The motivational arc of massive virtual collaboration 1

Massive virtual collaborations (MVC) involve large numbers of mostly unpaid contributors collectively creating various kinds of new content. We propose a model of motivations for contribution to MVC that uses helping behaviour as a framework to integrate various theoretical perspectives, namely work motivation and social movement theory. We argue that what was previous considered a single, static and individual phenomenon, namely motivation for contribution to a virtual work setting, is in fact at least three separate but interrelated phenomena, with organizational and dynamic aspects. The model distinguishes motivations for three levels of contribution (initial, sustained and meta) and captures the dynamic and recursive effects of contributions on emergent individual and project states.