O'Reilly Network Weblogs: Creativity, Flow, and Joy in Programming

Published on The O'Reilly Network (http://www.oreillynet.com/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1784

Creativity, Flow, and Joy in Programming

by Tim O'Reilly
Jul. 31, 2002

Karim Lakhani and Bob Wolf of the Boston Consulting Group worked with Chris diBona and Jeff Bates of OSDN on a survey of developers who have projects hosted at SourceForge. They presented their results at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Unfortunately, I missed the talk, but Karim sent me the slides. It's a big PDF, but well worth the download.

The most interesting bits in the survey focused on motivation.

The study ended up dividing the respondents into four categories: community believers who contribute for ideological reasons (19%), those who work on projects for "learning and fun" (29%), hobbyists whose projects are practical but not related to their jobs (27%), and professionals whose projects are related to the needs of their jobs (25%). People in the last category may or may not be paid to work on their project, but the itch being scratched is related to their employment.

These figures confirm what most observers know intuitively, that most people involved with open source and free software are not motivated by ideology. But the really wonderful thing about the study was the way it confirmed the title of Linus Torvalds' book, Just for Fun.

Respondents said that they:

Find projects to be as creative as anything they have done
Report experiences similar to “flow” and other creativity-related phenomena

Almost 50% of the respondents agreed that “When we prepare a program, it’s just like composing poetry or music.” (Incidentally, this focus on creativity also came out in the OScon keynote by cognitive scientist Elaine Coleman of Sun, who has been filming hackers and interviewing them about their attitudes and lifestyles.)

My favorite finding was the line about how much hackers love what they do. 60% said, “With one more hour in the day, I would program.” 70% of the respondents volunteered that lack of sleep was the most significant cost of participation!

Also interesting was the perceived benefit. Increased personal knowledge base and a personal sense of accomplishment outweighed the long touted "reputation" imperative.

Another interesting part of the study involved what developers want from open source project managers. Overwhelmingly, they made clear that they want peer leaders, not traditional project managers. They said that they expect an open source project leader to create the initial code base, integrate submissions, open minds to options, and provide motivation, but not to determine or delegate tasks, recruit contributors, or manage timing.

The survey also has a lot of other interesting data on the geographical distribution of respondents, their age, their average amount of programming experience, their job titles, the number of projects they work on, and the amount of time they spend contributing to projects.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, and an activist for open standards. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.