Re: Finding out if anyone reads your stuff

[Karen Kay <karenk -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Christopher M. Fisher said:
> As far as I could tell, this actually helped the project.  During a meeting in
> which we all pored over 75-odd pages of documentation, it seemed that everyone
> on the team had taken the time to read it and had plenty of questions
> prepared.  It probably wasn't really the money that did the trick; once they
> knew that there might be a game hidden in the documentation, they had extra
> incentive to read it more thoroughly.  Kind of a "Where's Waldo" approach to
> getting users involved.

I just listened to a piece on NPR last night on the concept of rewarding
creativity in children with cash incentives. There were several
interesting results of the study they reported (such as the fact
that creativity is transitive--if you encourage artistic creativity,
you'll end up with more creative writing), but the relevant one is
that the reward needed to be small and out of sight. When the reward
was either large or in view, creativity became subsumed in the larger
greed that developed.

Anyway, your story sounds like an application of the same principle.

Karen
  karenk -at- netcom -dot- com