Why Do People Participate In The Area Of Technology?

Description Our team would like to formally investigate why people participate and contribute to different areas of technology from wikipedia to online gaming to building iphone apps. Each area of technology has some sort of user driven information or piece in which a user can add their own touches to the technology in question. For example, in the videogame Little Big Planet, the users are allowed to build and share their own levels with the other players online. As the player starts out, they may begin to only play someone else's levels. But as they become more familiar with the game, they began to build their own levels with the help of well constructed tutorials and they began to help drive the game's development and evolution. We would like to explore this phenomenon and others, like what inspires someone to develop an iphone app and do the user rating systems in the iphone apps store and on youtube actually help order and drive user participation.

Objectives

• Choose a set of technologies with user participate of various levels
• Find common threads or ideas within that set of technologies
• Develop a questionnaire to survey to our friends, family, classmates, etc
• Analyze our findings and hopefully draw some conclusions from our data

Possible Challenges Our group will need to keep our topic focused since it is such a large undertaking, but with the appropriate questionnaires and frame of reference to the bigger picture, we feel that we can provide a high level summary or view of why people participate in different technology areas. There seems to be a general consensus in our group that there are some common characteristics between all of the user driven content that is out there.

Relationship to the class topics We would like to figure out how and why people express themselves and their ideas through technology. Whether it is designing an iphone app or just creating a myspace page to expose themselves to the world. Is there a common theme, and if so how could we use that to develop technologies in the future that can leverage those ideas for economic or societal good.