Connected Generation 2010: The Conference
Filed under: Civic Participation, Social Media, Youth Participation, Youth Work 2.0, Youthwork, digital inclusion
Lots of people have been starting to ask me when the next ‘Connected Generation’ event will be taking place. Well, thanks to the sterling work of Katie Bacon, we’ve just booked The Watershed in Bristol for 7th May 2010 to host Connected Generation 2010 – a one-day conference exploring youth engagement and technology in 2010. Based on feedback from participants at recent training events, and on the positive response to the Beyond Twitter event we ran up in Wrexham last year, we’re trying a mixed Conference and Open Space format again – with a morning of top-quality input from speakers and a range of pre-planned workshops, followed with an afternoon of curated unConference, where delegates can set the agenda and direct the conversations.
Bristol Watershed - the Venue
I’m delighted that key speakers at the event will include a gender balanced panel with:
- Amy Sample Ward – co author of ‘Social by Social‘ and expert on the use of social media in non-profit contexts;
- Katie Bacon – pioneer of digital youth work in Devon, and founder of Online Youth Outreach digital youth work training.
- Joanne Jopling – project worker for the Gateshead Young Women’s Outreach Project
- Kieron Kirkland - learning researcher at FutureLab, and lead for the Greater Expectations project
- Chris Morgan – from the Communities 2.0 in Wales, talking about digital youth and community work.
We’re still in the process of confirming the workshop programme, but plans include:
- Ethics and ICT – workshop with Andy Phippen from Plymouth University;
- Promoting Positive Activities with Social Media with Steven Flower from Plings;
- Safe and Sound Foundations – proactive approaches to safe social media engagement with young people, staff and volunteers;
If there is a workshop you would particularly like to see, drop in a comment and I’ll see what we can do…
Full details and online booking available here. (If you can’t order online because your organisation needs invoicing etc. just drop me a line…)
Fingers crossed, we’ll also be using the event to launch a new ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media’ resource which Katie and I are hard at work drafting, and, if you want, you can pre-order a copy when booking your place at the conference.
Skills for public voice & participation alongside skills for social media
Filed under: Civic Participation, E-Democracy, Youth Participation, digital inclusion
Eszter Hargittai was in the Oxford Internet Institute earlier today sharing her research findings on the role of skills and socio-demographic factors in influencing levels of use of the Internet – and particularly web 2.0 spaces.
Implicit in Eszter’s argument was a relationship between the diversity of Web 2.0 use and democratisation. The presentation highlighted how socio-demographic factors, and particularly gender, can have an impact on the extent to which different groups contribute to public online spaces such as YouTube and Wikipedia. It’s not enough to give access to the web, and to web 2.0 for the imbalances in who is speaking and expressing their views through these online platforms to be challenged. Skills matter in addressing the imbalance.
However, as discussion at the presentation explored, if our concerns are of democratisation, social justice and equality, then the the skills that need to be promoted are far wider than technology skills, or skills to work with social media.
Skills to exercise public voice and to participate in community (online and offline) are arguably prior to the skills to use technology for public expression.
Both as we measure engagement online, and as we work to promote online engagement – keeping in mind a focus not only on digital skills, but also on general skills of public expression, interaction and dialogue is key.
For those working with young people and communities then that perhaps adds up to encouragement to address digital skills as part of wider civic skill-building programmes such as ‘Act by Right (now online as a free resource BTW)’ rather than to address digital skills and social media in isolation.
Two opportunities to explore social media & work with young people
Filed under: Quick linking, Social Media, Youth Participation, Youth Work 2.0, Youthwork
[Summary: Two day course, and six-month action learning set on social media in youth work and youth participation]
Getting started with digital youth work, or with using digital tools in youth participation, can seem daunting to many. It’s not enough to just talk about how digital skills are essential assets needed in the youth-serving workforce, or to point to tools and approaches that professionals should be using. Training opportunities, capacity building, and ongoing action learning to inform that training are all needed. Which is why I’m really pleased that 2010 will see the return of two key opportunities.
1) Social Media and Youth Participation Action Learning Set
Building on the Action Learning Set I co-facilitated last year, this six-month (one meeting a month) action learning supports participants who are working to increase their own organizations engagement with social media. Through expert inputs, workshops and shared action learning projects with peers – the action learning set aims to develop the skills of individuals, and the capacity of organizations, to engage with social media in youth participation.
Last year’s set resulted in a printed and online guide; and supported a wide range of local projects – ranging from those focussing on social media and youth engagement around commissioning, to projects supporting the use of social networks to engage young people in care in decision making.
