You probably take it for granted that people are nice to each other. People house and feed their kids, call to check up on their parents, smile as they pass you on the street, drop coins in buskers' hats,… and many give to charity. Kind and seemingly unselfish acts of this sort strike most people as being perfectly natural, but much of economics is based on the precept that people act selfishly. For many markets with lots people or firms offering and demanding the good in question, this simple or even simplistic view of human behavior does surprisingly well in predicting market outcomes. But in other situations it, perhaps obviously, seems inadequate.

So how do economists explain behavior like charitable giving, which seems like a patently unselfish act? The first possibility – and here the dismal science does its moniker proud – is that people are not unselfish after all. Why should I donate towards a cancer foundation? Because I'm a  middle-aged woman who has a 40 percent chance of getting breast cancer, so the odds are that I will benefit from breast cancer research. Why should I give to the arts? Because I'm fond of music and I know that without my donation, my local opera house risks bankruptcy.  A second explanation is what economists call "enlightened self-interest". This is the idea that I although I am gainfully employed and comfortably housed, I may still give to my local homeless shelter to ensure that I'll have a place to stay in the unlikely event that I lose my job and my home.

Why do I adopt snow leopards?

Of course, these two explanations go only so far. I don't envisage moving to Haiti anytime soon, and neither do think it likely that German immigration authorities will sanction a huge influx of Haitian refugees, so why do I donate to Haitian earthquake relief? I hate the cold, so I'm unlikely to go hiking in the Himalayas or sailing in the Antarctic, so why do I "adopt" snow leopards and emperor penguins? This raises a third possibility, namely, that charitable donations are driven by altruism towards others or towards future generations.

These three explanations have one thing in common: I care about the supply of the charitable good or service in question, and my charitable donation raises their supply. In this sense spending money on a donation is like spending money on any other kind of private good: I can buy a sweater for a homeless person or buy a sweater for myself. They have different qualities, and may affect me differently, but both acts supply a sweater, which presumably gives me utility (otherwise I wouldn't have bought the sweater in the first place).

The warm-glow explanation

There are, however, situations in which my charitable contribution doesn't make much of a dent in supply. Do I really believe that my 20 Euros is going to curb global warming? How much of my 50 Euros is really going to reach tsunami victims, once it's made its rounds through the UN bureaucracy? 10 Euros, maybe? What's that going to buy a family of 5 in Sri Lanka? A school uniform for one kid? In such instances, there is a fourth explanation for charitable giving – that people give because the very act of giving makes them feel good. This is the "warm-glow" explanation for charitable contributions.

Let's recap our motivations for charitable giving: we have selfishness as traditionally understood, altruism, a combination of the two, and warm glow. Now, you're probably asking yourself, "Why do I care why people give? Isn't it whether or not they give what matters?" The reason to ask the "why" question is that it has important ramifications for how one can go about raising charitable donations. Suppose people give for "warm-glow" reasons. Then, eliciting a warm glow, say by expressing gratitude for donations or sending certificates of appreciation, will presumably encourage people to give. Alternatively, if people are acting out of  pure self-interest, then charities would do well to request donations from individuals who share their agenda: ask 20-somethings to support internet freedom, women in my demographic to support breast cancer research, and beach cottage owners to fight global warming.

Economists have done a lot of experimental work to figure what does and does not elicit charitable giving (more on this another time), but there's a lot of work to be done regarding individuals' underlying motivations for giving to charity… Unless, of course, economists have it all wrong and people just give because they feel that it is a moral prerogative. In which case, we're back to the drawing board.

References:

• James Andreoni (2006): "Philanthropy", in Serge-Christophe Klom and Jean Mercier Ythier (eds.), Chapter 18, Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity, Elsevier: Oxford, p. 1201-1269.
• James Andreoni (2001): "The Economics of Philanthropy.'' in N. Smeltser, P. Baltes, eds., International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier: Oxford, 2001, 11369-11376.

Raji Jayaraman is a professor at the ESMT Berlin. She is a development economist whose research examines how people respond to incentives.

