1.b+Project+Genesis

The original concept for the Take Action project stems from the DoGood application (http://dogoodmovement.com/) for the Apple iPhone platform. The concept was simple, in that each day the user of the application is presented with one act of kindness, and then leveraged the connectivity of the platform, in this case an iPhone or iPod Touch, to connect the efforts of people "doing good" with the efforts of others.

This laid the foundation for the divergence of our project from the DoGood application. We didn't want to simply connect the actions by displaying data of how many do gooders had accomplished the task on any given day, or throughout the past week. And more importantly, we wanted the acts to be focused on simple acts of kindness that were achievable by any participant at any age level. A clear difference between the DoGood deeds and the Take Action deeds was that many of the actions would be focused on raising awareness of the Millennium Development Goals laid out by the United Nations, and ratified by 192 member nations in 2000.

To these ends, many of the Take Action deeds did not involve donating money, or performing other actions that required the relative freedom and autonomy of adulthood. Asking students to "tip your server more" or to donate money to a charity of their choosing on a given day would be a bit presumptuous and discriminate against younger students or those in lower socio-economic environments. It was with that understanding that we decided to focus on having our particpants not only complete deeds of educating themselves through media, online simulations, and discussion. We wanted to build a commenting system that would allow participants to participate beyond just signaling that their deed was done as in the DoGood application, and also provide a way for other users to provide feedback to one another in the form of comments and extrinsic means.

Moving away from the iPhone platform was also a goal of the project as we wanted it to be as open as possible. The barrier to enter the iPhone platform is at least $200 (the lowest cost for an iPod Touch), so we considered creating an application for Facebook, as the entry for that platform is free. However, Facebook proved to be problematic as their EULA states that individuals younger than 13 are not allowed on the network (contrary to common practice). Not wanting to cut out more than half of our target audience, the development of our own stand alone web application was needed.

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