Author: timdavies

What does successful e-participation look like?

[Summary: expanding on scribbled notes from a recent workshop on e-participation]

A few weeks ago I took part in the YouthPart launch workshop in Berlin at the kind invitation of Nadine Karbach. YouthPart is a new project, led by the German International Youth Service exploring e-participation for youth engagement. I was there to give a short 10-minute input on some elements of youth e-participation in the UK (slideshare slides here). During one of the break-out discussions, I was on a table exploring the question “What does successful e-participation look like?”. 

At first, the discussion centred on the fact that the success of e-participation should be measured just the same as the success of any participation: for Practical Participation that would mean can we measure what’s changed (doc) for the people involved and for the wider community. But there also developed an interesting thread of questions about the unique success criteria that we could apply to e-participation projects, particularly e-participation for young people. Some of the questions that might point us towards success criteria that I jotted down here:

  • Was the platform and process selected appropriate?
    Did it set reasonable expectations about the decisions that were being made, and the scope for influencing change? Did it give people the freedom to express their views on the issue at hand? Did it keep discussions adequately focussed? Did it allow you to give participants feedback on what changed as a result of their input? Was  it cost effective? Did technical problems get in the way of people participating?

    Whilst e-participation isn’t just about the platform, choosing the right platform for the right process matters. It is often tempting for e-participation projects to try and build their own platforms (I’m certainly guilty of going down this route in the past), but more often than not, there are good tried and tested platforms out there: the trick is in finding the right one and pairing it with the right process and facilitation support.

  • Did your e-participation tilt the balance of power in favour of young people?
    Young people often face significant inequalities of power when it comes to participating in policy making: whether explicit (not being able to vote; not given a shared role in decision making), or implicit (lack of experience makes it tricker to make your point; limited time to engage with an issue because of pressures of school or college make ‘competing’ with full-time lobbyists and advocates difficult etc.).

    Good e-participation should address these power imbalances, and should work to rebalance power in young people’s favour.

  • Is it inclusive?
    Have all the groups affected by the decisions being made been able to input? Have you seen a diverse range of views and opinions? How could you choice of platform or process exclude particular groups? Have you reached out in a range of communities? If you have been reaching out through social networks, how have you checked that you are not just going to easy-to-reach networks?

    E-participation often involved disintermediation of the youth participation process: young people are invited to input directly into discussion and decision making, without facilitation in groups or from workers. That can make for a more inclusive process, but it can also leave some people out.

    E-participation might need to be part of a blended strategy that involved online and offline working. Reaching out to different groups is just as important online as offline.

  • Are the parameters of your e-participation transparent, and open to critique
    Lawrence Lessig’s idea that ‘Code is Law‘ highlights that in digital environments the limits we set to what can be done can act as firm, but often invisible, restrictions on our actions. Whereas in a face-to-face workshop that asks people to fill in boxes on a flip-chart with ideas someone can scribble ideas in the margins – outside the set boxes and categories – the digital world often doesn’t offer these opportunities. Whilst in a face-to-face setting someone can more easily question the way of workshop is being facilitated if they feel there is a bias in it – that’s often harder to do when the ‘facilitation’ is coded into an e-participation platform.

    Thinking critically about the constraints built into an e-participation platform, and making sure you are sensitive to participants questioning your assumptions about the parameters is important.

  • Does this e-participation project increase the chance of the organisation/young people creating change next time?
    One of the big observations of workshop participants was that bad participation experiences can put people off civic engagement for life; but that you can’t expect every participation experience to lead to change clearly enough or fast enough to satisfy many young people engaging with a participation opportunity for the first time.

    So, if you’re not sure your project will lead to a satisfying and positively reenforcing experience of change for young participants, should you try starting it at all? Or should you avoid building expectations you might risk seeing crushed? Well – one way to guide the design of a project might be to think: it should have the maximum chance of making change this time, but it should also build participants capacity, skills and opportunities to create change in future.

This list is by no means a definitive set of considerations for e-participation projects (and in coming to write them up I notice they’re a little more abstract and in need of further clarification than my scribbled notes from the workshop suggested), although I hope they point to a number of elements worth exploring. What criteria would you use to measure the success of an e-participation project?

 

 

Challenging Myths about Young People and the Internet

[Summary: Workshop report from the Internet Governance Forum, Nairobi, 2011]

I facilitated a workshop at this year’s Internet Governance Forum on the topic ‘Challenging Myths about Young People and the Internet‘. The workshop report is available on the IGF Website, and also available to read below. I hope it can act as a useful resource in any policy work around young people and the Internet. Both the USA IGF, and Child Net’s Youth IGF Project held their own discussions and debates on the topic of ‘myths about young people and the Internet’ in the run up to the forum, and it seems to work well as a discussion format to dig deeper to understand young people’s online experiences.