Within the framework of our Stakeholder Feedback project, we try to keep track of and inform you about interesting initiatives that aim to connect the unconnected dots on the “feedback loop” in development. Amongst others, we are interested in the influence that the set-up and design of feedback pilots have on the willingness of stakeholders to participate.

Daraja – Maji Matone. “Raising the water pressure”

A few weeks ago, we spoke with Ben Taylor, Executive Director of Daraja, and asked him about Daraja’s project in Tanzania, Maji Matone. Daraja’s mission is to improve access to clean and safe water in rural Tanzania by empowering citizens to become change agents themselves. It encourages citizens to report on water supply outages via simple text messages sent to a short number. After receiving the messages, Daraja forwards them to the responsible provision unit, the local water engineers. If the authorities fail to act on this information, partnerships with the local media can be used to publish the story and put pressure on the local government. ‘If a radio team is there to follow up whether the water point is indeed being repaired, it will probably make public officials pull their socks up’, Taylor says.

The role of technology in Daraja’s approach

In this sense, the pilot builds on technologies that are available and familiar to the local communities. Radio, for example, constitutes a central part of the project’s technological arsenal due to its importance in many countries, including Tanzania. So does mobile technology, whose adoption rate in developing countries exceeds that of any other technology in history. (Today more than 72% of all subscribers are situated in developing countries.) Similarly to our SMS feedback project, mobile phones are used in the project in order to gather relevant feedback from beneficiaries. An SMS gateway then transmits the messages to a central web-based platform. But technology was also used in the preparation phase for outreach purposes: a combination of radio broadcasts and printed materials was used to explain the purpose, importance of the pilot as well as technical aspects involved with the feedback mechanism (for example which number to text to and which format to supply the information in). Essential though the use of technology is for the project, gathering data from locals is not an end in itself for Daraja. The emphasis is on acting on this data to promote change.

Status quo and outlook

Maji Matone is in the piloting phase until the end of the year, and is running in three pilot districts. After this, the plan is to scale it up to nationwide level. The project has already gathered 800 messages from citizens. 200 of these were passed on to the local government so that repair of broken water points could begin. So far repair works have been undertaken on water points in 12 communities, which benefits a calculated 3000 people in rural Tanzania.

Learning

Daraja is constantly monitoring the progress of Maji Matone and tries to discover what could be done better. One of the challenges, Taylor explains, is to improve the quality of citizen reports in terms of content. Sometimes, citizens forgot to include in the text information about where the water point is located, making it difficult to establish the whereabouts of the non-functional water point. The organization reacted flexibly to this issue and called or texted back to the given numbers. However, they were normally unable to reach the target person because, as it turned out, in many of the cases the sender was not the owner of the mobile device, or the numbers were unreachable. Taylor told us that Daraja is now working to resolve this challenge with the use of more outreach activities among the target district.

Daraja is also experimenting with changes to various aspects of the project. Based on a field research, they found that the main obstacle to participation for citizens was the use of a short number, while having to pay the fee of a standard rate SMS was not a problem for them at all. These results were quite surprising to us: firstly, we believed that making dialing a number more “simple” via a short code would be beneficial. In fact, in Daraja’s case, the people were not familiar with short numbers and they might have associated them with higher fees. Daraja is now considering switching to standard numbers or even abolishing the SMS system and replacing it with a voice and call-center based system. Second, we thought that providing some financial incentives to beneficiaries (and at least compensating them for the text messages) might be beneficial and give a kick-start. As Taylor explains, this seemed to not be a central concern for citizens in Tanzania.

These discussions are almost always awash with sweeping statements, and simplistic stereotypes which are unhelpful and counterproductive – or so think Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, co-founders of MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and authors of the excellent new book Poor Economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty. Banerjee and Duflo argue we should move away from impossibly big questions – such as ‘does aid work?’ – to more specific answerable ones, with a focus on hard evidence rather than just theorizing.

Look at the data!

Merely making the questions more specific doesn’t achieve anything unless we can give a good answer. Here Banerjee and Duflo, along with their colleagues at J-PAL, are pioneers in the new movement of Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), to try and produce concrete data.

