Re: [gaia] draft-irtf-gaia-alternative-network-deployments. Mitar review, question #1: Motivations

[panayotis antoniadis <[e-mail]>]

Hi Mitar,

I agree that describing the social aspects is important but I cannot
see how personal motivations could be used as a "classification"
variable of the systems themselves.

As every system is different, the same holds for the motivations
of the individual members in each of them. For Wikipedia, there
are many studies trying to understand why people do contribute,
and there is not a single answer.

In my mind, systems/communities/groups have more "stated goals"
than motivations, which refer more to individuals (at least based
on my understanding of the language). And those goals could be
collectively shaped, or defined by a leader and followed by those
that join, who can be "motivated" by the stated goals or other
personal reasons :-)

Actually, this is not a big problem since in the current list I see only
two items that I would classify strictly as "motivation" ("altruism",
which by itself a very contested term, and "becoming an active
participant ...").

If you don't feel very attached to the word "motivation" I would
rephrase the current list to read as a list of "stated goals", or "visions"
if you prefer, and add at the end a paragraph on personal motivations
and the collective shaping of the community "vision/identity" over time
(pointing to external sources for further reading.)

In any case, you could wait until next week for me to write down
a concrete proposal and then shoot back :-)

(btw, thank you very much for stirring things up)

Panos

On 14/04/16 20:40, Mitar wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 2:53 AM, panayotis antoniadis
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> I would put this in "goals". Aspiring to the goal could be of course
>> one of the motivations, but for example "altruism" or "gaining
>> technical expertise" are "personal" motivations difficult to
>> identify clearly. And trying to do so, one steps into issues
>> of human behaviour, social psychology, etc.
>>
>> I really don't see why these belong to this document.
> I would strongly be in favor of including also those social aspects in
> this document. At least for community networks those are very
> important aspects and it is really hard to explain why they exist
> without at least touching them and pointing to them. We do not have to
> go into details, but saying that there is more to it than just
> satisfying some goals or needs is I think very important.
>
> It is similar to trying to explain Wikipedia. Just saying that people
> are contributing to it because they want an encyclopedia would not
> explain to the reader really why Wikipedia exists and why it is like
> it is.
>
>
> Mitar
>