I also shared some of the myths from the workshop in a recent keynote to the EU Safer Internet Forum, the slides from which you can also find below.


Workshop 92: Challenging Myths about Young People and the Internet

Claims about youth are central to many Internet Governance discussions. However, many of the claims made about youth and the Internet are based on myth and misperception rather than on reality.

Myths come in a variety of forms. Some are compelling, but mistaken claims: intuitively plausible, but not backed by evidence and research. Others are based on stereotypes or distorted media coverage given to issues. Other myths are propagated by those with vested interests or particular agendas, seeking to secure support for their cause by making exaggerated claims.

Workshop 92 provided a space for constructive dialogue about how we should understand claims made about young people in Internet Governance. Contributions from ten panellists and the floor addressed a wide range of  myths or misunderstandings about young people and technology: highlighting where we need to think more deeply before making Internet policy based upon generalisations about children, young people and young adults.

This report looks at the myths in turn, before reporting some general points from discussion at the end. The Youth Coalition on Internet Governance will continue to develop a resource based on these myths to offer as an input for future IGF sessions. A number of the myths draw on headings from a list of common myths put forward by danah boyd.

The Myths

Myth: Young people are either digital natives, or digitally naive (Sheba Mohammid)

Our descriptions of youth and technology are frequently polarised with youth described as opposite extremes: either as digital natives, with ubiquitous understanding of technology, or digitally naive, and in need of protection. This can lead to technology projects ignoring the need to do work on pedagogical systems and educating youth; or it can lead to responses that perceive only the need for control and protection of young people online.

There is limited dialogue between those who describe youth as ‘natives’ and those who focus on youth ‘naivete’. The tendency to pigeonhole young people into one category or the other prevents us from developing a deeper understanding of diverse youth experiences of networked media, and how individuals can have different experiences at different times and in different spaces.

Talking about ‘digital natives’ or ‘digital naivete’ may have intuitive and rhetorical appeal – but whenever speakers use these phrases, they gloss over the reality of young people’s online lives and can lead to unhelpful policy responses. The following myths explore in more detail the subtleties that we need to bring to our discussions.

Myth: The Internet is a dangerous, dangerous place (Alannah Travers)

“There are dangers online, as in the real world, but that doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, or only dangerous and never good.” 

Starting from the assumption that the Internet is inherently a dangerous place can have negative impacts on policy. It’s important to develop skills and resilience to protect yourself, and, as with crossing the road, once you’ve learned to manage the dangers, you can be secure and safe.

Myth: The Internet is a free playground for youth (Max Kall)

“The myth is that youth regard the Internet as a free and anarchic playground where they can do whatever they want, and actions can unfold in whichever way they desire. Young people can spend hours and hours on social networks, gaming, and the myth is that young people think it’s all free. It’s all open and whatever you do, it does not yield any negative consequences. 

The opposite is actually the truth. For many young people the Internet is everything but free.”

Youth are frequently aware of the possibility of surveillance from law enforcement authorities, companies, employers or just from teachers or parents, and this can lead to ‘chilling effects’, limiting freedom of expression and democratic participation on the Internet.

The impact of these chilling effects vary from country to country, with a BBC survey finding that up to 49% of people in ‘democratic countries’ agreed with statements that the Internet is not a free space, rising to 70% is some countries. One workshop participant highlighted self-censorship by bloggers in the Congo. By contrast, in France and Kenya, the BBC survey found that 70% or more of people did regard the Internet as a free space. As with any claim about youth and the Internet we need to question the geographic and cultural specificity of the claim. Regardless, the levels of young people feeling inhibited in their free expression of political views online should be a cause for concern.

Myth: Youth don’t care about privacy (Kellye Coleman and Connor Dalby)

“…there is a myth that youth don’t care about privacy. I think youth do care but at the same time youth don’t fully understand what privacy means.”

Young people value education that empowers them to make positive privacy choices, where reasons are given for why certain privacy behaviors might be important: “If the why of privacy is shared I think we as young people can become more empowered and invested in taking actions to protect ourselves.”.

Education based on ‘fear tactics’ is less likely to be popular amongst young people: “[Scare tactics] are the wrong way to go about it. You are scaring youth to not share things they should be sharing, great things, or [scaring them to] stop using the Internet or social networks altogether. The best way to go about it is teaching about settings, not trying to scare them too much but teaching them good things that we can improve.”

