View source for Public Goods

== Motivating Myself when Creating Public Goods ==

You can't will through a lack of resources and labour-force. So it feels very demotivating to create [[:public goods]], such as [[:FOSS programs]] or [[:freely licensed art]], since it feels like you'll never be able to compete with commercial, corporate alternatives. 

All of the following solutions help.

Personal solution: just keep doing things. It is a marathon, not a sprint; don't burn yourself out. Things might feel too slow at first but the more you do things, the more experience you get and the more you level up, and you'll be able to do things faster and faster without pulling all nighters or burning out.

Communal solution (asynchronous): build on what has been done before you. You very likely don't have to start from scratch. For example, if you want functionality, has someone made a library for it? If you need to scrape things, has someone (or multiple people) made existing scrapes for it that you can merge? Then contribute back. (This process can span days, or decades.)

Communal solution (synchronous): less reliable, but you may be able to get direct help from friends or your commune, like a "hey I temporarily need some GPUs, can you lend me some computation" thing