Tim's Blog

One of the posts in the recent Knowledge Jam on technologies for collaboration for social change suggested the CollectiveX platform as a space for creating online communities or practise.

I've just been exploring it for a client, and:

a) It looks like a really easy to set up platform with good support for RSS feed agregation, online discussions, file sharing, networking and member profiles. (If you're looking to be up-and-running inside a couple of hours with a community website for a small team - and you're not anticipating needing to add any particular advanced features in the future - then it seems well worth a look.)

and

b) It has one of the most fantastic features I've ever come across in an online community system. It writes my biography for me.

A short post.

As the title says. Lowering the cost of participation in a political movement... without critical design to build engagement... lowers the cost of leaving the movement.

Shakuntala Banaji's brilliant presentation (the only presentation I saw during the event which contextualised itself in terms of the three elements of the event: Youth, Politics & New Technology) raised the question of whether civic society research, and included in this e-democracy researchers, are looking to support a citizenship which believes all (citizen) action oriented to political change is the excercise of Citizenship, or whether we are looking to a vision of citizenship with an implicit of explicit notion of citizenship as 'political action oriented towards an (imagined) public good'?

One reply made the suggestion "The role of the researcher is not to endorse one view or the other, but is to understand.". Nonsense.

(1) E-democracy research involves looking at projects that take place. It often involves helping set up and pilot those projects.

If asked to pilot a program supporing to support a group of right-wing campaigners in political co-ordination that could realisitically lead to success - would you?

And

Stephen Coleman's questions during Q&A sessions at the Young People, New Technology and Political Engagement conference have probably sparked more posts here than any other inputs.

This time, after a presentation on a web forum in Slovenia that achieved 100 contributions, "Why should a Member of Parliament care if 100 self-selecting people, quite possibly many of them friends of the person running the consultation - have posted on a message board?".

The simple answer seems to me to be: exactly the same reason they should care that 100 self-selecting people, quite possibly many of them friends of the person convening the meeting, turned up to the local town hall meeting and had their say.

But - this raises a more interesting question. Should (excepting the empirical aside that there are not many public meetings where 100 people get to speak - even if 100 may attend) the 100 online voices count for as much as the 100 in-person voices? After all - those who have turned out in person, we may argue, have put in more effort to participate - and so must have a stronger preference for the issue.

Just been in a fantastic keynote by Brian Loader on 'Cultural displacement or Disaffection? Reassessing Young Citizens, New Media and Civic Engagement' (which I believe is the topic of his chapter in his recent edited collection). I think for a sense of the presentation - it's probably best to point to the book - as I'd be hard pushed to capture everything in notes.

A presentation by Ben Whitnail of Delib on games and narrative in e-democracy:

• Just because young people are on the internet and you are on the internet - doesn't mean you're going to meet.
• The big question: why would anyone want your content?
• Online is about choice, driven by search, people find what their looking for - not what you want to present to them.
• Casual games act as a motivation for people to come and visit your content.
• Games are growing as a marketting tool. Branded games. Viral games.
• Games are great communication tools
  • Incentive and reward
  • Structure and narrative
  • Interaction and exploration (for education / informing)
  • Inputs and information capture (for consultation)
  • Personalised, shareable experience (for peer-to-peer collaboration)

• "You could learn a lot about someone from watching the way they play the Sims"

Types of games:

I'm at a conference on Young People, New Technologies and Political Engagement.

The title of the conference is the right way round - but most of the parallel papers I've listened to have been presented back to front. They seem to have started from Politics and Technology - with only a passing reference too or understanding of young people.

Unless we start exploring e-democracy for youth engagement from an understanding of the 'objective' processes of youth development, from young peoples subjective experiences and from the perspective of the political issues facing young people - we're going to keep on missing the point.

We need to define the population we're talking about. We need to understand if anything makes this group different. What are the features of this population, either as a generation cohort, or as a stage of life - that makes their engagement with democracy or with democracy through technology different from that of any other population?

Three presentations at the Young People, New Technologies and Political Enagement conference looking at different ways of engaging citizens and young people online:

Google turns up over a billion online forums - and there has been a lot of rhetoric in the past about using online forums to support e-democracy deliberation - but Kerill Duanne's research seems to show online forums are not working to help political deliberation online. They're inactive or inneffective. So do we need better designed spaces?

Professor Stephen Coleman has written widely on e-democracy, and has looked a lot of young people and e-democracy.

In his opening keynote, Stephen proposed dealing with the anxiety both manfest and latent in our fears about politics being in decline and crisis, and just not working right - by opening up spaces online for young people to engage not just in talking to young people and being heard - but in gaining power and influence.

In a presentation about a local Finnish youth website: Vaikuttamo.net

In research conversations with journalists in the local area where the website is based - it was found that all the journalists interviewed used the site as a source for stories. In the case of young people calling for a skating hall in the town - it sounds like journalists were taking young peoples discussions and views from the online forum and putting them to decision makers to get answers on their behalf - and to keep the campaign going in a way that led to a skating hall being built... (!)

That raises some interesting questions:

How many local journalists are picking up positive stories from your local youth website? Is there anything for them to pick up? How can a local youth discussion forum provide positive space for young peoples' voice to cross over into the mainstream media? Or are we going to need some Finnish journalists before we can see the same happening here?

I'm at a conference on Young People, New Technologies and Poltical Engagement for the next few days and I'm going to hopefully be experimenting with blogging as a way of distilling insights gathered and making sense of the wealth of ideas, learning and input I'm expecting. (battery power and WiFi permitting).

