Digital innovations are not always digital (and other reflections on youth-focussed digital innovation lab design)
Filed under: Digital Government, digital inclusion, Innovation, Youth Participation, Youth Work 2.0
[Summary: assorted learning from participation and hack-days applied to ideas about a youth-focussed digital innovation lab.]
Right Here, Comic Relief and Nominet Trust have a really interesting tender out right now for someone to deliver two ‘Innovation Labs’ focussed on helping “young people to look after their mental health and to access appropriate help and support”.
They describe how the labs should provide young people with “the opportunity to work with mental health, youth work and design professionals to design digital tools that will meet their needs.” If it weren’t for the unknowns of the schedule for my PhD that starts in October, it’s exactly the sort of project Practical Participation would be putting in a proposal for*, but, with the freedom to adopt a more open innovation exchange style bit of sharing around a proposal, and having been unable to resist jotting a few notes about how I might approach the tender, here’s a few quick reflections on youth-focussed digital innovation labs, drawing on learning from previous participation projects.
Digital innovations are not always digital
In my experience working with youth services and mental health services exploring use of digital tools, the biggest gaps between the potential of digital tools and their use in practice is not down to a lack of Apps or widgets – but comes down to a lack of training, inadequate policies, or other small barriers.
The most effective outcomes of a digital innovation lab could be how to guides for practitioners, youth-led training for mental health workers in how to engage online, or new protocols that make sure mental health staff have a framework and incentives to make use of digital tools – as much as they might be new apps and websites.
Set up to succeed
I’ve experienced and observed a number of participation projects in the past that have, mostly unintentionally, set young people up to fail by asking them to redesign services or systems without reference to the staff who operate those systems day-to-day, or the realities of the budgetary and legal constraints the services operate under. Instead of empowering young people to bring their lived experience to real problems, whilst avoiding organisational agendas crushing the ideas and insights young people can bring, participation projects can end up asking young people to solve problems without giving them all the information they need to find viable solutions.
In innovation events with both young people and adults ideas often come up which, whilst great in principle, draw on mistaken assumptions about resources that might realistically be available, or about how digital tools might be adopted and used (it’s not uncommon to hear ‘innovators’ of any age suggesting they’ll build ‘the next Facebook’ to bring together people to discuss some particular issue). Finding the balance between free-flowing innovation, and realisable ideas is a challenge – and increased if, for the majority of participants, the event is their first innovation lab, or project teams don’t have people with experience of taking an project through from idea to implementation. Finding facilitators who can combine the right balance of technical realism, with a focus on youth-led innovation, is important, as is offering training for facilitators.
Projects like Young Rewired State offer an interesting model, where young people who have participated in past events, return as young mentors in future years. Finding a community of young mentors may also prove useful for an innovation lab.
Involving adults
It’s not only mentors and digital experts who have a role to play in the design process, but also mental health professionals and volunteer adults who work day-to-day with young people. In policy consultations in the past we’ve used a ‘fish bowl’ like approach to adults involvement, starting the day with adults as observers only on the outside of circles where young people are developing plans and ideas; moving to a stage (perhaps after an hour) when young people can invite adults into the discussion, but adults can’t ‘push in’; and then (another hour or so later) moving to a stage when adults and young people participate together. Whilst artificial, in a policy consultation, this sort of process helped address issues around the balance of power between young people and adults, without removing the benefits to be found from youth-adult dialogue. In an innovation and design situation, this exact model might not be appropriate – but thinking about lightweight processes or ‘rules’ to help the relationship between young people and adults may be useful.
An alternative approach we’ve taken at past participation events is to have a parallel track of activities for workers coming to the event with young people: could you set a team of adult innovators competing with young innovators to contrast the ideas they come up with?
There are no representative young people
I’m not a representative 26 year old. There aren’t representative 17 year olds. Or 15 year olds. Or any age for that matter. People often design innovations for themselves: that doesn’t mean they’re designing for all young people. Not all young people are technology experts. In fact, most aren’t. There is no such thing as a digital native. Bringing the lived experiences of young people with experience of mental health services and challenges to the design of services is still a very very good thing. It can mean massive improvements in services. But often there’s a risk of implicitly or explicitly thinking of service-user or youth participants as ‘representatives’ – and that tends to be an unhelpful framing. Understanding participants as individuals with particular skills and insights to bring tends to work better.
