Motivations for Participating in Online Initiatives
Sarah Gilbert · 2017
Online initiatives, a term that describes goal-oriented systems such as crowdsourcing, peer production, and online communities, are increasingly popular ways to source work from and harness the skills of distributed populations. The explosion of online initiatives in recent years has inspired scholarship examining why people contribute to these initiatives. While there is an abundance of case studies on motivation, there is a dearth of research that explores motivation between initiative types. Through case studies of two online initiatives, my dissertation research explores relationships between initiative structure, engagement, and participant role on motivation.