politics

Debunking the myth that you can increase the performance of creative workers with carrot and stick.

Executive Summary

For creative tasks, the quality of performance strongly correllates with intrinsic motivation: Being interested in the task itself.

This article will only talk about that.

The main factors which are commonly associated with intrinsic motivation are:

• Positive verbal feedback which increases intrinsic motivation.
• Payment independent of performance which actually has no effect.
• Payment dependent on performance which reduces the motivation on the long term.
• Negative verbal feedback which directly reduces intrinsic motivation.
• Threatening someone with punishment which strongly reduces intrinsic motivation.

To make it short: Anything which diverts the focus from the task at hand towards some external matter (either positive or negative) reduces the intrinsic motivation and that in turn reduces work performance.

If you want to help people perform well, make sure that they don’t have to worry about other stuff besides their work and give them positive verbal feedback about the work they do.

→ comment on Slashdot concerning Unexpected methods to promote freedom?

Was it really Apple who ended DRM? Would they have done so without the protests and evangelizing against DRM? Without protesters in front of Apple Stores? And without the many people telling their friends to just not accept DRM?

That “preaching” created a situation where Apple could reap monetary gain from doing the right thing.

New version of this article: draketo.de/politik/generation-of-cultural-freedom.html

I am part of a generation that experienced true cultural freedom—and experienced this freedom being destroyed.

We had access to the largest public library which ever existed and saw it burned down for lust for control.

I saw the Napster burn, I saw Gnutella burn, I saw edonkey burn, I saw Torrentsites burn, I saw one-click-hosters burn and now I see Youtube burn with blocked and deleted videos - even those from the artists themselves.

Last month I earned 7,26€ through my Flattr account (Flattr is a voluntary payment service where people can make micropayments if they like something - after enjoying it). The flattrs came in through just 4 items:

• The incremental Mercurial guide, “Learning Mercurial in Workflows”.
• The Freenet promotion “I hope French Filesharers turn to Freenet” (written in reply to news about millions of hadopi letters).
• The Esperanto version of my free one page pen-and-paper roleplaying game: The “Slipoj-Rolludo”.
• And my free software song “Infinite Hands”.

Thank you very much for your flattrs, dear supporters¹! Thanks to you I could pay most of my server cost this month via the money from flattr - and that’s great!²

Some thoughts¹ on how the humble Indie Bundle managed to get more than 1.25 Million Dollars² in one and a half weeks — more than one quarter of that from GNU/Linux users.

→ A comment to The Effectiveness of Political Assassinations.

Another answer why this doesn’t work is really simple: Consider that you were in a terrorist organization. You work with people in secrecy, but the ones you know are close to you, because they know your most intimate secrets.

Short: You fight alongside friends (though probably assholes by most ethical standards).

Now someone kills one of your friends.

A man in the streets faces a knife.
Two policemen are there it once. They raise a sign:

“Illegal Scene! Noone may watch this!”

The man gets robbed and stabbed and bleeds to death.
The police had to hold the sign.

…

Welcome to Europe, citizen. Censorship is beautiful.

→ Courtesy to Censilia, who wants censorship in the EU after it failed in Germany. You might also be interested in 11 more reasons why censorship is useless and harmful.

PS: This poem is free and permissively licensed: Please feel free to use it anyway you like, as long as you provide a backlink.

-> written in reply to Bogus Copyright Claim Silences Yet Another Larry Lessig YouTube Presentation on techdirt.

This shows painfully how power is shifting currently:

• <5% of the people have >90% of the resources.
• So the <5% have more influence on the media.
• The media influences which people are elected into positions of power.
• Then these elected pass laws which shift more resources and power towards the <5%.

-> A comment on The Importance of Managing Your Online Reputation.

I read your article, and I found the points you make very interesting, though not only in a positive way.

You tackle the “we have a network others can see” from the active side: “How can I make sure my employer likes what he sees?”.

in reply to You do know you can't rely on Gmail, right?

You're citing some of the reasons why I dislike SaaS, but there's one more:

Whenever I use a SaaS application, I trust someone whom I really can't reach, and I trust him without being able to exert any kind of control.

A reply to a comment on slashdot named Can we fight the trend?:

There was a trend to having only proprietary software (by former free software being enslaved in the job contracts its creators took) and to having the hacker community die out.

That trend was reversed by GNU with the invention of the GPL and the GNU System.

And today millions of people use free software and we have organizations like the EFF and FSF who work for a free software society.

a comment to: Embattled ACTA Negotiations Next Week In Geneva; US Sees Signing This Year:

I didn't yet manage to get really safe information on what ACTA actually does (that's a marker for 'this is dangerous' in itself), but what I see on wikileaks sounds horrible:

-> a comment to BT to cut off file sharers from TechWatch.

I can read this article in two ways:
1) They took part in sharing/downloading that music file
2) They just had a bittorrent or Gnutella program running.

1 is unlikely, because not every fourth internet user will have downloaded that song.

And if 2 is the case, BT should be sued to its knees.

Having a Gnutella program is not illegal, and blocking access to Gnutella means vastly reduced service.

Written at: http://musicmanager.last.fm/contact/

Hi,

I licensed all my works under free and open licenses which permit any kind of commercial copying and reuse, but which don't permit taking away rights from the listeners.

I'd like to upload the files to last.fm, but I can only do so, if I can be sure, that no additional restrictions will be placed on the users (no DRM). Else I would violate the license agreement.

These are the terms under which I work together with other artists, so there's no way around that.

- Free Software version of "Finity's End"; original: {lyrics: CJ Cherryh, music: Leslie Fish}.
- filked by Draketo aka Arne Babenhauserheide (draketo.de) (capo 3)

- please check the dedicated site: http://infinite-hands.draketo.de -

Answer to a thread in the Gnutella-Forums where people bashed LimeWire for putting money first.

They are a company, and you don't trust companies. Not because they are evil, but because they have to think of money first and foremost.

If they do not put money first, they go down and others come up who do - and their employees will lose their job. At least as long as people still buy products without regard for ethics.

I hold them in very high esteem for GPL-ling LimeWire and for standing up against the lawsuit.

Beware of that Fruit (Broken Apple Heart) ( http://bah.draketo.de/?p=13 )

• download ogg
• download mp3

(What do you think, why Macs no longer Smile?)

Chorus: I was an Apple User and loyal to the core,
But one grey day I realized what made my heartache soar,
They want to make the big bucks now and want no one to see,
That ever more surveillance takes the Users rights as fee.

–

Dear Steve,

Do you understand that imposing Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is unethical? That attempting to control our computers and electronic devices to monitor what we do with digital files is wrong and a danger to society?

The problem for DRM proponents is that DRM doesn't work as advertised - and you are helping perpetuate a lie. We know you know this, you've said as much about music and DRM yourself. So why do you persist in touting DRM for video?

Singing the songs of creation to shape a free world.

One day the silver kit asked the grey one:

“Who made the light, which brightens our singing place?”

The grey one looked at it lovingly and asked the kit to sit with him, for she would tell a story from the old days when the tribe was young.

“Once there was a time, when the world was light and happiness. During the day the sun shone on the savannah, and at night the moon cast the grass in a silver sheen.

Comment to: Local man faces court on child pornography charges by heraldstandard.com

As I see it, the only way the authorities did track him was due to his use of p2p-networks.

At the moment, technology makes it relatively easy for the police to track hard criminals in p2p-networks, but it also allows people to do small infringements rather safely (just like people don't stop at red traffic lights when there is no car in sight),

So I'd think the current state quite ideal.