This is a Guest Post by Rodlie Ortiz. This post is somewhat of a different kind than we typically get here but I thought it was a good principle worth remembering. It’ll be your job to extrapolate that out to technology and it’s use.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of incentives recently. Steven Levitt, the renowned economist from the University of Chicago devotes a chapter to the topic in his book Freakonomics. The chapter is called “What do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?”

So here’s the gist of the issue: People will cheat if the incentive is big enough and the associated risk is small enough.

We’re all used to the idea of students cheating to do better on tests. After all, if you don’t pass some tests, you may not pass the class. Once, when I was in high school geometry, I entered some answers into my TI-89 calculator. I passed the test. Another time in AP English class I carefully…well, let’s move on.

What we’re not so used to hearing, though, is about teachers cheating.

I always looked up to teachers as castles of moral integrity and as civil missionaries. Those that seemingly don’t make a lot of money but still choose to work with hormonal/moody/hyper kids were surely saints on earth. But in the book Levitt details what happened when the state of California introduced $25,000 bonuses “for teachers who produced big test scores.” Many cheated.

More thoughts after the jump:

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Registration… ah, that is the question for a lot of application developers these days: Do we include our own registration process for our software and/or service? Or, do we use the oAuth and/or open API’s of popular existing services for logins (eg Twitter, Facebook, etc.)?

The answer is most simply this: Depends.

Now, I’m not necessarily going to prescriptive about the what and why but I do know that if you’re going to make me sign up for something then make it as easy, fast, and as painless as possible. Keep the bar of adoption low.

Or, you can just do it really creatively, like how Moof.com does it:

I really liked how they did the registration at the bottom; it fits very well with a casual and somewhat-personal approach to it. In fact, it was so novel that I didn’t mind signing up.

We could probably learn a thing or two about this strategy; does your church have a signup process? How easy (or personal) is it? Or how impossibly hard is it?

I can remember many times sitting in the back row of my local church trying desperately to stay awake, and as I began to slump over and fall into blissful dreaming I would think: “Man, church is so boring.”

Let’s just say that as a teenager I didn’t quite “get it.”

And although I don’t particularly think that anymore, there are tons more who still do, and perhaps “Online Church” can help engage some of those people?

A recent study done shows that most people come online for “fun and learning,” which top the list.

Overall, though, these six categories, from common to least, were these:

• Learn
• Have fun
• Socialize
• Express oneself
• Advocate
• Do business
• Shop

Perhaps we have an opportunity to focus in on the things that really attract those that engage heavily online and create worthwhile experiences that capture their attention? Are we providing the right types of information and communicating it effetively?