only 61 days for My First Summer , and 300 days for The Genius). Normally if a PM is that excited about getting their project done they work on it themselves as much as possible and encourage others to as well. And there's nothing DP can do about PPers having a life.
There are another 66 books I have helped work on at DP which have not been posted, some of which are about three years old.
and there are 1135 projects that I have worked on still in the system at DP. Quick look at some of the oldest.. one has been in PP for 6 years. There aren't as many at DP as the numbers may say, many of them join and do one or two pages and go again. If you want to speed things along do more pages, you're averaging less than one page a day. Don't complain about someone else not working on things when you don't. let's all just do our best and let the rest do the same JH ================================================================================ "Turning a Picture into a thousand words" Preserving History One Page at a Time!! Celebrating more than 17,000 books posted to Project Gutenberg! Join Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/c/ ================================================================================
participants (3)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Jeannie Howse -
Jim Adcock