Tim's Blog

Over on the BarCampUKGovWeb discussion list Ian Dunmore shared a question posted today on the Public Sector Forums:

"I've been asked by a couple of people in my council if they can use the
likes of Bebo and Facebook to add a group to, to encourage young people to engage with the council. Firstly, it's Libraries and secondly our youth
people who want to promote a youth portal that is being developed."

In my reading for the Youth Work and Social Networking research I'm currently involved in, and in trying to prepare a series of briefing papers on Social Networking Sites I've been struck by how complicated an issue this turns out to be.

The answer depends on (at the very least):

What are the analogies you are using to help you and others in making better decisions about social media?

In talking about new technologies I find I often turn to analogies to help in:

1. Explain how a technology works and what it can do (e.g. describing wiki's as similar to a whiteboard in this guide)

   and

2. Exploring policy responses to new forms of technology (e.g. in thinking about how youth workers should interact with social networking)

When talking with youth workers, two of my favourites for exploring social networks are:

In this comment David Wilcox suggests that participation is a sub-set of collaboration.

On definitions of participation, whether it is usefully different ... I'm not sure any more. I think it only works as a sub-set of collaboration ... that is, all parties have to want it to.

I found I couldn't immediately subscribe to that characterisation, and the exploration it led me too helps, I think, to clarify some of what is specific about children and young people's participation, and about participation in statuatory bodies, as opposed to participation within voluntary membership organisations or as part of a wider engagement agenda.

Warning: post of provisional philosphical musings follows...

I'm understanding collaboration as involving:

The idea that there is one 'voice of youth' is clearly nonsense. Yet this idea underlies many invitations to a small group of young people to participate in comittees and to 'represent the voice of youth' in those settings. Nevertheless, whilst there is no one 'voice of youth', that doesn't make it illegitimate for groups of young people to speak with one voice - and to make calls on behalf of their fellow young people.

Roger Schmidt has just added this this comment to my post reviewing the Civicus World Assembly 2007. The Civicus World Assembly included, for the first time this year, a youth assembly - which, as this post explains led to a 'Call for Intergenerational Collaboration' drafted collaboratively by the young people present. In effect, a youth declaration from the assembly.