Create more tools for team motivation

TYPO3 Association Community Budget Ideas 2024 Q2
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by Oliver Klee

What is your idea about?

The Motivation Research Team wants to create more tools (similar to design patterns) to boost motivation in community teams. It also wants to beta-test the tools and have a concept to scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of each tool. The team members will use the methods created by the EMPAMOS research project and learn the full use of this method at a workshop provided by the project.

What do you want to achieve by the end of Q2 2024?

  • The team has created 15 more tools to boost motivation and to address specific problems in teams.
  • The team has created a concept to scientifically evaluate the effectiveness of the tools when some team beta-tests it.
  • The team will create a concept for a workshop where community members can learn the motivation tools. The workshop will be held in Q3/2024.
  • The team has access to the EMPAMOS database/app which they use to build the motivation tools.
  • 5 team members have attended the EMPAMOS workshop and are fully-trained as experts on motivation psychology.
  • The team has started offering consulting for TYPO3 teams to boost motivation.
  • The team has created a presentation to show these tools at upcoming barcamps.

What is the potential impact of your idea for the overall goal?

TYPO3 teams will have more ready-to-use tools at their disposal to become more productive and motivated, to keep existing team members in their team and to attract new team members.

Also, the Motivation Research Team will have 5 fully-trained experts on motivation psychology that are available for TYPO3 teams that would like to have hand-crafted tools and advice to boost motivation in their specific situation.

Which budget do you need for your idea?
7.500 Euro

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Hi Oli,

Just a genuine and open question: Is there actually a need within the TYPO3 teams and committees for all of this motivation research and enablement? This is a substantial investment with 7.500€ and I’d love to get some more insights into who from the community and pool of potential “service” recipients is asking for this.

Thank you!
Luisa

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Hi,

yes, we definitely see the need for this. In general, the team members and team leads I’ve talked about contribution all said that they’d welcome or need more (steady) contributors, and that this a big limiting factor of how much they can achieve. One goal of our efforts is to help teams attract more contributors and new members.

Also, in the past, I’ve seen some other things in teams (or talked to people who experienced them) that we’d like to help with:

  • new team members not being able to work effectively because of an onboarding process that would benefit from some improvements
  • people attending a code sprint or one or two team calls and then dropping off again
  • people leaving teams after some months or years due to workflow or team structure issues

What we do is quite new for the community. So, there are no established structures in the community yet that would allow teams or other community bodies to officially ask for the things that we do. Still, our work is intended to for any community body that would be interested in improving how their team/group functions and that would like to attract and retain their members. This includes offering our services and tools to official teams, initiatives, the Board, the BCC.

Oli

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I can also give an example of some work we did in the past:

In our 2023 community motivation survey, one demotivating factor turned out to be insufficient (or late) feedback to contributions, e.g., changes to the Core not getting feedback via reviews (or reviews taking a long time). (In the news article about the survey, this was subsumed under the “appreciation” motivator and “lack of recognition” demotivator.)

We then developed some strategies to tackle this problem and are currently waiting for feedback from the Core team about discussing and trying out our ideas for this.

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Hi Luisa, Hi TYPO3 Community,

Thank you very much for your critical question, Luisa. It’s maybe the question every (community) budget idea needs to answer: Is it worth the investment? Is the expected return higher than the investment?

I recently joined the TYPO3 Motivation Research Team. I joined, because I am enthusiastic about Motivation, Gamification, the psychology behind it and the implementation in organizational contexts. And I am staying, because I more and more recognize the huge positive impact our work can have. I deeply care about having measurable, positive impact, and when deciding between different projects/actions I could take, I decide for the one with the higher estimated expected impact.

So I see the following cases:

  1. our budget idea has a lower expected return than other ideas, then our budget idea should be rejected.
  2. our budget idea has a higher expected return than other ideas, but we fail in communicating and demonstrating it. Then what our team needs to do is to communicate better and demonstrate our value better.
  3. we can show that our budget idea has a higher expected return than other ideas, then we should be funded

My hunch is that we are in case (2): We haven’t proven our value to the community sufficiently, yet. Probably not many have heard of our team, yet. I can totally understand if our budget request is not approved this time, because you shouldn’t trust our words and opinions as they are clearly biased, but trust our actions and results.

Thus: Please test and evaluate us. We would love to work with your TYPO3 team. We would start with an exploratory consultation, to analyze your current situation, and see if our team can support you in areas such as team motivation, stakeholder engagement, team member retention, finding demotivating root causes in processes and so on. Then we will continue with developing a solution together with you. So if you face any pain points in your team (or would love to enjoy your work even more): Please contact us via Motivation Research team

Intrinsic motivation is the core value we have as an Open Source Community: People work on TYPO3 because they enjoy it and see value in doing so. The TYPO3 Association recognized this by including “Engagement” in the new TYPO3 Association Strategy, while motivation is the driving force that’s needed to reach all of our values and results, it’s directly supporting Community and Engagement. Essentially, the goal of the Motivation Research is Engagement: “We want to foster continuous engagement in the various community projects. While one-time contributions are also welcome, securing continued engagement, especially from younger community members, is a challenge we must address.” The TYPO3 Association recognized this as a value that needs to be developed further. So please vote in favor our budget request, as a direct measure to develop Engagement further.

Thank you,
Marcel

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