Cutting through myths about youth and privacy is complicated by the ambiguity of the term. Threats to privacy can be many and varied, and different people may value particular aspects of privacy differently: some willing to trade their personal data for services from Internet companies, others seeing this as a threat to privacy. Young people’s views on privacy in particular situations, such as whether Amazon’s personalised recommendations are a positive or negative thing, are as diverse as those of the adult population.

Myth: The Internet is the ‘great equalizer’ (Matthew Jackman)

On the one hand, the Internet is a place where anyone could start a business, or choose to express themselves. On the other hand, “if you want ask someone where they would find videos they would clearly say YouTube…We find a monopoly website which control whole sectors.”

Just because the Internet presents great possibilities for access to information that doesn’t mean that everyone can access and make the most of it.

“…the Internet has potential to bring equality but with so many barriers with access, be it disability or affordability and censorship …[in practice it doesn’t]”.

However, we should be careful about assuming that disabled people, for example, are not only at all. One delegate reminded the workshop that young disabled people often rely on the Internet as a first port of call for information and resources, confounding the common assumption that they are not online. Projects and policies need to address barriers to the the realization of the equalizing potential of the Internet.

Myth: All young Nigerians as cybercriminals (‘Gbenga Sesan)

“I’m sure everyone here has probably, not even probably, has, received an e-mail from somebody who claims to be a Nigerian prince.”

The stereotyping of a whole nation can have profound consequences on the young people who live there. Young Nigerians are locked out of e-commerce opportunities as services like PayPal block the Nigerian market. Young Nigerians seeking to participate in online discussions can find their e-mails deleted by spam filters. And “this myth prevents the world from knowing what exactly is going on with young Nigerians on the Internet”, such as the 2011 mobile-phone based election monitoring application development by young Nigerians, or recent investment into Nigerian online businesses.

The association in popular conciousness of Nigeria with cybercrime is a modern stereotype: but a particularly harmful one to youth and one that needs to be challenged.

Myth: Social media is addictive (Dan Skipper)

Claims about youth ‘Internet addiction’ or ‘addiction’ to social media are common in policy debates, and at the Internet Governance Forum: often leading to polarised arguments. Although a small number of people may exhibit “compulsively driven behaviour with negative consequences” in relation to the social media, and many young people prefer not to be without access to social media for long periods, general claims about youth Internet addiction are based more in rhetoric and myth than in evidence; and a focus on ‘addiction’ can divert a focus on important issues such as whether people are enjoying a great enough diversity of online experiences.

“I think social media is not addictive, just a luxury people enjoy using so you could in a way argue anything is addictive if you are saying social media is addictive. If you play a sport and you love playing and you play it every chance you get, same with being on social media.  If you enjoy social media, you use it as much as you can. I don’t think you can say it is an addiction.”

Myth: Young People are all creating their own online content (Gitte Stald)

It is commonly claimed that the Internet allows young people to become ‘content creators’, yet The EU Kids Online Research has found that very few young people are actually creating their own content online. “What the majority do is very mundane, and not creative.”

This can be seen as a missed opportunity both because young people are not exploring creative skills, and because it is recognised that there is a lack of good quality content for young people online – and peer-created content could help address this.

Myth: The digital is separate from the real world (Naveed-ul-haq)

Discussions of ‘cyberspace’, or ‘the virtual world’ or even ‘spending time online’ often have an implicit assumption that the digital world is separate from the real world. But for many young people (and adults) it is more accurate the say that the digital world is simply an integral part of the real world for many people.

“The most important thing that we do in our real world is communicate. How do we communicate with others and with people around us and talk about digital world? There are five billion mobile users: so we cannot say that digital world is separate than real world.”

However, policy makers, parents and teachers often frame discussions with an artificial divide between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ which doesn’t reflect the reality of young people’s lives, increasingly including the reality in developing world contexts too, where mobile phones mean everyone is carrying a connection to the digital world around with them.

Taking forward discussions

Delegate noted that simply presenting the myths challenged in the workshop would be a useful input to future IGF debates: allowing workshops planned in future to avoid framing debates around myths, and to ask better questions. Particular themes included

The importance of evidence

The session highlighted that two forms of evidence are vitally important. Firstly, high quality statistical evidence (particularly from studies using shared methods to promote International comparison) helping us to understand the prevalence of a wide range of online issues – from safety issues, to freedom of expression issues – and helping us to see the local variations in issues of importance at any particular time. We need evidence to help both highlight difference between contexts as well as commonality. Secondly, we need evidence and input from a diverse range of stakeholders, including diverse groups of children, young people and young adults – able to offer insights into the varied online experiences and opinions of youth.

