Usually I put this kind of thing on del.icio.us, but this point by dan Bricklin is too good not to pull a long quote from:
Instead of making you feel bad for “only” doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%. People complain about systems that have lots of “freeloaders”. Systems that do well with lots of “freeloading” and make the best of periodic participation are good.
At IRIS we talked about this a bit. During the panel discussion at the end of the presentation day, we talked about freeloading vs. contributing, and where Joe Schmoe (or Joe User or Joe Schlemiel or Joe Q. Random, as he was variously referred to) falls on that axis. I argued that there’s a vein of willing contributors out there, and while it certainly doesn’t cover the entire user population for distributed software, there are enough (based on the Open Source movement, SETI@Home, etc.) of these “civil servants” to make the world go ’round. (As it is on Earth, so shall it be in software.)
[Link via Guilt Is Good (Many-to-Many).]
