Clay Shirky — Doing work, or Doing Work?

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.

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

(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.

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.

So we need utility testing instead of usability testing? Any ideas how to do that?