Take childhood vaccination. We know this is one of the most effective way of saving lives, and yet despite many programmes working in this area, the immunization rate among children in some areas remains very low – sometimes as little as 1%. To work out why this is, the researchers carried out an RCT in 134 villages in the Indian district of Udaipur, randomly assigning them to different test groups. They found that by making immunization easier by providing monthly camps in the village, immunization rates were three times higher than in the villages in the control group. But when as well as the camps a small incentive was added – a free kilo of lentils per child immunized – the rate rose to more than six times the level of the control group. Priceless information for planning cost-effective programmes.

In the book we hear colourful stories of Mexican schoolchildren, Nigerian businesswomen, and many more from the 865 million people worldwide who live on less than 99¢ per day; and we learn from RCTs investigating the most effective way to increase the use of mosquito nets to prevent malaria, to get children to stay in school for longer, how best to assist farmers in poor countries, and more.

Accepting the findings

What emerges is often unexpected – for instance giving out deworming tablets was a far more cost-effective way of improving education levels than investing in new teachers. And some of J-PAL’s findings have been the focus of some controversy for being perceived to be sceptical about microfinance. In fact, the study in Hyderabad gave good evidence that people were using microloans to make sound investments in their businesses – but they also found no improvement in empowerment of women or spending on health or education. The authors do not claim microfinance doesn’t work, but rather that it is not the cure-all solution that some have made it out to be in what the authors describe as “decades of overpromising”.

In fact what repeatedly emerges is a surprisingly complex picture. Mothers are discouraged by having to walk kilometres to health centres for immunizations, but also a small incentive can stop them putting off what they had intended to do anyway. Banerjee and Duflo repeatedly emphasise the conclusion that there is no ‘magic bullet’ solution.

A cause for frustration?

So will the many people working hard to fight poverty be dispirited by this book? Not only does it repeatedly emphasise the lack of any ‘magic bullet’ solution, but time and again we see instances of poor people apparently resisting our efforts to help. They frequently have to pay large amounts they can barely afford on curative medicine, having previously failed to take very cheap preventative measures, a farmer might decline highly subsidized fertilizer which would pay for itself many times over in increased yield, and mothers need bribing before they will have their children immunized or educated. We even hear of people in Africa with barely enough to eat spending the food grants they are given on satellite TV. Surely a humanitarian reading this will despair – why won’t these people act in their own interest?

But again, the mistake is in viewing poor people as some 2-D characters, rather than the complex individuals we all actually are. There are reasons they act how they do, which even if not objectively ‘rational’ are almost always understandable. Maybe they’re missing some important information, or their existence is so precarious they have no option but to be highly risk-averse, even if that means passing up a good deal. Like us, they will sometimes opt for immediate pleasures, such as TV or tobacco, rather than long-term investments.

The book makes the insightful observation that, with our pension plans, enforced schooling, and many other “nudges”, it is made much easier for us in the developed world to make the right choices (and yet we still all know the feeling of putting off what’s best for us – all those failed New Year’s resolutions and unused gym memberships). The poor, on the other hand, bear “responsibility for too many aspects of their lives”, and are constantly having to balance choices and risks, acting as “barefoot hedge-fund managers”.

In fact Poor Economics sounds a note of hope. We do need to move away from lazy stereotypes, unfounded speculation, and the misguided policies they produce. But if we take the time to understand the complexity of people living in poverty and their problems, real progress can be made – the authors give countless examples of successful programmes and encouraging new directions. And even if this approach at first makes the problems seem even more daunting and intractable, as they write, “success can sometimes be closer than it looks”.

You can watch Esther Duflo explaining more about RCTs here.

Watch the Banerjee and Duflo discuss Poor Economics on India’s NDTV.

Blogpost written by Ben Mason

betterplace lab: Jonathan, how the famine is playing out in civil-war-affected southern Somalia?

