

Clay Shirky — Doing work, or Doing Work? - yarapavan
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/72609-clay-shirky-doing-work-or-doing-work/fulltext

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tsally
It is interesting that Clay Shirky (the presenter that the article is based
on) reverses the usual roles of capitalized and uncapitalized nouns.
Capitalization denotes importance or emphasis and it is strange that emphasis
would be put on the work you do you your boss instead of on the work you feel
is important. The standard advocated by Shirky becomes even stranger when put
into a different context. Students produce art all the time but most would be
hesitant to call any of the pieces save a few Art.

This divergence suggests a few interesting hypotheses. First, the author
values Work more and is attempting to understand work from an outsider's
perspective. Second, coming from the perspective of Work leads to inaccuracies
in Shirky's point of view. The accuracy of claim that "Work drives the
economy" is not so clear. It could be argued that all Work trickles down from
the work of company founders. Indeed this is why many companies get started;
the founders have work that they want to do, they have something they think is
important and worth doing.

In closing, I will suggest that Shirky and the author of this article are
approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Respectively, they are
attempting how to translate Work -> work and Usability -> usability. The
author of the article wants to know how to "make and evaluate that miracle
motivational leap" from something with no motivation to something that
generates motivation. But when you are working on something with no
motivation, you're already dead in the water. Far more productive to start
with the motivation and try to figure out how to turn your intellectual itch
into wealth. If you're creating a product, start with something users want,
don't try and create the motivation after the fact.

Note: I've made several conjectures about Shirky and the author of the article
based on limited information (I can't find a video or slides of the keynote).
It's important to remember that I'm just speculating. It's entirely possible
I'm misrepresenting Shirky's true point of view. What I wrote is only accurate
based on the information from the article.

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andrewf
Capitalisation denotes a given name, rather than a word that has necessarily
has meaning.

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tsally
In this context you're giving a subset of a general category a name precisely
because it has meaning. Some but not all art is Art because it is of higher
quality. Similarly with work and Work, but separated by importance to the
worker.

I think in general you'll find people name things because they have meaning.

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coriander
Same idea as Dan Pink's talk on intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards/motivators:
<http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html>.

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yarapavan
(Capital-W) Work is what we have considered for years: your boss tells you to
do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, (little-w) work is
motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. Think of the difference
between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work, and a Wikipedia editor
doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives
the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half
million fanfiction stories about Harry Potter.

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aditya
This is possibly the hardest problem to solve when making social software...

Everyone else will do it when everyone is doing it. But motivating people to
do something radically different is much much harder unless there's clear
rewards, etc. Clay of course wrote the book on this but it's still not qn
exact sciene.

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cousin_it
So we need _utility testing_ instead of usability testing? Any ideas how to do
that?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
As well as, not instead of. :)

