My social calm project is an extension of my Text2Calm "I like __" daily affirmations.

Each day, I come up with a simple topic question like "What is your favorite thing about Friday?" or "What's on your mind right now?" I record a video of myself, either from my computer or my iPhone and post it to youTube. Then, I send out the topic question and the link to my response in an e-mail to my group of participants and ask them to record a video of themselves and send it to me. Then at the end of the day, I compile all the responses into a longer video. I upload it to youTube (privately) and share it the next day, along with the new topic.

I have 10 active users, who are all in friend groups. Getting people to record videos of themselves is really hard because they either don't know how to do it, or are self conscious or "too busy." Taking a quick 5 second video actually isn't very hard to do, especially if you are already sitting at your computer or have an iPhone. I think what might have helped is provide a step by step guide for people who aren't so tech savvy just to show them how easy it is. The active participants haven't had any issues with recording and sending me responses so I imagine they are familiar with the process.

I liked the idea of using video because it was a more concrete way of forcing people to actually talk/say things out loud. And I think it's more fun for another participant to see another participant's original response, rather than me sending out the  responses in a text form to read.

I'm currently on Day 5, but haven't sent out today's prompt yet. The responses have been getting longer and longer as people start to feel more comfortable talking in front of the camera.

What has been the most interesting thing I've observed so far happened yesterday. The topic was "What's on your mind right now?" I invited participants to be honest by mentioning that it could be simple or complex, fun or boring, positive or negative." A lot of participants talked about what was stressing or worrying them. A few noticed that they spend a lot of time having worrisome thoughts and in realizing that, they decided to think about something good. This really excited me because this is exactly what I want people to realize! The whole point of my project is to get people to be more cognizant of the amount of negative/stressful thoughts they have and remember to take a moment to appreciate the good things in life by talking about something they like and seeing other people share their happy thoughts as well.

I think the participants really enjoy watching the daily digest of everyone's responses, but they aren't quite interacting with each other (in a way that I can measure at least) very much (although one could argue that watching the other responses "feels" like they are talking to each other, which essentially is the case, they know they are sharing these responses with each other, not the whole online world). There is a youTube commenting feature that hasn't really been taken advantage of. Also, another really neat thing about YouTube is you can post response videos instead of commenting. I'm curious to how it works and want to try that approach instead of having to compile everyone's videos. It seems like it might be easier since participants wouldn't have to record, save and send me files, but just record directly on youTube.

The e-mail triggers have been working alright, but it's definitely a cold trigger, so people respond whenever they see my e-mail which can be at any point in the day, and also respond on their own schedule. I've sent them out in the early afternoon, early morning to ensure everyone sees the e-mail. Today I'm going to try to sending it out towards the end of the day, perhaps after dinner. I receive most responses towards the end of the day, I guess when people are done with classes or work for the day and sitting at home on the computer.

I'm also toying with the idea of just posting a video of myself on youtube with the daily topic publicly and then tweeting and facebook sharing it and see if I get any random people to video respond.

That's all for now.

-Huyen