Jonathan Ledgard: Southern Somalia is cut off from all aid efforts, because at the moment definitely one of the most dangerous areas on the planet, even more dangerous than the Taliban areas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Muslim or Christian, black or white, if you are not local Somali you are probably going to get executed by the Al-Shabaab militia if you go there. These guys hate women, they hate freedom of thought, they hate education; they are very dangerous. It’s essentially impossible to help the people of southern Somalia from the outside.

lab: So far Unicef and the International Red Cross have managed to deliver 400 tonnes of food to the area. Are the militia also help those facing starvation themselves to try and win support and popularity?

Jonathan: Al-Shabaab are providing schools and some basic relief work, on the condition that the community meets extremely strict Islamist guidelines. On the other hand we know they’re also often confiscating farmers’ harvests. Intimidating the people is their main tactic, also partly due to the fact that Al-Shabaab are not especially well organised.

lab: Are the people free to flee to refugee camps such as Dabaab in Kenya?

Jonathan: Al-Shabaab will try to stop them fleeing, harassing and intimidating them. But many people have managed to sneak through the bush. Here and there along the way they have to pay a little bit of money to bandits, so only the wealthier can do it that way. And because the journey takes several days on foot, only the strongest make it.

lab: Droughts in Africa are commonplace, and to predict this one you only had to look at the weather reports. So why does the catastrophe have to reach the stage that the media takes an interest and starts showing pictures of starving children, before any action is taken?

Jonathan: I’ve been asking this question since late-2010, when wrote a story saying the drought was coming and we need to organize. It’s cynical. Rich countries aren’t really interested in the poor people. And the whole Band Aid, Live Aid kind of culture that we’ve developed in Europe and America means that people only look at the problems here in a sentimental kind of way. So the system as a whole doesn’t work. Once you’re inside the system there’s often no exit-strategy. The World Food Programme, for example, do a good job of keeping people alive in emergency situations but do a very bad job of getting communities off food aid.

lab: You mean the people become dependent?

Jonathan: Yes. For example Ethiopia had a terrible famine in 1984/85. But  now 25 years later you still have six to twelve million people every year receiving food aid from foreign countries just to stay alive. This also leads to complicated and politically delicate questions about population growth and what size of population a region can sustain. It’s a topic that no politician will touch, but it’s what aid workers and economists and African ministers talk about in the bar at night. The Somalians just have too many people in areas where they can’t feed or support them. A friend of mine, who’s an aid worker, said to me that food aid is like crack. It’s an addictive drug and once a community is on food aid they’re not farming properly and they’re not looking after themselves properly.

lab: Aren’t catastrophes like this also important to get people to donate who normally wouldn’t?

Jonathan: Yes, and for that reason the big charities and the NGOs are inflating the numbers of people affected. It’s a really bad issue – they’re using the famine for their own fundraising efforts. However, we do have a really critical situation in Somalia at the moment. If we aren’t able to reach the area held by Al-Shabaab we’ll be looking at mortality figures of 60,000 to 120,000 within the next three or four months.

lab: Is the Al-Shabaab militia profiting from the aid deliveries?

Jonathan: Our food aid is supporting Al-Shabaab. But I don’t know if I’d be courageous enough to say we shouldn’t send the aid. Who’s going to tell a mother whose child is starving to death that her child isn’t going to get the food because that might support the bad guys? But we’ve seen it clearly throughout African history: food aid supports and underwrites rebel armies – it’s true here as well. Al-Shabaab will try and hold off until they have full control of all aid. Then they’ll have 50-80 million US-dollars in cash, and then they’ll start fighting again.

lab: Cellphones are widespread in Africa and very innovatively used. Has this technology also been deployed in the relief effort?

Jonathan: Ushahidi isn’t working in Somalia because in the Al-Shabaab-controlled areas people have very restricted use of mobile phones and it is monitored by Al-Shabaab. So the people there have barely any access to telecommunication. That’s why it’s difficult to gather crowdsourcing information. But in Mogadishu lots of people are online, on facebook and so on – at least on the side of the city controlled by government troops.

lab: Now that the catastrophe has been portrayed in the media and the people have seen these images, many of them want to help and to donate. Will this help actually reach those who need it.

