When Creativity Goes Open Source | CREATe

"An enduring puzzle has animated my research for a number of years: ‘what inspires people to contribute their labour to an online community, when they don’t directly benefit from that contribution?’. We’ve seen people do this all over the web, on old-school discussion forums, news aggregators like Reddit, and social networking services like twitter.  The collective labour of online communities generates $ billions in revenue for platforms that do little more than provide an opportunity for communities to share their work with one another. In projects like the Wikimedia Commons, this labour is not appropriated for commercial ends by the website, but neither are individuals materially rewarded for their contributions."