The diversity of youth experience

The workshop discussions demonstrated that challenging myths and generalisations requires us to engage with a diversity of views and approaches to address key Internet issues. We were reminded that “we’ll not have one answer that fits all… what might work in developed countries might not work in developing countries”, and a debate between young panelists and delegates highlighted the range of different views held on whether censorship, web blocking and filtering was every appropriate.

A shared responsibility

One delegate issued a challenge to young people to think about how they can work to dispel myths about youth and the Internet, and another mentioned the possibility of using social media to challenge myths. The importance of challenging myths in local and regional debates was also raised.

Next steps

The Youth Coalition on Internet Governance (www.ycig.org) will continue to develop resources based on the workshop transcript and report.

Random Hacks of Kindness – Oxford – 3rd/4th December

[Summary: Volunteer for Random Hacks of Kindness, Oxford] 

Random Hacks of Kindness events bring together digital innovators to work on building practical open technology with the goal of making the world a better place. As a follow up to the open data day held in Oxford last December, this year White October are hosting a Random Hacks of Kindness weekend on the 3d and 4th December set up in partnership with Oxfam.

The event is on the look out for designers, developers, data wranglers and others who are willing to give up a weekend to work on practical solutions to key social problems… and maybe even to take forward the ideas after the weekend.

You can find more details and sign-up here.

I’m sure we’ll be linking up with some of the parallel open data day hacking going on too.

Deeper and wider: dialogue at the Internet Governance Forum

[Summary: Reflections from the 2011 Internet Governance Forum]

I was asked by Nominet to put together some reflections on this years IGF for their blog ahead of the Parliament and the Internet Conference last week. As I’ve not posted about IGF since I got back, it’s also reposted here…

The challenge faced by the Internet Governance Forum is a big one: to convene open multi-stakeholder dialogue on extremely diverse Internet issues in order to help shape global Internet policy and practice. Sometimes it can feel like an event of fragmented workshops, repeating year-on-year without making progress: but within the packed agenda are discussions and insights and ideas that really can move the dialogue forward.

Deeper dialogue on youth

This year I had my first experience convening an IGF workshop, benefiting from the open agenda setting process to see my suggestion of a workshop on ‘Challenging Myths about Young People and the Internet’ (#92) make it onto the programme. The workshop, involving young people, young adults and adults from across the world dug into common claims about young people and the Internet, such as ‘young people don’t care about privacy’, or ‘young people consider the Internet to be a free, anarchic spaces where they can do what they want’, and ‘young people are addicted to the Internet’. Rather than reject these myths out of hand, the panellists and participants in the workshop sought to show how both the myths, and their opposites, hide the subtle realities of young people’s lives in a digital world: and how the continued use of simplistic myths harms policy making. Instead of making bald claims about young people’s lack of belief in privacy, panellists argued we should look at how young people act in practice, and should offer education that supports young people to improve their privacy protection, rather than running ‘messaging campaigns’ that assume young people need to be scared into acting on privacy. And instead of over-using phrases like ‘Internet addiction’, we should understand the Internet as a space where young people are engaged in many different activities (to paraphrase one participant: ‘The Internet gives you access to just about anything, so you’re going to use it a lot!’), and where any critique needs to be more targeted and nuanced. The ‘chilling effects’ of online monitoring on young people’s online freedoms; the prejudice young nigerians face because of perceptions about nigerian cybercrime; and the need to avoid basing our understanding of young people on claims about ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital naiveté’ were also addressed.

Although many of the myths addressed in this workshop will, I’m sure, turn up as claims in other transcripts from this years IGF (mostly because of misunderstandings, but also because simplistic emotive claims about ‘youth’ are used by some to further their own interests and agendas), members of the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance will be collaboratively writing up the outcomes of the Challenging Myths workshop as a resource for future IGF discussions with the hope of helping to shape a deeper dialogue about youth and the Internet.

Widening access to the IGF

The dialogue in Workshop 92 also reached wider than I’d anticipated: with e-Participation allowing remote Panellists to join the workshop from Pakistan, and a remote-hub joining the discussion from Syracuse University in the USA. If the 2010 IGF was when remote participation came of age with over 30 remote hubs, 2011 was the year that e-Participation was recognises as a fundamental part of the way IGF does business. A workshop on e-Participation principles identified the need to build on existing platforms like the volunteer-developed Remote Participation through webcasts and WebEx, and on the social media aggregation on the platform I’ve been experimenting with over the past few years with the support of Diplo, to work towards year-round e-Participation in the IGF that continues to improve the inclusiveness and accessibility of forum discussions to all. The potential of ‘data mining’ the rich transcript and report archives that have built up over the years of the IGF, to help visualise the changing discourse, was also raised in workshops and the closing plenary: highlighting a continued drive towards institutional innovation to support better dialogue on key Internet policy issues.

