Tim's Blog

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.

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?

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...