How to Motivate People to contribute to a cause: Some random thoughts

Working on Knowledge Management via application design patterns as part of my master thesis at Fraunhofer Institute FIT Germany, I came across success stories where people joined hands together to form a community of practice. They shared, disseminated and refined knowledge and eventually the knowledge base flourished in to a mature intellectual asset. For instance Yahoo! Design Pattern Library which has been around for more than 10 years now and frequently used and updated by the experts around the world.

But for quite a while a, single question kept lingering in my brain i.e.

How do we motivate people to share their knowledge? 

Since every act in the knowledge management process requires a motivation. The entire process would collapse if there is not motivation of the contributors.   
So the natural response to that comes to our mind is "Incentives". really!
But this does not suffice the proposition. Rather this leads to a number of others questions. So here in the following section I mentioned the prerequisites of solution to this problem:

Our Varying Mindsets:
Although we all are  homo sapiens but we come in all shapes and size and above all with varying "Mindsets". Some of us are driven by

• Peer pressure:  Yes! we follow trends.We look around and think upon the line of action that others have take and we try to follow that.
• Peer recognition:  Here the motivation is self-satisfaction via achieving glory and garnering reputation among the community or it can be  professional jealousy as well. Although it is not too different from the above type. 
• Goal Oriented: Some people are self-propelled, self-motivated and driven by the goals, that too set by themselves. They are in continuous race against themselves. They work on temporal logic that is to say "my version/instance in 2012 should be better than the one in 1999". Here I would like to mention Moslow's hierarchy of Needs based on the work of Abraham Moslow in his book Motivation and Personality. In the figure below,  the hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs. May be the goal oriented people are at a very high level in this hierarchy. That is because of the reason that in the first four levels, people have a deficiency of some factor which Moslow calls deficit needs, or D-needs that is to say if you don’t have enough of something, you have a deficit and you feel the need to fulfill that deficiency.  But in case you are lucky enough to get all you need, you feel nothing at all. Hence such people with no D-needs cease to be motivating. Food for thought!  

To motivate the first and the second type of people, what Yahoo! did is to implement a functionality by which users of the library could rate the knowledge shared by the other users. Rating was totally based on the efficacy of the knowledge i.e. once we know which is the most useful design pattern, we immediately recognize its author and rate her on the scale of, lets say 10. Via this rating the author climbs up the ladder of seniority. She builds up a reputation and hence respected by her peers. Here giving away rewards such as iPad can prove to be a great booster ;). BTW this is how Microsoft's MVP certification works.      

Motivating, the third type through material incentives and reputation model is unfortunately near to impossible. Since they work on extremely different logic. but here we come up with few concepts such as Social Norms and the Market Norms as explained by  Prof. Dan Ariely in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Man, being a social animal, forms colonies and communities based on certain norms and values. Then complies to these rules set by this community. Here we have certain mandatory social norms and not abiding by them can lead to a social boycott by the community members. 

I guess such kind of people can be motivated by adding mandatory social norms. For example, I can ask my best friend to come and help me move out to new place. As per social norms, he would obviously come over and help me carry my stuff. But if I try to introduce market norms for instance I ask my friend to carry all the stuff and as a reward he gets 10 Euros per hour then I will definitely get my bottom kicked. So this proves that market norms and the social norms can't go hand in hand. 

Although I can go on and on stating unrelated, random ideas but I think I was lucky enough to read both of the aforementioned books and this would definitely help somebody. since, when one, all of the sudden makes a conscious effort to work on such ideas , then one seldom reach to a better conclusion. BTW my motivation behind sharing this knowledge is the social norm of paying back. ;)