You can find out more about this year’s action learning set (first session taking place at the end of January) and details of how to book in this flyer: Social Media and Youth Participation Action Learning Set
2) Two-day training for Youth Work Professionals
After a successful pilot, Katie Bacon will be leading a number of two-day trainings in 2010, on ‘Social Media for Youth Work Professionals’. Katie & I have developed the course together, and initially we’ll be running a number of sessions in partnership with LECP Training.
This two-day training is designed to support youth professionals from a wide range of backgrounds to develop their understanding of social media and how to use it as a tool in their work. Including hands-on activities to learn to use different social media tools – it’s a practical training that grounds the use of social media tools in professional values and practices.
You can read about the pilot training day in this reflective blog post from trainer Katie Bacon, and keep an eye on the LECP Training network for details of when the public course dates are announced (join the network to get training alerts).
We’re also exploring how this training might be offered as in-service training in individual local authorities, or offered on a regional basis – so if you might be interested in having Katie and/or I come to train with your service/region, then do get in touch.
I’m also hopeful that 2010 will bring the completion of a couple more digital youth work resources I’ve been working on. More on that some other time…
The myth of easy engagement. Who should participate and how…
Filed under: Civic Participation, E-Democracy, Youth Participation, digital inclusion
Decisions are made by those who turn up.
Often, those looking to engage people in decision making and shaping services make the shaky leap from the fact that over 70% of people have internet access, to the idea that the internet offers the straightforward opportunity to engage 70% of the people. A few days ago, frustrated by questions driven by this logic, and of the form ‘How many people in our local area are on Twitter?’, Dave Briggs sought to explode ‘The myth of engaging with everyone‘. Dave asks for clarity stating:
The first thing to be clear on is that no one engagement method will reach, or suit, everyone.
The second thing to be clear on, is that you don’t necessarily want to reach everyone, anyway.
Two statements that seem empirically and intuitively sensible. But the argument they lead Dave to is not necessarily so uncontroversial:
My argument would always be to focus on the small number of active, enthusiastic people first.
Whilst there are a limited number of cases where putting the primary focus on the active, enthusiastic people is the right way forward, in local authorities, national government and other democratic contexts we need to think more carefully. The ‘active, enthusiasts’ who leap upon any opportunity to get involved may well be great & capable people – but they may well not have all the ideas, insights, experiences and networks that we need for innovation, change, and the development of engaged vibrant communities. The following post is not a call to reject the active enthusiasts, engaged online and willing to make considerable contributions to civic life – but it is a call to remember that, if decisions are made by those who turn up, those planning and facilitating engagement have a responsibility to make sure they are inviting and supporting the right individuals and groups to be part of the process.
So, who should turn up? Below I’ve sketched out three steps to thinking about who you need to engage, and how to manage that engagement.
This is a quick sketch – and I’m sure the ideas it explores have been well developed elsewhere – so I welcome comments / pointers and reflections to help shape and develop this more…
1) Start from the end
You can’t start planning an engagement process without thinking about why you are looking to engage people. Why you are thinking about engagement, will determine who needs to be engaged, and how.
Some useful questions to ask yourself about the outcomes you want:
- Are we looking to make a decision at the end of this process? If so:
- Does the decision need to be decided by a democratic process? Or does it otherwise need some democratic legitimacy?
- Do we already have a mandate or responsibility for making this decision?
- Is the goal to make a particular project happen where we already know what that project is?
- Is the goal to take action on a particular issue, but without already knowing what action to take?
- Is the goal to build a community who can take forward projects and action in future?
And then ask about the sort of input you need. Do you want:
- Ideas?
- Insights?
- Expertise?
- Innovation?
- People taking action?
- Voting?
- etc.
The reality is that most engagement projects involve multiple possible outcomes, and multiple sorts of input.
For example, you may want to initially get a wide range of ideas about the priorities that should be set for a £100k pot of local funding; to follow this up with a democratically legitimate vote to discover the top local priorities; to put together a panel who will invite local groups to apply for funding to run innovative projects that match up against the chosen priorities; and to decide who gets the funding and to support them in running projects and making an impact. Each stage of the process answers the questions above in different ways – and so will need to think differently about who to engage and how…
2) Think about who is affected & who should be involved
If you want to engage a local population – you could just put an engagement opportunity up online, and let the people who are interested find out. But, as Mark Pack points out in a comment on Dave’s blog post:
often those keenest on an issue have a different view from those less keen on the issue
Those who self-select to get involved in an engagement opportunity may not represent all the people who should be involved in an engagement opportunity. Of course, who should be involved depends on the sorts of answers you gave to the questions above.
