I May Be A Giver, But I’m Not Exactly Altruistic

Josh Pollock - January 14, 2014

A yellow flower in out-stretched hands.A yellow flower in out-stretched hands.

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike money or barter transactions, in which there are no obligations remaining after the transaction, gifts always imply future gifts. When we receive, we owe; gratitude is the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn.

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

My Gifts, Few Rights Reserved

A yellow flower in out-stretched hands.A few weeks ago, Michael Bastos shared an article that I had written for WPMU in the Advanced WordPress Facebook, which he moderates. I was pretty excited about the fact that one of the organizers of the group, and someone who I respect as a blogger and WordPress professional had shared my article. What made me especially happy was that some person or some bot, had liked my article so much, or calculated its SEO value to be so high, that they had decided to repurpose it for their own site.

I was flattered. I know that sounds sarcastic, but it is true.

Before Michael removed the post, it was pointed out that it was lifted from my post, so it’s not like this person I respect and others in the group didn’t know that I wrote it. I had already been paid by WPMU for the post, and it’s not like the kind of site that reuses other people’s content without permission pays for content.

So what do I have to be upset about? Yes, it’s copyright infringement, but it’s not my copyright. If it was, they would have been free to reuse it since, since everything I publish on my own carries a creative commons license. The license, like the GPL license that WordPress carries, gives people the freedom to redistribute and modify my work as long as they give attribution and keep the same license.

I’m Not (that) Altruistic

giveandtake-coverA lot of people would have a hard time seeing this sort of situation they way I did and accuse me of being too altruistic. I had a hard time explaining it at the time why I felt this way, but then a few days later, I read an amazing book by Adam Grant, called Give and Take, on the advice of Mike Byrnes who I met through WPMentor. This book has helped me understand my giving nature and why I sometimes get taken advantage of for it.

It’s also reenforced my belief that my giving nature is my key to success.

The thesis of the book is that the people who do the best, and the worst, by most metrics, are generally “givers,” people who naturally give freely as much as they can. Grant classifies givers into two categories, “selfless givers” and “self-interested givers.” The first kind are those who give without ever helping themselves  and often pay a price for it, while self-interested givers thrive by giving in ways that make them more likely to succeed in the long-run.

The giving strategy shouldn’t be confused with what Grant calls “matching,” which is doing things with an expectation of reciprocity. Givers, like myself, do not act with an expectation of immediate reciprocity, “tit for tat” and instead are more likely to focus on paying it forward by contributing to communities that help us and we can help. Giving, only when there is immediate benefit greatly reduces the amount of people who benefit from what you can give, reducing the potential pool of contacts you can call on when you need help.

According to Grant, successful givers collaborate by taking on “tasks that are in a group’s best interest.” We’ve been taught, by a over-simplified understanding of the concept of “the survival of the fittest” to think of giving as being unnatural or weak. We’ve been taught that we should naturally act like those that Grant calls “Takers,” those who seek to get as much personal benefit from everyone they interact with. Grant writes that givers are “not necessarily altruistic [and that] successful givers are every bit as ambitious as takers and marchers. They simply have different ways of pursing their goals.”

It’s Only Natural

Cat sleeping on a sleeping dog.This overly simplified view of natural selection is funny, because we are a species that has become so successful because of how well we work together. Among our defining characteristics is our ability to modify our environment to support large numbers of us living together, and our unique capabilities for language that facilitate everything from hunting in groups to exchanging information for mutual benefit.

What I’ve learned from studying ecology and biology is that there really is no such thing as altruism. Instead there are acts that because of the way they benefit the group, increase an individual’s fitness, and therefore benefit the group as well.

By working to improve the WordPress community I help ensure that these resources are there for me when I need them. Before I submitted my themes to the WordPress theme repository, I joined the team that review the themes. I learned a ton by reviewing other themes while helping to provide this valuable service that theme developers like myself need.

I also rely on groups like the Advanced WordPress Facebook group as well as other useful sites when I need help. I pay forward for the help I receive by helping others. In the process I’m developing a large network of weak ties–contacts that I interact with occasionally for specific purposes. A large group of weak ties can be a lot more useful than the smaller group of close connections that marchers form as they offer a more diverse set of connections and skills.

WordPress, both blogging and development, is an environment where the self-interested givers are especially likely to thrive. For example, I’m working on a new plugin that adds a “theme switcher bar” to the bottom of a WordPress site so users can preview different themes. It’s something I needed for my site. If other people can use it that’s great. Because of the GPL license, someone else can take it, and turn it into their own plugin. In fact that’s how my plugin started–I took a plugin that was close to what I wanted and made it into exactly what I needed and it’s now available for others to use if it fits their needs.

Even if no one uses it, I still have the plugin I need, and I got more experience teaching myself object-oriented PHP, finally figured out to do a settings page right, and I think I’ve finally gotten my head around the Options and Settings APIs. Because of the GPL if someone takes my plugin and makes it into a better version I can incorporate their changes into my plugin or just use the better version.

Giving

Will I see direct benefit from a site that reused my article without attribution. Probably not, but it doesn’t bother me. I’m used to giving freely. Am I getting screwed a little on this one? Sure, but I don’t focus on every little exchange. Overall I’ve benefited more than I can possibly calculate by what I have taken from the WordPress ecosystem. Keeping score would be pointless.

The WordPress community is woven from gifts. These gifts, contributions to core, plugins, themes and blog posts, as well as support offered to others, Meetups, WordCamps and more are gifts that people give because they need them. Is that altruistic, selfish, or is it the distinction meaningless?

Image Credit: Flowers in hands copyright by Hamed Saber. Cat and Dog photo by Barry Rogge. Both licensed under the terms of the CC-BY-2.0 license.