Our author 
Together with Wikimedia Germany and the University of Karlsruhe, STI Innsbruck organized a workshop on motivation and incentives on the Web (http://webcentives09.sti-innsbruck.at/) at the World Wide Web (http://www2009.org) conference in Madrid, Spain.
The aim of the workshop was to address the following questions around incentives and motivation of Web applications: what is the motivation for a user to (install and) use a tool? Which incentive structures can be applied to the Web, which cannot? Moreover, incentives are a crucial topic for future Web generations: Web paradigms, like the Semantic Web or the 3D Web, that are novel and unfamiliar to end users, aim to involve wide user bases.
We had very interesting submissions that approached the topic on different levels. The workshop accepted 5 submissions, that were invited to present in Madrid. We were happy to welcome Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo!, as an invited speaker. Arpita gave an entertaining and informative talk on her work on charity auctions through social networks.
The talks triggered lively discussions: a method for estimating causes of drop-out of Wikipedia contributors was presented; the Phrase Detectives game brought up many questions in the audience. Michael Fink’s presentation on YouTube’s annotation was very interactive and gripping. The incentives for social voting were discussed in another presentation. The final talk investigated reputation ranking in social networks.