If you want to get the best possible democratically legitimate outcome that respects the independence and self-determination of local communities then you need at least two broad groups of people involved:
- (a) People with expertise on the issues in consideration;
- (b) People who will be affected by decisions or actions that result from this process;
You could just work with a tick-list consisting of these two items, and check you have people from both categories taking part – but chances are that breaking down category (b) at least is going to prove useful for targeting engagement opportunities and making sure you get beyond the easy-to-reach enthusiasts.
For example, you may decide you need to hear from:
- Men & women, of a range of ages and employment situations, who live in different wards where your funding of £100k might be spent.
You may find you can generate a matrix from the lists of different group you want to engage – giving you a tool to check and think about who is engaged so far. For example, the matrix below helps get a rough sense of whether a process is hearing from participants across areas of Oxford, and from a range of age groups and employment backgrounds.
It’s important to note, however, that these are not tick-boxes. You may not necessarily have someone from every category. These lists are tools to help you think about and visualise whether or not you are getting a broad range of inputs into your engagement process.
Engaging some groups is easier than others. Although – as I heard it put at the recent Beyond Twitter conference, that’s not because some groups are ‘hard to reach’, but because from some places in your local area, the council is harder to reach. With a matrix like the above, you can think about where you put your resources, and how accessible the engagement you are creating is to different groups.
3) Think about the sorts of input you allow, and the inputs you are getting
The people you engage are not, unless they have been elected through a suitable process, representatives . Nor, unless you’ve gone through some in-depth statistical sampling, are they representative.
But they do bring something to your process. And knowing what they bring is important to ensure the outcome is as high quality and legitimate as possible.
People bring ideas, insights, lived experience, energy to take action, skills and practice know how and a whole lot more. Sometimes people should be allowed to bring a veto; or to call for a vote on particular issues.
Fascilitating engagement involves looking at these different sorts of input, and getting the right balance at the right time.
For example, you may first gather stories from across an area about what living there is like, and share these stories with the ‘active enthusiasts’ who have time and energy to give in thinking about innovative funding priorities that could respond to those stories. You may invite those affected by decisions about funding to reflect upon the ‘active enthusiasts’ suggestions. You may offer a veto power to local community members. You may seek out the views of specific groups to make sure a decision is well rounded. And you may seek to bring together a large group to vote on proposals. If all the stories and insights come from one group; all the ideas from another; and all the action from another group again – then the risk that your process is unbalanced is big.
Engaging everyone
Many people have had bad experiences of engagement in the past. Some people are not interested in being engaged. Many people face barriers to getting engaged. You can’t engage with everyone all the time.
But whatever you do, look beyond the easy and obvious, to seek approaches that will work, and that will push forward are more just society.
Why engage online?
Where does this leave the argument for online engagement that Dave Briggs was exploring in the post that sparked the exploration above? Well, one avenue worth exploring is how digital technologies can lower the costs of engaging the easy-to-engage, to free up resources to offer substantive support to those groups, who for reasons of structural and systematic disadvantage, may find their input less likely to be otherwise included.
Commissioning Connexions – Consultation in Bradford
[Summary: Just launched Buying Bradford Connexions consultation for young people. Please help get the word out...]
Commissioning is big news right now. Many services for young people are now provided through commissioning arrangements, and competitive tendering. That can lead to a shift in the ways in which young people’s voices influence service provision – and it can open up new decision making spaces where young people’s participation is a must.
When the Commissioning & Contracts Manager in Bradford got in touch to ask if Practical Participation could help them to develop ways of getting young people’s input into the Commissioning process – I was interested to explore the possibilities for blending online and offline engagement – reaching out to a wide range of young people, but also getting in-depth engagement to take place structured around the commissioning process. At first I thought, with my impending return to MSc study, that the job was too big to take on – but, with Bill Badham joining the Practical Participation team in September (more on that soon…) and working in partnership with our friends at YouthBank UK – we’ve been able to put together a plan for young people’s engagement in Commissioning the new Connexions Bradford service & to identify a few opportunities to experiment with new methods along the way too.
So – yesterday, and after a week of development, I pushed the button to launch http://www.buyingbradfordconnexion.net as a participation space to gather the views of young people from Bradford and surrounding areas into the Connexions service.
