Where the x-prize approach seems to have worked is in creating press and awareness, bringing new participants to the table, leveling the field. It seems to work in particular as a complement to government bureaucracies which while well funded just seem unable to innovate.
It may also be best for research; which is always risky and has more unknowns than for data collection. And such a programme would undoubtably need careful goal setting with consolation prizes and a series of hoops rather than a single success or fail measurement. It requires a focused attention; such as a peer based review committee. How it actually works may differ from how we think it works; teams may coalesce, split; share skills and the like - it may not be directly competitive as it may seem from the outside. Empirical results may differ from expectations. I really have no idea whatsoever; it could go horribly. Undoubtably there will be some negative side-effects - just a question of if they drown out intended consequences. But I suggest the x-prize approach today basically for one reason: as a hedge against the kinds of longer term ossification we see in other institutions when money and value come together. The link to 'crowding out of intrinsic motivations' touches on it. (I note that avoiding that pathology is one of the incentives behind the BSD license as well - where the license lets developers make money and push away the liability of having to own the source code). Perhaps it is best to focus on "today" problems rather than "tomorrow" problems but it's clear OSM is going to be recognized as being as fundamentally valuable as Wikipedia and other like huge social efforts - if not more so... Place is so important and underpins many other big projects we can't even start without our models being better. (For me in particular I want to do computational forward simulation of entire watersheds and ecosystems like say 'London' - but need access to ongoing high-quality data... Hopefully you can forgive then the longer term view in my thinking...) a On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 11:31 AM, Frederik Ramm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > > > are there examples of where this has happened in other projects? > > None that I know of. There's some discourse about this online, good > starting point is > > > http://tieguy.org/blog/2006/06/18/crowding-out-of-intrinsic-motivations-aka-the-bounty-problem/ > > but it's all rather inconclusive and builds heavily on non-IT > examples. > > We could make history by trying this out on a grand scale ;-) > > > Bye > Frederik > > -- > Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" > > > _______________________________________________ > > > dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev > _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
