4.c+Crystallization+of+Observations+&+“A-ha!”+Moments


 * A-Ha!**

In running our month-long pilot of the Take Action pilot, we met twice a week in an effort to be very responsive to the needs of our participants and the needs of the pilot. For this reason, many of our "A-ha!" moments are reflected in the work we did through the pilot. One observation that seemed evident during the course of the pilot was that Apply - Offline actions, or "simple actions" which we called it during the pilot, were much more effective with the users. Looking at the data, Apply - Offline classified actions were some of the most frequently used Actions of the Day because we were responsive to these noted observations. Despite these efforts, though, actions on weekdays in the first week of the pilot were the most viewed and acted upon of the entire pilot.

Our super users, those people who were most active in giving and receiving Karma, were most active during the first two weeks, but then tapered off. If the people reading and reacting to other participants comments the most couldn’t hold out for the full month (although they did come back towards the end), then perhaps month-long time frame was too long.

The large difference in weekday versus weekend completion of actions has been recorded by the number of completed actions completed for the Action of the Day and in site traffic from Google Analytics. There is one overwhelmingly clear example of this. There were only two actions which were classified as both Apply - Online and Apply - Offline. Both of these were online games which resulted in directly giving food or water to those in need. While one of these actions saw 27 people act on it the other only saw 4 people take part. The only difference between the two being the day of the week - the first was on a Monday and the second on a Saturday. Day of the week was a significant factor in action completion. we fostered global citizens who were only active during the week, while there was a teacher and/or adult present leading the group. This leads us to believe that the participants were educated and engaged, but not to a level where they sought out opportunities to affect change or be a part of the the global citizenry as we envisioned it. Rather we developed passive global citizens, people who have a greater knowledge of global issues but are not willing to act on their own to affect change based on this knowledge.

While we hoped to achieve a huge leap in the number of participants that felt their value to helping tackle global issues was significant, we only wound up with about 10% more participants that managed to change their thought in a positive way according to our post-pilot survey. It was extremely interesting to see that we either discouraged, or actually helped some participants feel that their individual contributions to the project and the MDGs was insignificant, about 5% more than when we started the project.

The MDGs of Gender Equality and HIV/Aids & Other Diseases were the two least frequently connected goals to the actions of the day, and subsequently, neither of those two categories received above average number of comments and completions, meaning the students weren’t completely motivated to explore areas in which we hadn’t explicitly led them. Which leads us to conclude that perhaps they were being passive global citizens, educating themselves when asked, and that 90% of the users weren’t seeking out additional information.

While Environmental Sustainability was in the middle in terms of how frequently an action was connected to it, the majority of the actions were connected to offline applications, something the participants could do physically, which led to greater social activism on those actions. This pushed Environmental Sustainability to the top of the list of actions being taken.


 * Crystallization**

While all of our "gut instincts" and "a-ha!" moments were surprises or revelations to us as we worked through the Take Action pilot, these were just the pieces whose sum would eventually become the answer we knew we could find. It was a lot like working on a math problem. Think of a room with basic ceiling square tiles. You've been there, sitting in a long meeting or class, lying in a hospital bed or just trying to occupy a child while sitting in an endless wait for the next appointment, you decide to count the number of tiles in the ceiling. How did you go about finding the answer? How did you deal with the tiles that were not entire tiles or the bits of the ceiling obscured by furniture? In the pursuit of finding the answer, one must deal with these problems. Despite what you might be thinking, there is no one exact way of solving this problem. One may choose to count the tiles length-wise and width-wise and then multiply, making accommodations here and there. Someone else might choose to actually count each square to ensure nothing is missed. Yet another person might know the contractor who built the place and choose to call them up and ask how many tiles were used to make that ceiling. None of these methods are wrong; they are simply different paths to the same answer.



In our effort to find a way of how to initiate and then foster the growth of these new global citizens, we knew the answer was there. Even though we did not know it yet, we trusted we would find our way there somehow and it would be clear in the end how that path managed to get us to the answer we sought. It's clear to us now that 'simple actions" or Apply - Offline actions on weekdays with a teacher's guidance are all important variables to developing this engaged global citizen. This is the answer we found, but any good math student knows you need to check your answer to ensure that it makes sense. Checking our teacher sensibilities and the literature we have read, this answer makes sense. In fact, it kind of feels like we knew it all along - we just needed to show our work.

media type="custom" key="5978727"