I’m Sven and I’m writing this to help you (1) build excellent data companies, (2) build great data-heavy products, (3) become a high-performance data team & (4) build great things with open source.

Every other Friday, I share deeper rough thoughts on the data world.

Let’s dive in!

Data companies love to build communities
Especially open-source based companies rely a lot on community work
Nudging to spike intrinsic motivation is the way to go
Nudges can be designed to be effective
My local cafe has a good grip on incentive design!
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“Tip for good Karma”, and so I did. When I saw this nice tip setup at a cafe, I simply had to leave a tip. You throw a couple of coins in at the top, they rattle down the tube with considerable noise and land inside the glass jar at the bottom.

What an amazing way of nudging people towards doing a wanted behavior the owner doesn’t want to force.

A lot of data companies, and likely more general companies, are turning towards communities, and as such, find themselves in a spot in need of nudging. So let’s deconstruct this weird tipping mechanism and then see how data companies use very similar mechanisms to do some great nudging!

A transparent, loud, fun way of saying thanks

This tipping apparatus does a lot of things right:

It is accessible, almost “in your face” (literally) at the counter
It is playful and fun, both the tube and the message are fun to read and look at.
It isn’t shy of asking, there is a big message at the top.
It is transparent to everyone else, even “loud”. The jar is filled with coins you can see and the tube makes sounds other customers do hear on every tip.
It does NOT beg. In fact, there is not even a “thanks” sign, the owner didn’t say anything about my tip, and yet I felt happy to have given the tip.

Data companies are utilizing the fun

This is the automated welcome message you get when joining the DataHub Slack community, run by AcrylData. The cat is lovely and playful (2), It is right "in your face" (1) launching and it asks you directly (3) of doing the right things.

In fact, they have this one message set up and then a second (a little less fun one) set up via the Slack Bot talking about the rules, etc.

Data companies are loud

Speaking of slack, if you join the prefect Slack space, and introduce yourself inside the #introductions channel, you're hit with an avalanche of welcome messages. It's transparent and open to everyone inside the Slack channel (4).

You can not get the message, the people at prefect care about the community, and they want you to participate.

Transparency beyond Slack

But data companies don't stop there, they take this to the next level to incentivize people. AcrylData launched a "DataHub Data Practitioners Guild" which highlights important behavior they like to nudge towards. They even group it into the three most important categories. inside this guild, they highlight people from the community.

Can't be much more transparent (4) than that, right?

"I am so excited to announce the DataHub Data Practitioners Guild — a space to celebrate members of our amazing Community that have gone above and beyond to contribute to the collective success of DataHub. […] In this initial round, we spotlighted members who were highly impactful to the success and rapid growth of the DataHub Community and open-source project in 2022 through code contributions, providing troubleshooting support and technical guidance, and spreading awareness of DataHub across networks and platforms.” (Maggie Hays at the DataHub project Blog)

Prefect has something similar setup, aiming just for contributions called the "top prefectionists":

Btw. there even is a whole book about nudging I love, and I’m always going to associate this book with Nobel prizes and toilets.

GX shows off & tells you you can do the same

GX shows off community contributions in their community round-up, they incentivize talks, blog posts, and more by community members by showing them off publicly inside the live round-up & the write-up of the roundup.

They have a humble and direct request for more contributions, no begging there (5).

followed by a simple CTA.

Nudging & incentive design is hard without money

The key to all the approaches above, including of course the tipping mechanism, is that these nudges & incentives include no money, they focus on fostering intrinsic motivation.

I do recommend the book "Nudge" on this topic, although it will forever remind me of urinals. And it was written before one of the authors got a Nobel prize, really just based on their research.

Feel free to point me to more great examples of intrinsic nudging.

How was it?

Shameless plugs of things by me

New things:

“Don’t Waste 12 Months On Your Open Source Project - 5 Fast Ways To Prototype Open Source” - is the first article on unpackingbos.com where I’m collecting a lot of my open source writing.
If you’re curious about what my top 10 go-to resources are for cutting-edge data content, read “10 Surprising Resources I Visit Weekly“

and the usual:

I truly believe that you can take a lot of shortcuts by reading pieces from people with real experience that are able to condense their wisdom into words.

And that’s what I’m collecting here, little pieces of wisdom from other smart people.

You’re welcome to email me with questions or raise issues I should discuss. If you know a great topic, let me know about it.

If you feel like this might be worthwhile to someone else, go ahead and pass it along, finding good reads is always a hard challenge, and they will appreciate it.

Until next week,

Sven

Three Data Point Thursday

Tip For Good Karma! Examples Of Community…