Today, we are proud to announce the launch of our Community Spotlight! Our community Spotlights will be selected by our employees and volunteers based on their overall helpfulness, and kindness showcased in the community.
Community Spotlights will receive a title in the community for the entirety of the month and when that month is over we will provide a different title, “Former Community Spotlight”. Spotlights will receive a follow on a social media platform of their choosing if interested.
The title of Community Spotlight will change, however, as we plan on adjusting the name with the help of our incredible community. If you have any name ideas please let us know below! We have a few ideas such as ‘Framework Fireworks’, ‘Framework Fireflies’, and ‘Framework Flashlights’. We are also hosting this vote in our Discord community, here: Discord
This month’s Spotlight we are pleased to announce will be going to @DHowett . DHowett is a dazzling community member who is never afraid to jump into a conversation and help out. Thank you, DHowett
@FrameworkBee Personally I am negative for the new system Community Spotlight you created. I am sorry to hear that. I was enjoying this community, because this is a community by people who gathered with intrinsic motivation, unlike a company job where people sometimes have to work by external motivation, reward, carrot. I believe if you enhance people’s esteem needs, relatively a low level of human needs by such a way, you weaken people’s self actualization, intrinsic motivation or higher needs here.
We appreciate the feedback! We have hopes to use this program to reward good behavior from community members as we have been seeing a growing amount of toxicity on the forums, sadly.
We have hopes to use this program to provide physical/digital goods in the future as well and felt that a program like this would make the most sense on how we can do so!
We definitely don’t want any of our programs to feel like a job but as a way to reward those who already dedicate time to the community. This program being one of the ways and there will be more programs introduced soon that are less “selective”!
We appreciate the feedback! We have hopes to use this program to reward good behavior from community members as we have been seeing a growing amount of toxicity on the forums, sadly.
Hmm. I can understand your frustration for the growing amount of toxicity, and you want to fix it as a community manager.
However, I think you need to accept some level of chaotic situation. That’s okay. It’s other side of passionate community to make a community driven innovation. Especially in growing community.
I was a passionate watcher of Jim Whitehurst, ex-Red Hat CEO. In my memory, this is what he said. You might find a clue to improve this situation in a better way from his book or articles.
Polishing the community guide and improving the topic template of this forum by adding the community guideline URL might be useful for that.
Controlling people’s esteem needs by carrot (reward) is easy as well as controlling people’s safe needs by carrot and stick (reward and punishment). Maybe you can understand how controlling people’s safe needs is bad. In less safe environment, it’s difficult for people to have needs to connect people and to grow. Same thing happens in higher level of needs too. I am talking about human’s needs such as Maslow’s theory.
@FrameworkBee below video of Jim W is useful to know about the intrinsic motivation. I would recommend you to watch it. Thank you for managing this forum.
Let me try to explain things to manage this community specifically, though the topic itself is abstract and conceptual. Because this is important topic for me about how the community is managed.
First, it’s better that below low level needs exist like “air” in the community. The “air”, oxygen is essential for people to live. That fills people’s physiological needs. But people usually don’t think about the existence of air. People think about it consciously if it doesn’t exist.
Physiological needs
Safety needs
Love and social belonging needs
Esteem needs
That means it’s better that we create the community for all the people on this community to feel the needs unconsciously and unconditionally. So, how to give esteem needs to all the people unconsciously? That’s is what you are already doing mainly on your blog posts. Admire everyone with other main topics.
And if you want to admire people with intrinsic motivation by self-actualization needs or higher needs, that you show your recognition to the people is good enough and better. For example, citing those people’s activities in your message. You don’t need to cite the actual name of the people. It’s good enough for only specific people to recognize your recognition. For example, writing “Thank you for your contribution about our embedded firmware” in your message is good enough. Sending an indirect message or signal that only the specific people can recognize is also a good way.
I think the reason why this has been created is to improve the quality of the forum, if everyone is trying to work towards a reward the behaviour of everyone will get better.
As long as we’re not getting fake friendly and racing each other to be helpful, I’m all here for it. If the goal is to have more community anchors that contribute in a nice, regular and helpful way, this might be a good way to achieve it.
However I think there are different incentives needed if the goal is to prevent toxic behavior from everyone, as this is mainly an incentive for the regulars of this forum.
OK. I can understand the intent. But the reward is a way to motivate people by the external motivation, a low level of motivation. Let’s say you have pursed something by your internal motivation, but suddenly someone say “you have to do this to be liked and approved by me”, then you are less motivated right?
I admit this kind of reward to control external motivation is used widely in ordinary organizations, especially global big tech companies that Framework might want to model. But it doesn’t mean it is the right way.
Anyway, personally I mute threads related to Community Spotlight. I tried to find a way to hide specific threads automatically by checking Discourse community. But as I couldn’t find it, I muted those by clicking “Muted” manually.
I hope people don’t start to play a game to be liked by people who have a power and authority. I think we don’t need incentives to motivate people. This is a paradigm of external motivation. I think Fedora project community is advanced about how to motivate people. There is no such kind of Community Spotlight. In Fedora project people in committees are elected by people openly not by people who have a power and authority in closed room.
I can not suggest concrete steps to motivate people by their internal motivation. But there are some studies about human’s motivation. Of course, Maslow’s hierarchy (needs >= cognitive needs) [1]. And the [2] is books (text book and visual book) about the study of company cases of motivating people by a higher level of motivations. The book is based on the theory by Ken Wilber [3].
