Tim's Blog

If you're looking for a way to run a quick mobile phone based consultation - or you've been wanting to use interactive voting at a conference or participation event - but haven't been able to afford expensive e-voting equipment - then you might want to take a look at SMSPoll.net.

 The service (which I just discovered this evening and have only briefly tested) lets you set up quick polls - which anyone you tell about them can vote on by sending a text message to a UK number. The results are updated in near real-time on the website - meaning you can get an 'ask the audience' style effect if you project the graphs that SNSPoll generates onto a big screen.

It's free for small polls (25 votes or less) and is very cheap for larger polls (from £5 month). 

Thanks to tweets from Dave Briggs and a blog post from Simon over at Puffbox I've just been exploring Steph Gray's quite fantastic innovations over the Science and Society consultation website.

Not only does the site work hard to make a complex consultation more accessible through the use of video introductions and a blog format - but it sets the consultation free, and let's any visitor select questions from the Consultation to make available on their own websites via a custom widget - which feeds information right back into the core consultation.

My work in youth participation really got started when the fantastic Bill Badham (Who incidentally is right his moment is somewhere cycling three times up a mountain in France to raise funds for a youth centre in Birmingham. Go sponsor him.) created four part-time jobs in The National Youth Agency Participation Team for 16 - 24 year olds to become co-trainers in equipping local and national government to include young people. Being one of the young members of that training team was a great experience for me - so I'm always delighted to see the model spreading.

I've explored the role of games in consultation before, but never bringing together the mix of playful real-world games, person-to-person interaction, and digital consultation and dialogue in quite the way that the process Kevin Harris describes in this recent blog post on 'Community engagement by treasure hunt'.

Kevin combined a quiz-book based treasure hunt around the site of the library due to be redeveloped with opportunities to speak to architects, chances to text-in ideas and an invitation to record reflections in the quiz-book. Kevin writes:

[Summary: why should you be involving young people? - And once you know your reasons - what impact do those reasons have on the nature of their involvement?]

Can you hold an event about children and young people without children and young people being there?

[Summary: shared learning/pointers from explorations of facebook groups as a platform for dialogue]

In response to a number of questions I've had recently about how Social Networking sites could be used for youth participation and engaging young people in local democratic dialogue, I've been exploring a range of different options. To capture my learning, I though I would try and write up my explorations in the form of a number of strategic 'recipes'.

games make things more interesting

response rates are always lower than expected

we should build in incentives

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'nptech' stands for 'Not-for-Profit TECHnology'. In the last year, these six characters have probably led me to discover more extermely interesting stuff, and more extermely interesting people than I've discovered through all my wider reading, web-surfing and (albeit limited) conference going put together.

Why? Because nptech is used as a shared 'tag' across social bookmarking and blogging websites by an active community of people interested in not-for-profit technology in the UK. And it's possible, using an RSS reader, to follow all the blog posts, links and other interesting things they are sharing as they are shared - making a daily dose of the latest new ideas, insightful reflections and helpful resources easily available.

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):

These two one page guides were written for the Young Researcher Network launch conference where they were used as part of a session introducing social media tools for young researchers.

I've always found geographic and mapping visualisations to be really helpful in participation projects (as in this series of workshops on the local offer), and so these two guides explore how Google Earth and the My Maps feature of Google Maps can be used to add an online dimension to community mapping projects.