(If you happen to work in, or around Bradford – or know anyone who does, your help in getting the message out about this new participation opportunity would be much appreciated)
And in the interests of shared learning – a few more notes on the project below… Read more
Voicebox – making the most of engagement
Filed under: Civic Participation, Techie things, Youth Participation
The process is depressingly familiar. Someone asks you to fill in a survey for research or consultation. They take away your results – and – in the rare cases where you ever hear of the research/consultation again – you see that your responses have been written up as part of a dull report, full of graphs made in Excel, and likely to sit on the book shelves of people whose behaviour betrays the probability that they’ve not really read or understood what was in the report.
Which is why it is refreshing to see the (albeit well funded) Vinspired team doing something rather different with their Voicebox survey of 16 – 25 year olds. Here’s how they introduce the project:
Journalists, politicians, academics, police and parents all have a point of view on what the ‘kids of today’ are like.
But has anyone ever asked the young people themselves, and not just in a focus group in Edmonton, but in an open and transparent way and on a national scale? And has anyone done anything smart, cool or fun with that data, that might, just might, make the truth about young people be heard?
These questions were the starting point for Voicebox; a project which aims to curate the views of 16-25s, visualise the results in creative ways, and then set that data free. Over the coming months, we’re going to try to find out how young people spend their time, what they care about, how many carry knives, what they really think about the area they live in and much more.
But not only are they breaking up their survey of views into manageable chunks, and giving instant feedback on the results to anyone filling the survey in – they are opening up the data they collect through an open XML API and CSV downloads, so anyone can take and use the data collected.
Plus – to make sure responses to the question ‘What do young people really care about?’ make it in front of decision makers – they’re planning to wire up the responses to a robot, ready to hand-write out each and every response as part of an installation in Parliament.
Of course, it’s not often that your budget stretches to custom-built flashy survey applications and internet-connected-robots when you’re looking to gain young people’s input into local issues or policy making. But what Vinspired have done with VoiceBox does raise the questions: how will you make sure that you really make the most of the views young people give you? Any how will you get young people’s views in front of decision makers in a way that makes them tricky to ignore?
Certainly two questions I’m going to be asking myself on any future consultation or engagement projects I work on…
Saying YES to social media
As my return to study with a year long full-time MSc comes closer, I’ve been trying to write up and share a lot of my learning from the last 18 months of researching and working with organisations using social media in youth engagement.
What started as a small wiki with a new notes on has quickly evolved into the outline of an online guide to youth engagement through social media – and so, before any perfectionist tendencies take over, and the diminishing returns of time spent knocking off the rough edges kick in any further, here’s a link to the in-progress-but-by-now-hopefully-at-least-a-bit-useful YES – Youth Engagement and Social media Guide.
It’s got sections on the What, Why and How of planning youth engagement and participation using social media – covering issues of strategy, safety and touching upon evaluation. The toolkit of HowTo’s and Case Studies in using different social media tools has a long way to go – but if you want to know about Listening Dashboards and Search Alerts then hopefully it already provides a good overview.
Also contained in the guide you will find a copy of a document I wrote a while back, but have failed to properly share – called ‘Safe and Effective Egagement with Social Network Sites for Youth Professionals (PDF)’ and which I hope provides a useful (and relatively brief) overview of the things to think about if you’re planning to use social networking as part of your youth engagement work.
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(The observant will notice that the Youth Engagement and Social Media Guide is yet another Dokuwiki install, a tool I’m becoming a big fan of since using it for a personal notepad wiki, and then the Interactive Charter/Social Strategy site. It may not have the WYSIWYG editing power of Wikispaces, but for flexibility and ease of deploying on one’s own server it’s fantastic. It’s also behind another site I recently set live for the DFID Civil Society Organisations Youth Working Group)
Networked Participation: opening up
Networked Participation - funded by LGIU
Just a quick (and slightly late) note to let readers interested in Youth Participation & Social Media that we’ve opened up the Ning network for the Youth Participation and Social Network Sites action learning set to anyone to join.
You can access Networked Participation here.
You need to request a membership to access all the content – but as long as you provide just a few details I’ll get any requests to join approved quickly.
Inside the network you will find shared resources and slides from our expert speakers and all sorts of other bits and pieces from the last four months of explorations of what social network sites and online social network has to offer to effective youth participation.
Can social networks bridge the participation gap?
[Summary: Online social networks have a role to play in bridging one off engagement with more structured forms of participation.]
A bit of scene setting
Image from Hear by Right book (p.g.7)
The ‘Ladder of Participation’ which asks organisations to consider the depth of youth participation in particular activities will be familiar to many people in youth engagement. Using Hart’s Ladder of Participation you can assess whether a youth council is acting as a genuine structure for youth empowerment, leading to young people and adults sharing decisions and creating change – or whether it is really a tokenistic gesture, creating the illusion of participation whilst adults are actually running the whole show.
