The motivational arc of massive virtual collaboration

Massive virtual collaborations (MVC) involve large numbers of mostly unpaid contributors collectively creating new content. Wikipedia is the most dramatic example of MVC; smaller-scale examples include contributors to blogs and discussion groups and teams of programmers and users developing free/libre open source software (FLOSS). In this paper, we propose a model of motivations for contribution to MVC that integrates various theoretical perspectives. The model extends prior work by distinguishing three different levels of contribution to projects (initial, sustained and meta) and by capturing the dynamic and recursive effects of contributions on emergent individual and project states.