Freedom and frameworks
I’ve spent most of this afternoon at the Guardian offices in London as a mentor for young hackers at Young Rewired State. Young Rewired State is a week-long event taking place across the country for young people interested in building things with open data and digital platforms. Young Rewired State centres have varied in how much structure they have had: some simply providing a room, and some mentors on hand, for young people to identify what they want to work on and get hacking. Others have supported the participants to work through a design process, offering more structured how-to guidance and support. Some young people thrive and innovate best with a framework and structure to work within. Others need the freedom from pre-planned programmes and tight agendas in order to innovate. Having no agenda at all can exclude those who need structure. But an agenda that is too tight, or a programme that is too prescriptive can miss innovation opportunities. Fortunately, the Innovation Labs tender that sparked this post highlights that the events themselves should be co-designed with young people – so there’s space to negotiate and work this one out.
Keep out of the dragons den
I’ve sat on a few ‘dragons den’ style panels recently – responding to presentations about young people’s project ideas. And I’ve yet to be convinced that they really make a useful contribution.
This post has been in the spirit of reclaiming reflective space, and has no neat ending.
*Although I’m not putting in a proposal around the labs, I’d still be really interested to get involved should a youth-engagement and effective technology focussed facilitator/action researcher/data-wrangler be useful to whoever does end up running the labs.
A simple story, but a complex strategy
[Summary: A short post of reflections by way of contribution to the Youth Policy Symposium on Participation]
I’ve just been tuning into Howard Williamson’s introductory speech at a Youth Policy Symposium on participation taking place in London today and tomorrow, convened by the Open Society Foundations and the British Council, with help from friends at CYEC. Nicolo from YParticipate summed up Howard’s talk in the following tweet:
“We need a simple story to tell about youth participation, and a complex strategy to implement it”
Which seemed as good a provocation as any to offer some thoughts and connections on that simple story, and complex strategy.
Children’s Human Rights
In the RightSpace project we explored the importance of shifting from a narrative based around ‘exceptionalism’ of children and young people, to a focus on the fundamental rights and personhood of children and young people, and the rights to be involved in decision making that flow from that.
A recognition of the personhood of young people, and a recognition that there are systematic patterns of discrimination against children and young people in society (which Adam Fletcher of Freechild labels ‘adultism‘ highlighting their similarity to other ‘isms’ of racism, sexism, castism, and ageism), cannot be met only by changes to systems and institutions, or by the introduction of policies – but requires – as other isms do – a change of individual and societal attitudes towards those discriminated against.
There are at least two aspects to participation rights:
- A right to be heard, and to influence what happens to me as an individual – far too often talk of participation jumps straight in with a focus on large-scale collective decision making, ignoring the many domestic and seemingly mundane contexts in which the views of children and young people are not taken into account. From the moment we can communicate we can express preferences about a situation: from decisions about what to eat, to where to live, to what should happen in a family. These preferences may not be perfectly formed (whose are?), and in general in any social decision making there are many people’s preferences to weigh up. In good decision making, negotiation over preferences leads not only to a decision, but to a transformation of the preferences involved as well. The fundamental simple story of participation is that whenever there is a decision affecting children and young people, they should be part of the negotiation around it.
- A right to participate in collective decision making - which might simply be direct negotiation with more actors, or, more often, involves ‘representatives’ discussing issues on behalf of a wider constituency. In global (or even national and local) decision making the groups involved tend to be far from demographically representative of wider populations, and the procedures by which people are selected to participate in these systems have inherent bias against young people being equally likely to be selected to participate. Sometimes this is because of particular structural properties of youth (having had less years to gain certain key experience), and at other times it is down to discriminatory attitudes (implicit or not) of adultism. However, we also have to recognise that many other groups are systematically excluded from these decision making fora (and even when young people are included, it is often only a particular sub-set of young people to do get included – the bias towards young mens participation over young women’s in some contexts being one example). To promote children and young people’s participation in collective decision making on the basis of rights and democracy, without promoting deeper forms of democracy which seek far wider inclusion than those we conventionally operate with is inconsistent.
This suggests that whilst one simple story might be tricky, there are two simple, but radical, narratives we can draw upon in advocacy for youth participation:
- Children and young people, are people;
- We need deep democracy open to all to participate as equal parties in negotiation;
But what about a pragmatic story?
The story above, about what youth participation is and should be, is liable to charges of idealism. However, unless advocacy for children and young people’s participation is based upon deep principles, we will continue to have many stories: many different pragmatic reasons for youth involvement, and many different ‘strategies’ for promoting participation that flow from them. As I wrote in 2008, having different pragmatic reasons for young involvement is ok, providing you match your engagement approach to the goal. But a foundation in common principles is useful to identify when an youth participation project is an attempt to move towards a realisation of principles of young people’s rights, and principles of deeper democracy, or when projects are uncritically replicating existing power structures and co-opting young people into undemocratic decision making.