But youth participation is not just about youth councils and young mayors. Good youth participation offers young people the chance to get involved and influence issues that affect them in a wide variety of ways, from one-off input into feedback and complaints processes, through to more structured engagement in the governance of organisations. On it’s own the ladder of Participation doesn’t show the full picture. That’s where the ‘matrix of participation’ comes in.
It’s a tool I’ve been using in training sessions for years, having first discovered in whilst working with Bill Badham delivering Hear by Right training. However, as far as I can tell we’ve never written it up online (though it is written up in this book
The matrix of participation includes Hart’s Ladder of Participation on it’s vertical axis, and adds a horizontal axis consisting of different participation approaches, running roughly from one-off, short term or informal approaches on the left, to more structured and long-term approaches on the right.
Organisations can map the different participation opportunities they provide against both their level of participativeness, and against the type of approach they represent.
The matrix is particularly useful to encourage organisations to consider whether they are offering young people a spread of engagement opportunities, and our experience is that attempts to just provide opportunities at one side or other of the matrix is unlikely to lead to sustainable and effective youth participation which leads to positive change for young people.
An observation: the gap in the middle
When Bill Badham joined us at the April meeting of the Youth Participation and Social Network Sites Action Learning Set he led the group in using the matrix of participation (plus some post-it notes and a big sticky sheet) to put together a big visual representation of the different participation approaches in use amongst the 20 or so local authorities participating in the learning set.
Standing back from the wall where this matrix had been put together during the lunch break we spotted something interesting. The participation methods shown were clustered on the left and right of the matrix, and things were thin in the middle.
Already participants had been talking about how many of the more structured participation methods to the right were limited in their efficacy because they only managed to attract certain groups of young people who did not reflect the diversity of the young people the organisations worked with. And this got us thinking.
Participation methods towards the middle of the matrix are really important. It is through involvement in events; in creative projects; and in short-term activities that many young people can develop the confidence to express their views and can build the networks with other young people and with supportive adults that enable and encourage them to then get involved in further participation. The middle of the matrix is a key point on young people’s ‘pathway of participation’. Without opportunities to gain experience, information and develop networks – many young people (and often the young people we most need to hear from) may never go on to speak up in forums where they could have power to make serious change happen.
Bridging the gap: online social networks
Online social networking is not a cure all. But it seems that it could have a role to play here.
Right now, young people engaging in participation on the left of the matrix of participation, in one-off participation opportunities have few ways of connecting this engagement to longer term involvement in participation. Filling in a paper form to provide feedback on an activity and handing it in can often feel like a participation dead end.
But what if, instead of just handing in feedback, young people were encouraged to digitally provide their ideas for improvements to a service, and were to vote for the ideas supplied by other young people (see tools like UserVoice)?
And what if young people taking part in survey and small-scale engagement were offered an opt-in opportunity to connect with the person who will take forward action based on their input, so they can continue to engage with further questions that crop up as a policy or practice comes to be implemented?
And what if young people who want to express their view on a single issue could do that by joining a group within a social network, in the process coming to discover the other issues their peers are working on – and becoming part of a shared network with young people already involved in formal participation structures?
Not all young people will go on to ‘leap the gap’ themselves and move from one-off engagement to sitting on a youth forum or governance board (nor should they), but perhaps some will – and perhaps, equally importantly, those young people who take part in formal participation structures will have ways of keeping connected with the issues that matter to their least advantaged peers, and will be better able to represent the views of others and to advocate for improvements that benefit those most in need of change.
How are you blending online and offline social networks into your youth participation practice?
It’s not about you
If you have documents, websites or presentations about your youth participation project, and they spend more time talking about your organisation, or the consortia and collection or organisations involved in the project – than they spend talking about the project itself – something is probably wrong.
If your consultations are designed around your internal organisational structure, rather than being based on the issues and themes that matter most to the people you are consulting – something is probably wrong.
If to access your services young people need to provide all sorts of management information that is just for your funders, and which provides not added value to the young person – something is probably wrong.
Good participation isn’t just something you bolt on to your organisation – it shifts the focus. It’s not about you. It’s about change for young people.
Tim’s Blog
This is the personal blog of Tim Davies, an independent consultant and researcher from the UK, writing about young people's participation, social media and social change.(And also now MSc Student at the Oxford Internet Institute)