Jonathan: That’s a difficult issue. I would definitely recommend that people donate. The question then is to whom and in what way. This is just my personal opinion from being on the ground – but I’m not convinced that private donations are particularly useful for emergency relief work. I think that private donations are more effective if targeted specifically. In the case of a great catastrophe the government will provide hundreds of millions of Euros, and the amount given by private donors is an insignificant part of the equation. I think it is better if the money is donated to areas that are not covered by normal emergency funding – say to organisations working with the handicapped or elderly in the camps. Identifying those areas and projects I think is much more useful that simply donating without consideration.

Jonathan Ledgard is the East Africa correspondent for The Economist. The 40-year-old has lived in Africa for the past five years, primarily in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. “But my main ambition is to be a novelist” says Jonathan. Following his debut novel Giraffe, his new novel Submergence was released a few days ago. Joana has already finished it and described it as “Very good, well worth a read!”

What many people would think of as stress, I consider living intensely. But sometimes I also need some time-out. Normally that comes in the form of travel to countries which have basically no internet, but there are less and less (I remember one time in Addis Abeba, where after an hour in an internet cafe the Hotmail homepage had just finished loading). In any case, during the summer I’m always in France, but even though the internet connection is slow and unreliable, I just can’t resist the inner urge to check my mails every day.

So that’s it! I’m going to follow the example of the American internet-researcher Danah Boyd and impose an email-sabbatical this summer: from 28th July to 28th August I’m OFFLINE! But if I just resolved not to go online during this time, knowing that thousands of emails awaited my return at the end of August would ruin any chance of recuperation. So I’m only reachable until 28th July, and anyone who wants anything from me in the next 6 weeks please speak now.

Because on 28^th July my email-sabbatical begins, and all incoming mails will be irretrievably deleted. Of course the senders will get a notification that their messages did not get through, and that they should try again to contact me from the 29th August onwards (if it’s still relevant). In emergencies (what could they be?), Dennis is taking my place in the Berlin office and knows how to reach me.

Otherwise: from 28th July to 28th August I’m OFFLINE.

P.S. Anyone who fancies an email-sabbatical themselves should read Danah’s how-to guide give it a try. In September I’ll let you know how my email-free month went.

OpenJapan Berlin: Joana Breidenbach from opensimsim.net on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago I participated at Open Japan (and blogged about it here in German). In this video, filmed during the 72hours session, I explain why this experiment in collaborative creation is so exciting for us.

Twenty international volunteers, mainly from Australia, have dared to tell their story in a new blog called Ethnosense since April this year. This is not exactly a blog for returned volunteers to give feedback on their cross-cultural experience. Neither it is to encourage social entrepreneurship, travel writing or design thinking. But those may be just some of the interesting by-products that this platform might offer. Ethnosense is rather a space designed for ex-volunteers who are in need of a means of expression. But why does it make sense to create an online space for returned volunteers that has no concrete purpose… that is like a blank whiteboard?

The missing link: from volunteer to change-agent

Universities and NGOs that are concerned with developing social awareness and active citizenship tend to see volunteer programs of cultural immersion as revolutionary machines that turn isolated individuals into engaged citizens. This vision is of course attractive, but also way too simple. What I’ve rather found through my research on the topic is that returned volunteers find it extremely difficult to relate their Indiana Jones- or Mother Theresa-like experiences with their everyday life. They can barely talk about it when they go back home, or at least not in a way that they think others would really understand.

Cross-cultural volunteering is a growing trend in countries like Australia. Young people in particular are embracing a broad range of international service options, from short-term internships and voluntourism programs to gap years and long-term placements sponsored by government agencies. Yet, even when many of these programs offer re-entry workshops and are well aware of the reverse-culture-shock effect, they are missing an important source of social development. These organizations are focused on either improving the delivery of aid or on finding new volunteers. But what happens with those who are at the end-point of the engagement-cycle?