Strategy
If finding a simple story is challenging, finding strategies for promoting and evaluating participation is also.
However, rather than further dissertation on strategy, I’ll simple point to two tools I’ve found immensely helpful in strategic approaches to participation:
- Hear by Right, co-written by Practical Participation co-director Bill Badham, Hear by Right uses an organisational change framework which puts shared-values right at the centre, and provides a simple model for addressing a wide-range of organisational issues that support participation – from addressing participation in job descriptions, to involving young people in governance.
I ran the shared learning website for Hear by Right for a number of years (now sadly discontinued by The National Youth Agency) as a space for people to share their journeys in promoting participation within their organisations.
Perhaps the one strategic weakness of a Hear by Right approach in the way it was most commonly implemented was that a focus on organisational change could allow organisations to see participation as something done by a particular part of the organisation, rather than working more explicitly to challenge the adultist attitudes of staff and stakeholders right across the organisation.
- The Matrix of Participation (a copy is in this post) which sets out a grid of participation methods, and uses the (contested) ladder of participation to highlight that participation is not a one-dimensional thing in organisations or communities. Just having formal structures for participation is not enough, they need to be linked to other forms of participative structure – allowing a range of ways for children and young people to be involved in decision making.
Change
The question of “What changes?” has already come up in the Youth Policy Symposium (as I watch on the webcast). A big elements of later versions of the Hear by Right tool was a focus on collecting stories of change as a means of ensuring participation was not just tokenistic, but led to visible and measurable change. However, if participation is based on the principles I’ve suggested above, of personhood and democracy, the fundamental question is not necessarily ”what has changed?”, but is “who was empowered in the negotiations?”.
Youth participation often seeks after fast change: after all – the time in which one can be ‘officially’ part of youth participation structures is a limited one – and we all want to see change as a result of our actions. But sometimes all democratic decision making has to face that decision making in diverse groups is complex, time-consuming and difficult.
As I write I realise the role of change in participation is something I need to give more thought to, but at least we can separate out two key questions:
- What has changed on the substantive issues children and young people were bringing to the table?
- What has changed in making the decision making environment more inclusive, and more deeply democratic?
Too often we mix up those two questions.
A changing world
This post has already become longer than I’d planned, and raised various issues I need to go and explore more. But I want to also mention the importance of recognising the global, digitally connected nature of the world we are living in when developing any strategies for promoting participation.
Although early days of utopian thinking about the democratising potential of the Internet are passed, it still has phenomenal potential (and existing impact) as a tool for creating new forms of participation, models of negotiation, and spaces where ageism and discrimination can be challenged.
I hope discussions at today’s Youth Policy Symposium will help develop further visions for participation in the 21st century and will explore not only formal structures, but also more fluid ways of children and young people participating in public debate and decision making.
Reflections: Blended facilitation at Commonwealth Young Professionals Forum
Filed under: Digital Government, E-Democracy, Innovation, Reflective Learning, Social Media, Youth Participation
[Summary: Reflective learning from an experience of blended facilitation at Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum]
I spent two fascinating days yesterday and Sunday with the Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum. It’s the first time that an event focussed on engaging under 35s (youth in Commonwealth contexts has a slightly broader definition than most contexts I’m used to working in…) has been organized alongside the main Commwealth Local Government Forum, which brings together 100s of delegates from local politics and government administrations. The main focus of the smaller (about 60 of us) Young Professionals Forum (#cypf11 on Twitter) was to draw out from discussions a series of recommendations to make to the main forum, sharing a young adult voice on issues of local economic development and on youth participation.
Below are some brief reflections on two parts of the process I was involved in working on…
1) Social media orientation & encouraging social reporting
On the Sunday afternoon at the start of the forum we ran a short session introducing the Ning network set up for the event, and offering people quick opportunities to think about different social media tools that could be used for social reporting the event. I ran through posting blog posts and photos to the online network; gave an overview of how twitter could be used at events; and talked about vox-pop style video interviews. Everyone was encouraged to use their own equipment for social reporting; although as not everyone had devices available in the session we had a few practice/interactive activities that didn’t need technology there.
The first, asking people to think about the headline of a blog post they might write during or after the forum, generated some really good ideas – and the suggested headlines that delegates shared revealed a lot about their interests and aims for the event (e.g. ‘Best practices in youth entrepreneurship’, or imagining the post they would like to write after the forum ‘Local Government Forum accepts youth recommendations’).
