> I can't find a link but there's several studies showing that people are willing to do a lot of things for free if they like it, but they see it like work if i

> I can't find a link but there's several studies showing that people are willing to do a lot of things for free if they like it, but they see it like work if it's paid and they enjoy it less, especially if for a ridiculous sum of money. This seems to be the unfortunate result every time a bounty or a prize is offered for a public competition with some meaningful task. * If the task is obviously unuseful (for example other TopCoder competitions, sports competitions), prizes seem to make it more desirable. * If the task is useful and there is no prize, people jump on the chance of doing something cool. * If the task is useful and there is a prize, it is seen as work, and judged based on the typical (Western world) hourly rates. Plenty of open-source bounty boards have had a similar backlash, even though hundreds of thousands of coders work on fixing open-source bugs just because they like it. It would be great to come up with a solution that stops people being upset at being offered more than nothing, for work they would gladly do for free anyway. But at the moment I don't have any solutions to propose. For this particular hackathon, NASA would do better to say up front if this is a space publicity competition (and the results are not useful to them), or if they will use the winner's code on the ISS (in which case bragging rights are worth way more than $10k).