Returned volunteers seem to have one of two options: 1) either do it again, having to start all over with the sacrifices in terms of funding, time and commitment to get there, or 2) embrace a “normal” life at home, which usually comes with feelings of frustration and cynical reactions. Perhaps in the long run a few of them might become lifetime donors, non-profit workers or even social entrepreneurs, but many of them will just go back to their mainstream lifestyle after feeling that their time as a volunteer was simply a nice story that does not have anything to do with their real lives.

Social media as an experimental tool

Volunteer immersions are always experimental because unexpected things inevitably happen. The organizational context is unknown, the culture is different, the language is usually different too, expectations change from place to place, the skills of the volunteer differ and rarely match well his tasks. There may be also constraints of time and resources, etcetera. Thus, what a volunteer experience overseas does to a person, I don’t think, can be predicted in advance. It’s just like when the anthropologist goes to live among an Amazonian tribe: she knows she’ll learn a lot of things, but she doesn’t know exactly what.

That is why the blog is called ‘ethno-sense’, because the immersion of a volunteer requires the same openness to culture and ethnographic sensibility of an anthropologist. And that is why the blog had to be created without any predefined objective in mind – beyond that of being an experimental tool of social media, of course. If cross-cultural volunteering is full of contingencies and therefore affects each person in different ways, it means that you need to create a space flexible enough where personal expression and self-reflection can thrive.

However, as I suggested at the beginning, Ethnosense is a model that many actors from the social sector might find exciting. Volunteer-oriented organizations may use it to receive feedback about their programs. Educational institutions may find that it helps to support their programs of experiential learning. Design thinkers may identify interesting challenges and spot creative solutions that are emerging on the ground. Some NGOs might get to know better how to attract volunteers by understanding how they think. Others may be interested in how such a space can create synergies by facilitating exchange between like-minded people. Also, people interested in volunteering abroad may have a taste of what it is like to actually have gone through it. At the end, many other benefits may come out of this social-media tool, but it’s important to emphasize that its fundamental commitment is to the spirit of experimentation. After all, a lifestyle of sustained engagement like the one that micro-volunteering dreams of requires an open space for it to be nurtured and flourish.

P.S. Carlos will keep us up to date about the results of the project. Also, please feel free to contribute to Ethnsense yourself and tell us about your volunteering experiences.

Ushahidi is a free and open-source platform enabling individuals and organisations to report on a live map during crisis situations. You simply need to go online or send an SMS to report incidents and events. A group of volunteers, crisis mappers, then speedily validates the information and determines the GPS coordinates of the reported incident. This way, the crisis map becomes an integrated source of insight both on events and the resulting needs of those affected during the crisis.

Hereby, the platform offers great opportunities for improving the way humanitarian action is organized: Efforts can be better coordinated among the most diverse actors, and help will become more timely and effective. Ultimately, crisis mapping can help to save numerous lives during a crisis.

After his excellent keynote speech at re:campaign in Berlin a few weeks ago, Patrick joined us for a coffee to share experiences and discuss the challenges we have encountered during our pilot projects on stakeholder feedback. We would like to share the most important topics with you.

A key issue for us has been to raise the interest of people in developing countries to give feedback on projects at all. Incentives for people might not be an issue during a crisis, as the example of Ushahidi shows; they have received thousands of SMS reports. In contrast, giving feedback on some development project might be quite an unusual idea for community members in developing countries.

Regarding this issue, Patrick raised the important point that incentives need not necessarily be understood as money, there are plenty of cases where participants were compensated in creative ways. Providing daily mobile services such as market information, weather forecasts or even sending jokes are great ways to say ‘thank you’. A promising alternative, according to Patrick, is entrusting respected members of local communities to discuss projects and their impacts with other community members and document the results by sending SMS to the non-profit wherever it is based.

In this respect, as Patrick emphasized, the process should not become one-sided. Upon sending text messages, people expect you to answer and act on their feedback. In a crisis situation, people will base their decisions on expectations like: Is the help I asked for coming? Only if they can be sure their feedback is heard and responded to, they will build up the necessary trust. Thus, responding and living up to feedback is key, and this should be no different in the development sector.