The second activity, inviting people to practice vox-pop style interviewing of a partner sitting with them, also got people talking and sharing ideas for the event (and felt very similar to a standard ice-breaker, albeit with the addition of getting people’s permission to record them, and trying to manage a camera whilst talking).
On reflection:
- A number of delegates commented on the usefulness of a social media introduction. Whilst almost all the young professionals taking part were familiar with blogging, and many had twitter accounts etc., many had not considered how to use these effectively in a conference context (for example, the use of tagging or hash-tags on Twitter was new to a number of people). Given digital communication and sharing messages online can be a key advocacy tool for the messages coming from the forum, a half-hour spent pointing to how digital tools could be used seemed to be useful investment of time.
- Even with a good introduction, social reporting still needs facilitating. I switched my attention to the real-time collaboration, and running an afternoon workshop on open data in the commonwealth, and hadn’t formed a dedicated social reporting team. As delegates also got more involved in recommendations drafting, social media activity started to drop off and potentially a lot of stories and case studies that would have been useful to digitally share may have been missed.
- My main take-away is to explore how the social media introduction could be integrated with ice-breakers and introductions. The blog post activity could be combined effectively with an expectation or aim-setting activity; and the vox-pop practice with an ice-breaker. Sometime to try next time…
2) Real-time collaboration for statement drafting
The process of drafting a text (statements or recommendations) from an international youth fora is an interesting one. Delegates vary in their experience of political processes, in the backgrounds they come from, and in the degree to which they are present representing a specific group or constituency – either by virtue of a formal mandate (e.g. elected youth representatives; leaders of organizations or networks), or informally adopting a representative role – or to which they solely represent and feed their own views into the process. Bringing together diverse views and voices into a text which can potentially influence policy making, and be used as an advocacy tool, is practically challenging.
There are all sorts of general process issues to be addressed in statement drafting (for example, the way in which processes generally start with a blank sheet of paper, rather than seeking to build on past statements), but one practical one we tried to address at CLGF was the process of typing up the statement itself. I’ve sat in a youth hostel late into the night before along with about 20 other people crowded round a laptop quibbling over phrases and wordings, all whilst one person: the person at the keyboard, acts as facilitator and gatekeeper of the document. At CLGF, instead of typing into documents on individual laptops, we took advantage of Cardiff City Hall’s free Wifi to get everyone typing into Google Documents – made public for anyone to edit – but with a rapporteur in each working group taking main responsibility for typing up their notes. As we moved from individual thematic working groups generating ideas, to the process of drafting a final statement, we moved into one single shared document to edit.
It might be a bit premature to assess how the process has worked, as I’m writing this as the second day of CYPF is starting (alas I’ve had to leave early) and there is still work to be done on the statement – but the process raised a number of interesting learning points.
Some reflections:
- From one laptop the facilitation team were able to get an overview of the points emerging from different groups by looking at all the different docs, and to point out overlaps – either adding notes into the Google documents – or going to talk to specific groups (spread out in different parts of the room / different rooms) to suggest making connections with another group on a particular point.
- We could use that access to the developing drafts to visualise emerging themes. For example, at lunchtime I put together Wordles of the drafts which a number of delegates noted were useful in getting a sense of the discussions and record being generated. http://network.cyec.org.uk/profiles/blogs/drafting-recommendations
- Whilst allowing multiple editors changes the power dynamic associated with one person at a keyboard – by allowing anyone with an Internet access device in a group to directly clarify and update notes – one delegate pointed out that it can lead to (a) some people being left out, as screens become personal again rather than shared; (b) people making edits direct without discussing them – missing on opportunities for dialogue across the table (this matches my experience of sitting in silence at IGF10 drafting a statement in etherpad with a number of other delegates – all the interaction taking place in chat and on the text directly).One practice way to address some of this may be to try and project each document up on a shared screen as well – and to think about having different ‘editing policies’ (possibly enforced with the document sharing settings) for different stages of the process (e.g. during initial idea creation anyone can add anything; during refining thematic papers edits should be discussed; during final changes to a statement, all changes should be approved by the group before being made to the text).
- The documents we were using were set so that anyone in theory could access, read and edit them – even if not at the forum. This was mainly for ease (no need to get people’s e-mail addresses to share the document with them), but also seems to me to be a good thing – potentially enabling more enhanced participation and allowing expertise and ideas to be brought in from across the world – regardless of people’s ability to travel to the conference. We didn’t exploit this possibility – and how it could fit into the general processes of statement drafting would need more thought – but it’s an exciting one.
