This is also addressed in a forthcoming book from MIT Press, tentatively titled “Evidence-based Social Design: Mining the Social Sciences to Build Online Communities” by Robert E. Kraut and Paul Resnick, of which some chapters are online at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/RKraut.site.files/pubs/books.html . The chapter on rewards, for example, suggests that “Non-transparent eligibility criteria and unpredictable schedules will lead to less ‘gaming of the system’ than predictable rewards.” “Gaming” is defined as “doing useless or destructive actions just to get the rewards”.

Also, “Rapid Decision Making for Complex Issues” prepared by Andrea Saveri and Howard Rheingold for The Institute for the Future (August 2005, SR-935, http://www.iftf.org) notes that “Gaming the system creates distrust among members of a standards-setting group and acts as a disincentive to sharing. Both disincentives and a lack of trust prevent sharing information necessary to develop an effective, equitable standard.”

As long as there are people, systems will be “gamed.” You cannot design or implement a “foolproof” system. Consequently, the best kind of system spreads oversight around among all the members, so the impact of the fools is lessened. The problem is that all too often the impact of the wise is also lessened. A good design doesn’t prevent gaming, but is resilient to being gamed, with the full knowledge and awareness that it WILL be gamed.

“It is worth noting that the GNU GPL – which is currently the most
popular Free Software license – does *not* require attribution, and
yet has been instrumental in creating probably the most stable commons
for virtual materials we have yet seen.”

My reply:

I think it is safe to say that a huge and significant amount of
software, knowledge, and hardware released out there *does* present
attribution (many times in automated ways via wikichanges, revision
control, and listing contributors in license or other text).

So, whether GNU GPL or any other license *requires* attribution, I
thin it is worth noting that the fact is that there is a culture which
is *giving* attribution, and I think there is a reason why it is
happening. I think that has to do in part with sustaining a commons
where many participants expect it.

Patrick then replied:

“This is a very good point as far as the psychology (or is it
sociology) of how those who collaborate under such licenses interact
and are ‘sustained’ by the certain amount of pride and/or recognition
that comes with fixing bugs or adding features, etc.

So there is a sort of ‘internal’ attribution occurring between the
‘workers’ (I use that word with caution considering much of Free
Software development would more likely be considered ‘play’ or at
least “self-scratching” by those who contribute) that is not
necessarily exposed to the end users or public in general except for
the most famous…”