Another fascinating aspect of the discussion was how to inform beneficiaries about the opportunity to give feedback; how to let them know what number they need to dial. Ushahidi used media, television and radio broadcasts to inform the people about the crisis mapping effort after the Haiti earthquake. This might also work for a beneficiary feedback project in the development area but there are other options: According to Patrick, areas frequently visited by villagers and community members in developing countries would be suitable places for a billboard containing the necessary information.

We also agreed that it is very important to use short numbers that are already known to the locals. In a crisis situation, not having to search for a telephone number can make the difference between life and death. Often, Ushahidi used numbers that people were familiar with, such as the weather forecast. One only needed to put a short code in front of the text message to make sure that the report went to the crisis mappers instead the weathermen. This is also why TickerTXT and betterplace lab developed the concept of FairGAIM, ("fair sharing and networking of SMS GAteways for Inbound Messages"). Though it is not yet implemented, the idea is to promote humanitarian and crisis management initiatives by reducing the transaction costs related to installing SMS gateways and to guarantee more efficiency by enabling humanitarian and development actors to share gateways.

Before Jack left, we asked him to tell 3 good and 3 bad things about his internship at the betterplace lab. Regarding the bad things I think Jack could have been more rigorous.


Good things

1. Great atmosphere and welcoming staff: when I arrived, everyone made sure I was involved from the start, and two people personally introduced themselves and said that I could go to them if I had any questions.
2. Responsibility and trust: Being given responsibility to complete important projects, and to conduct my own work was very empowering, and made me want to work harder. The pay, too, made me feel valued. Because of this, I wanted to add value to the betterplace lab.
3. Diversity of work: I enjoyed having a number of things to complete at any one time. I feel the experience I gained has been quite various: from making films to writing blog-posts.

Bad things

1. My German: This is a personal problem - being able to half-speak German but not having the confidence to do so. If I try to speak it, I get nervous; if I revert to English, I feel guilty. This can be a little isolating in a German office!
2. In the early days I was sometimes unsure what to do.
3. Too many stairs (the betterplace lab is located in on the 5th floor and the elevator costs 20 Cent per use).

With such an optimistic response, the fact that so few tasks were completed within the three-month pilot period is less discouraging than it might first seem. Research conducted at the betterplace lab into crowdsourcing and micro-volunteering has shown that sites like the Intern Cloud require two things to function: time and stimulation.

With the Intern Cloud pilot maintained as an experimental project, and with few participants, there was perhaps too little incentive to interact and take part. The MMS interns identified this in an early meeting, and suggested that in the future, a rating system for interns’ work would encourage more participation, while developing the site as a social and career network might draw in users more frequently. In this way, the Intern Cloud would become more rooted in users’ off-line activities, and they would be more likely to collaborate and share ideas.

More interns and more publicity needed

The interns of Serviceplan, according to Eva, were really too busy to complete any tasks. However, she believes that a larger number of interns, participating with support from their supervisors, would increase the chances that projects would be completed. She suggests more publicity for the project in order to draw in new agencies and increase the number of interns available for each task.

Increasing the number of participating interns, then, seems to be the next step for the Intern Cloud. Adding new features and functions, as the MMS interns suggested, would also create a more diverse and engaging site. More dynamic interaction and participation would allow the moderator and project leader a deeper insight into the potential uses of the Intern Cloud, and enable them to develop it accordingly.

For a broad evaluation of the pilot programme, please see the slide show below. I would be very keen to hear how others feel the Intern Cloud could be developed: if you have any suggestions or ideas, please email me at jackorlik[at]gmail.com.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the Intern Cloud pilot: Joana Breidenbach and Dennis Buchman of the betterplace lab, Torsten Sewing of Breaking the Ice, Stephan Breidenbach of the Humboldt Viadrina School of Governance, Stephan Balzer of Red Onion, Nina Reicke, Timo Rang, Hinnerck and Pablo of MMS, and Eva Klausenberg and the interns of Serviceplan.