- The cost (or lack of) Internet access in hotels is still a big barrier to this process. I was able to set up a MiFi to allow a couple of people back at the hotel to carry on working on the draft, but a lack of affordable WiFi suddenly limited the breadth of possible collaboration.
Seeing how quickly and easily delegates adopted real-time collaborative documents for drafting in a general conference (I was wondering if the YCIG experience was unique to a technology conference), I’m keen to spend more time looking at effective and empowering facilitation techniques in this space – and to see how the process could be developed more.
Diplomacy labs
We’ve only scratched the surface of how digital tools can transform youth fora, and other international gatherings. However, the ingredients of a transformed way of doing business are coming together: remote (or enhanced) participation; understanding the digital record as a fundamental vehicle for driving outcomes of an event and real-time collaboration tools. I certainly hope institutions like CLGF, CYPG and the upcoming Commonwealth Youth Forum in Australia in October take up the challenge of innovating and living out the common conference platform claim that “we need to change the way politics is done”.
Update: Photo Credit to Dan from A-Leap (fab participation, youth and learning people in Wales) for the picture in this post.
Expectations and Evidence: youth participation and open data
Filed under: Open Data, Reflective Learning, Youth Participation
[Summary: Exploring ways to use data as part of a youth participation process.]
Over the last year and a bit I’ve been doing less work on youth engagement and civic engagement processes than I would ideally like. I’m fascinated by processes of participation, and how to design activities and frameworks within which people can actively influence change on issues that affect them – getting beyond simply asking different groups the question ‘what do you want?’ and then struggling to reconcile conflicting answers (or, oftentimes, simple ignoring this input), to create spaces in which the different factors and views affecting a decision are materialised and in which those affected by decisions get to engage with the real decision making process. I’ve had varying levels of successes doing that – but the more time I’ve been spending with public data – the more I’ve been struggling to work out how to bring it into participative discussions in ways that are accessible and empowering to participants.
Generally data is about aggregates: about trends and patterns rather than the specific details of individual cases. Yet in participation, the goal is often to allow people to bring their own specific experience into discussions and to engage with issues and decisions based upon their unique perspectives. How can open datasets complement that process?
The approach I started to explore in a workshop this evening was linking ‘expectations and evidence’ – asking a group to draw upon their experience to write down a list of expectations, based on the questions that had been asked in a survey they had carried out amongst their peers – and then helping them to use IBM Many Eyes to visualise and explore the survey evidence that might support or challenge their expectations (I’ve written up the process of using the free Many Eyes tool over in the Open Data Cook Book). It was a short session, and not all of the group were familiar with the survey questions, so I would be pushed to call it a great success, but it did generate some useful learning about introducing data into participation processes.
1) Stats are scary (and/or boring; and/or confusing)
Even using a fairly interactive data visualisation tool like IBM Many Eyes statistics and data are, for many people, pretty alien things. The idea of multi-variate analysis (looking at more than one variable at once and the relationship between variables) is not something most people spend much time on in school or college – and trying to introduce three-variable analysis in a short youth participation workshop is tricky without leading to quite a bit of confusion.
One participant in this evenings working made the suggestion that “It would be useful to have a reminder of how to read all these charts. What does all this mean?”. Next time I run a similar session (as I’m keen to develop the idea further) I’ll look into finding/preparing a cheat-sheet for reading any data visualisations that get created…
2) ‘Expectations and Evidence’ can provide a good framework to start engaging with data
In this evenings workshop after looking at data we turned to talk about interview questions the group might ask delegates at an upcoming conference. A number of the question ideas threw up new ideas for ‘expectations’ the group had (for example, that youth services were being cut in different ways in different places across the country), which there might be ‘evidence’ available to support or challenge. Whilst we didn’t have time to then go and seek out the relevant data there was potential here to try and then go and search data catalogues and use a range of visualisation and exploration approaches to test those bigger expectations more (our first expectations work focussed on some fairly localised survey data).
3) The questions and processes matter
When I started to think about how data and participation might fit together I sketched out different sorts of questions that participation processes might work with. Different questions link to different processes of decision making…
- (a) What was your experience of…? (share your story…we’ll analyse)
- (b) What do you think of…? (give your opinion … we’ll decide what to do with it)
- (c) What should we do about…? (give us your proposals…)
- (d) Share this decision with us… (we need to work from shared understanding…)
To introduce data into (a) and (b) is tricky. If the ‘trend’ contradicts an individuals own view or experience, it can be very demanding to ask them to reconcile that contradiction. Of course, creating opportunities for people with experience of a situtation to reconcile tensions between stats and stories is better than leaving it up to distant decision makers to choose whether to trust what the data says, or what people are saying, when it seems they don’t concur – but finding empowering participative processes for this seems tough.