I'll probably be posting without links at first, and I'll come back to posts later in the week to tag and link - as the blogging client I'm using seems not to like tagging posts properly...

Also experimenting with twittering short nuggets that I'm not going to be able to turn into blog posts...

I've just spent a very interesting two days taking part in a online Global Knowledge Jam around 'Collaborative Technology Requirements for Social Change'.

What's a jam?

The online knowledge jam formula (the name parallels a musicians 'jam session') is something along the lines of:

Bring together a group of interested / relevant participants and set aside a time-window when participants will regularly drop into an online 'jamming space' to contribute to discussion space on a specified topic.

One of the joys I find in blogging is that just when I'm strugging to find a way to express an idea, I stumble across an idea with similar roots elsewhere that can, hopefully, help make sense of what I was thinking about.

Just such a thing occured with this post from Annecdote about 'Story Spines'. As Shawn explains:

I asked the groups to grab an issue and tell a story explaining what happened. People busily jumped into the activity but I noticed they were just writing dot points detailing their opinions about what had happened. No one wrote a story.

It seems that they didn't know what to do to write a story. I had just assumed that everyone else thinks about stories like I do and has a sense what one looks like. Big mistake!

My next opportunity was at another knowledge strategy workshop but this time with a government department in Canberra. I had remembered Andrew introducing us to story spines so I dug out the blog post. Here is the simple story spine (Viv's example is more elaborate).

Since the Civicus World Assembly I've been wondering about how technology could be better used next year to create more connections and capture more of the discussions that were taking place.

I experimented earlier this year with content-tagging and aggregation - but its reach was very limited. One of the challenges with trying to create an online collaborative dimension to a big event is encouraging those not accustomed to online interactions to view and engage with it. I think, however, Michele Martin has it cracked in her suggestion here that we should be making use of online portal systems as our platform for creating better, more online-integrated, conferences:

Just tidying up the final videos and content from The Youth Summit and came across this.

The hoodie is a much maligned garment. Luckily it has staunch defenders, like NYA Chief Exec Tom Wylie... and a certain group of Monks...

Interactive maps can be really effective ways of visualising information with a geographic compotent. For example, if you want to find participation workers near you making use of Hear by Right, the Local Network Map lets you see who is around far easier than any listing would.

Up until now, finding out the co-ordinates of a UK address to be able to plot address-linked information onto a map either meant paying a lot to commercial providers for access to a postcode or address database that could tell you - or putting (as the HbR Local Network Map does) with being accurate to within one or two miles by using free postcode databases and geocoders.

No more.

If you were still left wondering what 'Open Space' is all about after my recent post on the topic then this video might give prove to be a good introduction.

Thanks to Annecdote for the link. And, as an Australian consultancy, using their linking to again show the worldwide importance of the wonderful town of Stroud where the video was shot.

I recently co-designed and fascilitated a series of dialogue events for The National Youth Agency (NYA) between young people, officials from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and Parmjit Dhanda MP (then Minister for Children and Families). We focussed the dialogues, which were part of a broader UK tour by Parmjit Dhanda, on the Local Offer.

The Local Offer is a guarantee introduced through Section 6 of the Education and Inspections Act that gives young people the right to:

Technology and discussions of technologies were notably absent from the Civicus World Assembly. Even the head of Africa's first mobile phone company speaking in a BBC World Service debate missed speaking about how bringing a mobile phone infrastructure to Africa creates a potentially massive platform for driving, evaluating and improving development.

However, in the packed programme there was one session that took at look at technology. Co-ordinated by Igloo the session was primarily exploring tools for fascilitating communication between dispersed teams of researchers or practioners. A lot of what was said about building network and communities of practioners was really useful - but, it was this slide:

I've made it. I've whittled the cloud of 600 blog posts and links that have been hanging over me for a fortnight down to just 17 that I need to follow up when I finally make it back home. Things started getting bad when the deadlines for launching the new Participation Works gateway co-incided with preparation for The Youth Summit, the tail end of Actions Speak Louder and running the final 3D dialogue - bizzarly being held on the set of Hollyoaks.

Knowledge garnered through all the interesting things that I find myself reading and links I find myself following that don't have any direct relevance to what I'm working on right now, but might just come in handy one day...

An essential component of synergies and interdisciplinery inspiration...

Over the last two years I've worked with YouthBank UK and the YouthBank network of Community Foundation Northern Ireland to develop a Management Information System to support youth led micro-finance. The software I developed ended up very customised around YouthBank, but with the rise of the Youth Opportunity Fund, and other growth in youth led grantmaking there appears to have been a real need for a more general information system supporting such projects.

Thanks to signal failures a rather long train journey home I've managed to catch up on completing a few blog posts that have been waiting... so a short burst of posts that should really have appeared a couple of weeks back follows...
Normal levels of activity (or inactivity) here will be resumed shortly..

At the Youth Summit last this week Steve Moore from Channel 4/Policy Unplugged injected a hour-long 'Open Space' session into the more formal structure of the event. Open space ideas also heavily influenced the session design I developed for a series of recent dialogue events between young people, DfES officials and the Minister for Children and Families (at that point, Parmjit Dhanda) looking at the Local Offer. This has got me thinking about what 'Open Space Technology' has got to offer to participation practitioners, and what factors we need to be thinking of when exploring its use.

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