Shirky asserts that collaborative crowdsourced work results from "a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users." He states that the promise of what the user will get out of participating in a project leads to a person's desire to get involved.
Collaborators will then choose the best social networking tool to do the job. One that "must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do." The bargain, Shirky states, defines what collaborators expect from each other's participation in the project. Shirky's 'Promise, Tool, Bargain' premise restates aspects of the Uses and Gratifications Theory of mass media research.
I wonder if the page is TV Tropes-like death-by-hyperlink nonsense. "Uses and Gratifications Theory" is a 3,000 word Wikipedia page and I don't understand the point of the "theory"...
Uses and gratifications theory is a communication theory that describes the reasons and means by which people seek out media to meet specific needs.