It seems that data can feature in participation more easily when we shift from opinion gathering to decision sharing; but building shared understanding around narratives and around data is not something that can happen quickly in short sessions.
I’m not sure this post gets me towards any great answers on how to link data into participative processes. But, in interests of thinking aloud (and in an effort to reclaim my blogging as reflective practice, getting away from the ways it’s been rather news and reporting driven of late) I’ll let it make it onto the blog, with all reflections/comments very much welcomed…
Young people, activism & the web: Speaking Out in a Connected World
[Summary: Sharing slides and notes from a children's sector conference presentation]
I was speaking earlier today at the Children England & NCVYS ‘Speaking Out’ conference on the topic of ‘young people, activism and the web’. The conference was predominantly attended by staff from third-sector organisations providing frontline services for children, young people and families, so I tried (not entirely successfully in a short slot…) to cover a mix of examples of youth-led use of the web in campaigning at the national level, and some practical steps that organisations, who may not be campaigning organisations, can take to make the most of the web to engage with young people and get their voices heard.
A slightly adapted version of the slides can be seen via slideshare below, and I’ve tried to write up some notes with links to relevant resources as well.
Notes and Links
I started planning the presentation by posing the question “How can young people use the web in activism?”, which pretty quickly, as I turned to watch a Twitter stream full of tweeting from the University College London students occupying their University, making extensive use of different digital media challenges to get their message out, and with members of UK Youth Climate Coalition celebrating their success keeping Chris Hune at the climate negotiations in Cancun by mobilising hundreds of people by e-mail, Facebook and Twitter to flood the Number 10 switchboard with calls, that the question was really “How can they not?”. The web is right at the heart of much modern youth action – and yet so many organisations still struggle to engage with online spaces.
As I put together the next slides, however, I was quickly reminded that the web alone doth not change create. Earlier this year I came across a Facebook group set up by young people campaigning against the use of Mosquito sonic weapons against young people in Barnsley, and I fired up Facebook to grab a screenshot of this today’s presentation – hoping I would see stacks of campaign updates. Yet the Facebook group, which when launched had quickly accelerated to over 700 members, was standing stagnant, the top updates as spam, and apparently no real action having been taken further engage and mobilise the young members of the group. So whilst young people may turn to social media tools when they’ve causes to campaign on, and they may have the know-how to set up Facebook groups and YouTube channels, the skills, support and connections needed to campaign effectively remain as vital as ever. As the Young Foundation put it, many young people are plugged in, but with their digital skills untapped.
Resources like Act by Right (and the great Act by Right on Climate Change remix by Alex Farrow), the Battlefront campaign toolkit, and a wealth of web pages about campaigning with the web, can provide some of those skills through the web itself – but there is also a need for youth organisations to work directly with young people to support the development of critical campaigning skills. Just before I spoke today, John Not, General Secretary of the Woodcraft folk, gave a last-minute presentation and shared the inspiring work they are doing to offer support to young people who are passionately campaigning right now on the issue of University Fees, demonstrating some great leadership on how organisations can provide responsible backing to youth-led action.
Helping young people to make connections with decision makers, through sites like TheyWorkForYou.com and WriteToThem.com, with the press, through the leverage that organisations might have, and with other campaigners, through spaces like TakingItGlobal and Battlefront is also a key role that adults can play in supporting young people to use the web for positive activism. There is also a need for organisations to think about how they support young people to make safe and effective use of the web in campaigning.
Many organisations, however, might not see their role as supporting general youth-led activism, but there are still many ways digital tools can support the delivery of participative practice. Online spaces can help organisations to engage young people, to communicate and co-ordinate, and to amplify their practice; and to ensure that young people’s views and insights on key aspects of a service, or key local issues, are heard and valued in decision making.
In thinking about how to engage with young people online it’s important to understand the different ways young people use the web and to think about whether a project is trying to engage young people who are already into an issue, or whether it’s trying to attract attention of those who are predominantly ‘hanging out’ online – spending time with friends and paying little attention to organisations and issues in the digital space. Good engagement also starts by listening (I mentioned Google Alerts as one handy digital listening tool, but there are many more), and starts from where young people are, whilst seeking to support young people to move beyond their starting point (a theme I initially developed in talking about youth work values and social media in the Youth Work & Social Networking report (PDF)).
