The ubiquity of online communities should be obvious to everyone by now. Whether it’s through forums, newsgroups, Myspace, or any of the other well-known Web 2.0 beasts like Digg, as long as the Internet has been used for social networking it has leaned towards the natural development of communities based on one interest or another.

If a community is engaging in the practice of crowdsourcing this also means they are trying to persuade users in some way or other. So what is the secret ingredient to motivation that keeps some Web communities churning while others fade away?

Robert B. Cialdini, a well-known social psychologist, wrote the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” to unlock the mysteries of human persuasion. Cialdini spent time in the field exploring various jobs that use persuasion to get people to purchase things. This book, however, is not a step-by-step guide on brute force selling techniques as you might find in marketing books. It explains in a scientific manner the reasons why people can be persuaded to do or act certain ways. So can the examples given be applied to areas other than sales, perhaps also to online communities?

The practice of open source reporting, still nascent, can take many forms. News organizations are experimenting with methods to open up the reporting process to their readers in an attempt to find the best methods.

Scientific American had reportedly been “kicking around the idea for months,” and received its opportunity to take a stab at open source reporting when the story of “Lucy’s Baby,” the recently discovered reportedly 3.3 million year old skeleton of an ancestor of human beings called A. Afarensis and nicknamed Selam, made headlines. The story, however important, was placed on the backburner since Scientific American’s news line-up was already too full to squeeze another story in – especially one that demanded a greater attention to detail like this one.

As CJR Daily reports:

“[Scientific American published] a feature-length article for the magazine’s Web site describing the Selam discovery and the significance of what scientists had already learned from her bones. Next to it was a sidebar that urged readers to “Be part of our publishing experiment.”

The call to readers explained that another version of the story would be crafted for the December issue of SciAm with extra reporting guided by reader suggestions. Through a simple blog, readers would comment about information on the Selam discovery and the subsequent research, which was left out of the original article.