The Cost of Contribution

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Joining a welcoming and inspiring Open Source community such as WordPress can be exhilarating and makes people want to contribute their part to join the movement and strengthen their feeling of belonging.

It is not heroic or laudable to overdo it and burn out!

Alain Schlesser, WordCamp US 2019

Initial enthusiasm can easily lead contributors to slowly spiral into overcommitting and feeling obliged and responsible for a project. There’s a cost attached to anything we do, even when we’re talking about unpaid volunteer work done in one’s spare time. And that cost will be paid in some way or another.

We need to talk more openly about the adverse effects of unsustainable contributions and destigmatize the subject of money. We need to directly address issues of frustration and burn-out as they surface. Let’s all have our fellow contributors’ backs, and make sure we’re all in it for the long run!

This episode of the Openstream podcast is a great talk by WordPress consultant, speaker, software engineer and WP-CLI maintainer Alain Schlesser from Germany. At WordCamp US 2019 in St. Louis in the US state of Missouri, he spoke about the cost of contribution.

Transcript

In the summer of 2014, I started work on my first client project with WordPress. I had just switched careers from government agent to software developer and I was making extensive usage of the WordPress codex to help solve my problems with my initial project. What I found was that it was very vast, very detailed and most of all, in a lot of places, very bad advice, actually. So I thought to myself, I should blog about this and maybe share what I find with the other developers.

Then when I delved deeper into the project, I started to hit bugs in WordPress core and I’m not talking about exotic edge cases. It was really very prominent, major bugs that that hindered me and my progress. And I found out that the bugs were known. There were patches already available and they were just waiting to be committed so that the problem would be solved. They were waiting for several years already. So I thought to myself, maybe I should contribute to WordPress core to help fix these bugs faster. Maybe this way of sliding into contributions slowly, maybe that’s something that’s known to some of you. For me, after a while, it was that I was starting to question my choice of the platform, because WordPress had not been the development tool I had hoped it to be. And I thought that there might be something that would be more productive for me. And just when I considered switching, I experienced one thing that continues to keep me within this space. The WordPress community. So that’s all of you folks.

This community is very passionate and very inspiring group of people. It’s very intoxicating if you get into contact with them first and I was immediately hooked. But after a while, I noticed that this group of very interesting and inspiring people that for some of them, the community had a very bad long term effect on them. I witnessed stress, frustration inside these burnout and a lot of churn in general. And I was wondering how is possible that such a seemingly positive environment can have such a devastating effect on some of its members.

What I found out is that I believe most of it to be traced back to a root cause of cost. So everything comes with a cost attached. It might be combined cost. Like, for example, might be the cost in energy to operate your body and your mind. The cost of opportunity for not doing something else. The financial cost of travel and accommodation for attending an event. And all of these costs, the best way to cover them is using money. Money is the tool that best fits for the job, because it is easily tradable for other resources and it is on its own, neither intrinsically valuable nor scarce.

So it is the best way to cover costs. But most of the Open Source contributors they are not being paid to contribute. They don’t earn money to cover their costs. So what they use instead to cover the costs is time. But time is much scarcer resource than money. And if you overdo it, you’re spending the time that is actually meant to go into your health or your family.

The main drive behind why we overdo things is our natural tendency for pro-social behavior. This is deeply ingrained within us, because caring for our group means that we improve the viability of its long term survival, which is a fundamental evolutionary mechanism. But the the pro-social behavior is also rooted in another principle called reciprocity. It’s the basic principle of giving something and receiving something back. There’s a hot debate that’s going on for a while to find out whether the human species can truly be altruist, whether through altruism actually exists. But a lot of researchers agree that whenever we help someone, we ultimately do it to get something back in return. That can be a direct benefit like gratitude or recognition, or it can be a more indirect subconscious reward, like, for example, helping being the fastest way of escaping an uncomfortable situation. And this means that whether we decide to help or not is just a matter of doing a subconscious cost benefit analysis and finding out if I help now does the return I get from this outweigh the costs I need to invest.

So wouldn’t that mean that just on their own? People would naturally try to only contribute when the return they get outweighs the cost they need to invest? Wouldn’t they automatically stop themselves from overdoing it and hurting themselves? Well, things are not that simple, unfortunately. There’s a lot of factors at play. If you help someone, your brain produces serotonin, which makes you happy about what you just did and encourages you to keep on doing it. This can lead to an addiction that’s commonly known as helpers high, which makes you unable to stop helping even to your own detriment, always chasing the next helpers high.

Then there’s another psychological effect that lets us constantly compare ourselves to others and deriving our self-esteem from what we perceived as social comparison to be. If we see someone contribute, it motivates us to contribute as well. If we see someone contribute more than us, it motivates us to try even harder and push further. In a given group we also always tend to strive for conformity, to adhere to what we perceive as being the social norm within that group.

What’s worse, though, is that if no expectation is explicitly set to define this norm, what that should be, then with deduce our own norm by observing the behavior of the group. This can lead to volunteers that have regular day jobs in their spare time try to match the output of professional full time contributors that are paid by companies. Because that is what they perceive to be the norm within Slack, for example. They are unaware that the majority of volunteers and contributors, they don’t even show up in Slack for weeks and months on end. All they see is the constant activity of the core team.

So taking all of these psychological factors into consideration it makes it even more important to talk about sustainability in Open Source contributions. Money is the best way we have of covering our costs, and we need to make sure that we do our best to keep on contributing sustainably. So people need to be aware of the costs involved and how to contribute without hurting themselves or their family in the process. We need to start destigmatizing this money topic in Open Source, and we need to make sure that the overall community just takes care of its own contributors to to let them stay safe.

It is not heroic or laudable to overdo it and to burn out. We don’t need a rotation of models that we burn through. We need a accumulation of reasonable and unsustainable effort. And please, if you see someone where you think they’re overdoing it or that they are starting to burn out, please, absolutely do talk to them and address the issue. It is very important that we have each other’s backs in this, so that we all can stay in it for the long term. This can often be a deciding factor of keeping everyone healthy and also keeping the project healthy in the long run. Let’s all contribute responsibly. Thank you.

Credits

• Music by Northern Dusk
• WordCamp video presentation on WordPress.tv