Tim's Blog

I'm currently at the Civicus World Assembly, which, for the first time this year, has included the Civicus Youth Assembly.

The Youth Assembly has brought together 130 young people from 65 countries, spending two days before the main assembly exploring global issues, and inputting into the main assembly. The Youth Assembly is a positive step for Civicus on the journey to meaningfully engaging young people in its work, challenging age-based discrimination and drawing on the innovative spirit of youth* - but it also illustrates how essential it is that the rational for engaging young people is clear in each context when it is explored.

There are at least two ways in which young people might engage in the Civicus World Assembly.

Firstly, as young practioners, involved in the same daily struggles and facing the same set of problems as 'adult' world assembly delegates. That is, involved in the building of civil society organisations, in the provision of service, in the development of new sollutions.

The topic of this years Civicus World Assembly is 'Accountability' and I've just been in a plenary session looking at Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and accountability.

During the session I was more and more aware that many of the ideas being explored were those I would understand as issues of participation - rather than accountability... and so I got scribbling trying to put together a model that helps me make sense of how Accountability and Participation relate to each other.

It's very much in draft (word version attached) - but the key intuitions are that:

I'm blogging from the opening plenary at the Civicus World Assembly. (Will try and post some notes and quick reflections as battery allows...)

Speaker Venus Ilagen from Disabled People's International has just put forward a challenge to ask whether the needs of, and accounability to, disabled children features highly enough in talk of Children's Rights, Women's Rights and in other rights dialogues.

Reflecting upon the recent UK draft report on the UN Convetion on the Rights of the Child - it strikes me that Venus has a strong point. An exploration of the rights, and excercise of rights, by young people with disabilities was not a strong thread in the draft. Do we give strong enough attention to the rights of children with disabilities?

I'm currently up in Glasgow at the Civicus Youth Assembly, just about to start at the Civicus World Assembly and I've not yet seen much use of digital technologies to share ideas and media, and to build conversations between participants. We've finally just got use of wireless internet here today (after two days of the Youth Assembly disconnected) - and there is a larger 'Net Cafe' space opening up tomorrow when the 900-strong full World Assembly really gets going - and I'm hoping there might be some suggested use of social media.

However, in case there isn't, I've decided to experment with how social media use can be catalysed. Can social bookmarking, photo sharing and back-channels work effectively at non-techie conferences? What is needed to make them work? Is there value in making it work?

I'm starting off by seeking to encourage use of two tags for agregating links and content:

Youth Assembly: civicusya2007

World Assembly: civicuswa2007

Just a quick post to point to this diagram from Jane Berry over at the Open Innovation Exchange which I think has some relevance to the conversations we've been having recently about The Enfusion Network, and trying to gain an understanding of the profile of potential members and how they might interact with the site...

Over the past few weeks at http://www.innovationexchange.net/ a team led co-ordinated(?)/fascilitated(?) by Simon Berry from ruralnet|UK and including a really diverse and interesting selection of innovators, thinkers and actors have been putting together an £1.2m Open Source bid to the Office of the Third Sector to run an 'Innovation Exchange' (i.e. the bid has been developed in a way that allows anyone to contribute and potentially feed into it's contents...)
I've made a few comments on the website, and reviewed and commented on version 4.2 of the bid document. And it's a real demonstration of the openess of Simon and the core team for the bid that my comments, and those of others, have been very clearly worked into the bid and the workplan it would lead to.

I'm currently involved in establishing a network of consultants and practitioners working on embedding youth participation (called The Enfusion Network).

For the network to function at its best, we need to encourage practioners and consultants to engage with an open working style that allows the benefits of a network to emerge.

But as Seth Godin's post on bananas suggests... (and as our experience working to encourage organisations to embed young peoples engagement backs up...) 'selling' and encouraging change is tough.

But if we're serious about the need for Enfusion (which we are). And if we're serious about avoiding 'organisation building' and making sure that we have a responsive network that really serves to aid improved practice and impact in youth engagement (which we are), then we need to stick at it.

We've just had a working weekend to explore the next steps for the network, and from that I think our core challenges are:

As I'm intending to use this space to try and blog some useful reflective content arising from the different things I'm currently working on - and as those things are mostly what are preventing me timewise from blogging about them - I thought a quick post just introducing them might be in order (and would help me post on them without extra introduction in future...):

In Action

I've been holding off on starting a personal blog - preferring to contribute to particular discussions that are already out there online... but more and more I find ideas, resources and bits and bobs worth sharing that fall through the gaps of the other spaces I participate in.

There may not neccessarily be any prior coherent guiding theme for what ends up here, other than these posts being linked to thinks I'm personally thinking about or working on. Hopefully that will be enough of a rational for this space to be useful as an log of goings on, and an archive of generally useful things.

I've also been holding of getting a personal blog because I've not had time to get the design right, or get it all tidied up and looking how I want it... and - I've still not had the time yet... but here it is.

Links to other relevant places...

Coming soon...

Hello. I’m Tim. Welcome to Tim’s Blog.

You can read more about the blog itself here. In case you wanted to know a little bit about the person behind it, then here goes:

In brief:
My full name is Tim Davies. I’m 23, based in the UK (currently living in Leicester), married to Rachel and working as a freelance consultant on youth participation. I’m a graduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and I spend my spare time cooking and enjoying cheese and wine.

In a bit more detail:
My work focusing on promoting the empowerment of young people as decision makers and actors for social change. I work primarily through Practical Participation on projects that either focus on involving young people in complex decision making (e.g. influencing the substance of government policy) or that bring together technology and youth participation.