Motivation Research Team

Our purpose, vision, mission

Purpose (Why?)

We want to make work in volunteer communities (like the TYPO3 community) more engaging, motivating and fun. This helps those communities grow and thrive. It also contributes to building trust and a feeling of connection between the members.

Vision (How?)

We become experts on motivation psychology and gamification. We use this expertise to provide advice to other teams and to build a ready-to-use concept for other teams and communities.

Mission (What?)

Becoming experts on motivation psychology and gamification

  • We get an overview over motivation psychology by playing through our main questline.

  • We deepen our knowledge on gamification and self-determination theory by completing the corresponding Coursera courses (including the exercises).

  • We take the EMPAMOS workshops.

  • We read literature and listen to podcasts and talks in this area.

  • We analyze games and gamified systems.

Providing advice to other teams

  • When a team approaches us for advice on motivation, we readily share our expertise.

  • We advertise that we offer these services.

Building a ready-to-use concept

  • We create easy-to-use tools that list the situations in which they can be applied, what they try to achieve, what to do, and relevant documents, templates or links.

  • We try these tools ourselves (“eating our own dog food”), beta-test them in other teams, help the teams implement them, and gather feedback to improve the tools.

How we work

Every third Tuesday, at 18:00h Berlin time, we meet on our Discord server for our team call.

Between the calls, we work on becoming experts on motivation psychology and on building our content. All of this is organized in quests.

Oliver Klee

Team lead

oliver.klee(at)typo3.org

Sabine Schmidt

Team co-lead

Yasmin Haustein

Team member

Marcel Ackermann

Team member

Davyd Rabinovych

Team member

Kevin Schüler

Team member

Slack channel

The team has a Slack channel in the TYPO3 Slack workspace. The Slack channel serves as an additional contact point. (For team discussions and coordination, we use a Discord server instead.)

Team rules

  • We abide by the TYPO3 code of conduct.
  • We go out of our way to treat each other well.
  • We do our best to help each other.
  • We diligently attend our monthly conference calls. If someone cannot attend, they let the team know as soon as possible so that we can reschedule if possible.
  • We keep our promises and agreements, and we finish our to-dos in time. If someone cannot keep a promise or cannot finish a to-do in time, they inform the team as soon as possible so we can find a way to work around this.
  • Between the monthly conference calls, each team member invests a few hours each month to further our purpose/vision/mission. If someone is not able to do this (e.g., due to vacation or an emergency), they inform the team as soon as possible.
  • All team members have the permission and responsibility to improve our team processes, structures and content, and to add topics to the agenda for the next team call.
  • To change our team charter, we need a team decision (except for spelling and bug fixes and formatting changes). 
  • Team members are required to resolve any conflicts between them that affect how they collaborate or communicate in the team. If necessary, they ask for help from the team leads.
  • We use our expertise to make our own work more engaging and fun.
  • There are no stupid questions.
  • It is okay to ask for help.

Our team culture

  • We are a very friendly team that strives to have a high degree of psychological safety. We help each other, go out of our way to treat each other well, and spend some social time together. We are also a high-performance team that likes getting things done: We expect each team member to invest some time each month, and we trust each other and hold each other accountable for sticking to our promises and agreements. Also, all team members are expected to reliably attend our monthly team calls.
  • We are still setting up some of our structures - so some things are still a work in progress.
  • The team is led in a very lateral way: We have strong leadership that relies on all team members contributing to organizing our team, sharing many leadership tasks, and improving our structures.

Interested in joining the team?

Great! Then we have prepared a team joining quest for your to play!