Using online spaces to communicate involves finding the right tools for each job, and, finding out the right ways to use them. For example, Facebook profiles, groups and pages look very similar – but offer nuanced different ways of communicating with young people and creating online community. Quite a few of the practicalities of using different social media tools for youth engagement, including issues around organisational policy and safety concerns are covered in the ‘Social Media Youth Participation in Local Democracy’ report and in posts on Youth Work Online.
I ended today’s presentation by taking a look at three big policy agendas which have a digital edge to them, and trying to relate each to a critical question for organisations working with young people – but the full articulation of each of those I think will have to wait for a future blog post…
Further links
For those who were at the conference, and have made it reading this far without being overwhelmed by lots of links (and for anyone interested), a few more bits that might be of interest:
- Resources for exploring social media participation
- RightSpace – exploring rights and participation right now
- Youth Engagement and Social Media Guide – a work in progress
- Incluso manual – resources from an EU funded project on using social media in work with ‘youth at risk’
Youth Participation in the Big Society…
[Summary: explore & add your thoughts to this paper from North West Regional Youth Work Unit on youth participation in the Big Society]
Last week a new paper from the North West Regional Youth Work Unit (NWRYWU) crossed my radar – exploring how a wide range of approaches to youth participation may fare under current government policies and priorities – particularly those framed by ideas of the big society.
It looks at approaches including:
- Youth led grant giving
- Youth inspectors
- Shadow boards and youth panels
- Youth councils and fora
- Campaigning work
- Regional youth fora & youth parliaments
- Peer education
- Short-term projects
- Rights and advocacy work
- Health service participation
and - Youth-led organisations
Partly to aid my own note-taking on the document – but also to open it up to wider discussion (and with kind permission from NWRYWU) I’ve put the document up as a commentable doc over here where it can be read paragraph-by-paragraph and you can leave your comments on any section.
Whilst I’m not convinced that those supporting young people should immediately bend their language and focus to the priorities and language of a ‘big society’ agenda (and Kevin Harris’s critiques on the naivety of much big society thinking are worth reading), exploring and understanding what big society ideas might mean for youth engagement and getting more dialogue on the future of youth engagement can only be a good thing.
Social Media Youth Participation in Local Democracy for download
A few people have asked be recently for copies of the Social Media Youth Participation in Local Democracy resource I worked on with LGIU out of a practitioners action learning set last year. You can get hold of a print copy from the LGIU direct, or a PDF is available for download below or for viewing on Scribd.
The guide contains four sections:
- What’s it all about? – giving an overview of key concepts
- Youth participation
- Social network sites
- Participation and social network sites
- How are young people using social network sites?
- Why use social networks to involve young people?
- Making the case for using social network sites in youth participation
- Practice – drawing on learning from practitioners across 20 different organisations
- Principles and values
- Strategy
- Safety
- Measuring impact
- Resources – highlighting practical tools and technologies that can be used
- Three key concepts
- Listening dashboards
- Bebo
- Ning
- Blogging
- Video sharing and YouTube
- Find out more – signposting to further support
- Online communities
- Practical guides
- Toolkits
It’s a sign of the pace of change in social technology that this report, written back in mid 2009, includes detailed sections on engagement on Bebo, which has virtually disappeared as a platform used by young people. However, much of the rest of the content remains as relevant as ever – with case study sections such as the ‘Social Networking for Young People in Care’ section of increasing interest as Children in Care Councils and other groups look towards advocacy and empowerment when resources are reducing.
Download: Social media and youth participation in local democracy (PDF)
Social Media and Youth Participation in Local Democracy
Resources for exploring social media participation
[Summary: a quick linking list of social media & youth engagement resources, cross-posted from Youth Work Online]
I’ve just been running a short session at a meeting of the South East Participation Project around how different social media and social network sites can be used in youth participation. The session gave me an opportunity to put together some new slides and a list of resources capturing learning from recent projects about the need to look at more than just Social Network Sites – but to think about how a wide repertoire of tools and online facilitation approaches are brought together to support engagement and inclusion. You can view the slides below (may not make massive sense without the speaking with them – but hopefully give some insights) or scroll on for a list of links and resources.
We discussed a wide range of resources in the session, some of which I’ve tried to capture links to below.
Online tools
Video-making tools: powerful for ‘context-setting’ (explaining a participation opportunity); promoting projects; and as a way of capturing young people’s views and getting voices heard.
Useful links: Shared Practice Through Video guide; Example of video to promote projects; Discussion on using video; Suggested kit-list with cameras;
Survey tools: you can link people to online surveys – or some surveys can be embedded within Facebook and blogs to get structured input from young people. Think carefully about the design of online surveys.
Useful links: SurveyMonkey for online polls; Look for Poll and Voting applications to add to a Facebook page; SMSPoll for text-message surveys; Practical Participation can offer support designing and hosting online surveys; Google Forms also offers a free and effective way to create quick survey forms.
Online mapping tools: to communicate information, or for campaigning.
Useful links: the MyMaps feature on Google Maps (see the one page guide here) can be used for collaborative map making; Google Sketch Up can be used to make 3D models for Google earth; OpenStreetMap can generate free maps of your area for printing & working with; TacticalTech on Maptivism
Collaboration tools: for group work across distance.
Useful links: iEtherPad offers a quick-to-set-up places to collaborative write a document in real-time. Google Documents allows a group to all share and collaborate on spreadsheet(e.g. Budgets) or other documents. Zoho collaborative docs and Huddle collaboration space both have Facebook applications that let you create a ‘virtual office’ within Facebook for a project.
Social Network Sites can be the hub for many engagement projects. They provide a space to connect with young people; to share media from other tools; to promote opportunities to engage; to campaign for change and more.
Some local areas will have private ‘social networking spaces’ within the local authority or schools – such as SuperClubsPlus or RadioWaves which practitioners may wish to explore as environments to work with. If exploring engagement in the wider environment of existing social network sites then more links are below.
Working with social network sites:
There are many resources to help practitioners explore the use of social network sites such as Facebook. The following were mentioned in the workshop:
- Social Media, Youth Participation and Local Democracy – including sections on overcoming barriers to using social networks; case studies of practice; guidance on using listening and engagement tools; and section on using social media with children and young people in care.
- Online Youth Outreach from Katie Bacon includes a wealth of shared resources, policies, guides and tools.
- Check the pictures section of Youth Work Online for some flow-charts on responding to common challenges in social network practice
- Youth Engagement and Social Networking Guide – a draft and developing guide with Toolkit section on many different social media tools – including details on different ways of using social network sites. Also support on making the case for online engagement – and getting web blocks removed.
- Safe and Effective Engagement with Social Network Sites for Youth Practitioners
- Youth Work and Social Networking Report – sets out a theoretical and practice case for engaging with social networks.
On e-safety issues take a look at The Byron Review for the wider context, and resources from ChildNet such as Digizen.
For those exploring the development of applications Safe and Effective Social Network Site Applications might also be of interest.
If you have young people interested in Internet governance issues – check out the HuWY project.
Taking it further
The Youth Work Online network and the Network Participation networks are places to explore these issues more.
RightSpace: Holding on and moving forwards
[Summary: If you're involved in promoting the rights of Children and Young People, and you're an advocate for youth participation, join in the RightSpace debate]
What is going to happen to youth participation over the next few years?
On the one hand we’ve a government promising massive spending cuts*; and on the other hand, quite genuinely (I hope) talking about localism and transferring power back to communities. Whilst the coalition agreement is woefully lacking in any recognition of the rights and agency of young people, some policy proposals are creating new spaces for civic engagement and participation – whether that’s from open data and transparency; or the encouragement of cooperative and social enterprise structures for the delivery of services.
Later this year, Practical Participation will be involved in an event, RightSpace, that’s trying to explore where participation has got to – and to look to the future of rights-based youth participation. My colleague Bill Badham is already at work heading around the country talking to people about their experiences of participation, their learning from the past, and their fears and visions for the future. You can see video clips from those conversations, join in the conversation, and find out more about the RightSpace event taking place in Sheffield in October over on the dedicated RightSpace website.
Hope to see you there…
Footnotes
*I’m reading Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine right now, and feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the narrative of cuts being spun; so whilst questioning the spending cuts in this post – do think we need a far more critical debate about the arguments for ‘massive’ cuts – and some of the positive and ethical alternatives.
Explaining commissioning…
More and more services for young people are arranged through commissioning, as opposed to being delivered directly by local authorities or other agencies. Last year Practical Participation did some work supporting Bradford with the commissioning of their new Connexions Service, and for that we had to find a way of explaining the commissioning process in an accessible way. The result was the slide-show below:
A recent e-mail from an NHS trust interested in using the slide-show in their own youth involvement around commissioning services made me think that other’s may also find it useful. Please consider it to be under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA and as such feel free to adapt for your own contexts.
And of course, if you’ve been exploring youth participation in commissioning and have other ways to explain and explore the issues, do share your insights in the comments below…
Tim’s Blog
This is the personal blog of Tim Davies, co-director of Practical Participation and Web Science/Social Policy PhD student at the University of Southampton.