Emerging issues: open data

A number of worshops in Nairobi developed an IGF focus on the growing areas of ‘open data’. I participated in one panel on ‘Privacy and Security in a Linked/Open/Realtime data world’ that took a wide-ranging look at emerging issues around open data, from open government data like the International Aid Transparency Initiative data I spoke on, to the data from citizens sourced by Ushahidi explored by Eric Hershman, and data aggregated from social media and other sources addressed by Robet Kirkpatric talking about UN Global Pulse. With the need to critically explore open data initiatives, their technical and policy frameworks, and their social impacts, becoming more pressing, I’m sure an IGF thread on open data will return in 2012.

So: time to start looking forward to IGF2012? Well, yes and no. As Ginger Paque reminded us a in a number of sessions, IGF doesn’t just talk place once a year. With online networks like the Diplo Internet Goverance Community, and regional IGFs taking place across the world, the IGF process is going on year round – and the wider, deeper dialogue is needed year round too.

 

 

PhD and Practice

[Summary: study as part of practice]

This week was my first as a full-time PhD student with the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre and the Social Science department at Southampton University. It’s just under a year since I put in an application to start, and the start-date has pretty much fallen in one of the busiest month I’ve known: in part as I’ve tried (and failed) to sequence projects to finish before I started, and as a number of exciting events, projects and deadlines with the Internet Governance Forum, and International Aid Transparency Initiative, and Journal of Community Informatics and work on young people and technology, have all converged on the last and next few weeks.

Which makes for an interesting start to a PhD. But I hope, a positive one: with a clear reminder that I want three years of PhD not to be about three-years of stepping away from or outside of practice, looking to specialize into some narrow disciplinary structure for the purpose of a future academic careers; but to be about connecting research, theory and practice in mutually supporting ways.

I originally titled this post ‘Creating creative tension: PhD and Practice’ – as right now it feels like that is what I’m doing: setting up an interesting tension between the drivers in a number of projects to deliver some clear outcomes, and the drivers of early PhD study to spend time widening the horizons of my reading, broadening out with no outcomes yet in mind. But I’m not sure ‘in tension’ is the best way to keep practice and study over the coming years: so, time to dig out a reading list on theory, practice and praxis.

A logistical note:

Taking on a full-time PhD does mean that I’ve got limited personal capacity for new freelance projects over the coming months and I’ll be focussing on projects that overlap with my area of study on open data and civic engagement. Practical Participation more generally however continues to take on projects with Bill Badham and Alex Farrow leading on all things youth-engagement.

The Risk-Opportunity discourse is broken: Rethinking responses

[Summary: Slides and paper given at EU Kids Online Conference yesterday] 

Yesterday I rather hurriedly (last presenting slot of the workshop at the end of a long day…) presented at the EU Kids Online conference around the draft model that emerged from the Youth Work Online Month of Action and other prior work to use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as the core of a model for broader and more effective research, policy and practice thinking about young people’s online lives. Below you can find a copy of the slides, annotated to explain what would otherwise be a series of rather uninformative words and images, and the working paper based on this can be found here (of follow this direct link to the PDF).

 

Rethinking Responses to Young People and the Internet – beyond Opportunity and Risk – EU Kids Online II – September 2011

View more presentations from Tim Davies.

 

I’m speaking again around this idea of rethinking responses to young people’s online lives, and about the need to reframe the discourse and debate (something danah boyd has just this week again reminded us of the need for with a deeply insightful paper and article), at the EU Safer Internet Forum conference in October, and yesterdays brief presentation has already giving rise to some good suggestions of ways to refine the above – so I’ll blog some more on it soon.

 

Digital innovations are not always digital (and other reflections on youth-focussed digital innovation lab design)

[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.

Event: Social Media and Youth Engagement Hotseat

[Summary: join me for an online conference hotseat on social media and youth engagement next Thursday]

Last year I was involved in a project in Nottingham called Measure-Up, exploring youth-led approaches to promoting positive activities through a range of different digital tools. It resulted in the Measure Up handbook, a step-by-step eight-week guide to using social media to promote activities for young people, and for youth projects to develop their online presence.

Next Thursday I’ll be joining some of the team who were involved to take part in an online hotseat on the LGA Communities of Practice platform sharing learning from the project. More details below:

How can social media support you to engage with young people and at the same time increase the uptake in positive activities?
 
Join the online discussions with Nottingham City Council on Thursday 4 August between 11:00 – 13:00
  
Click on the link below to access the draft case study, vox pops and online discussion:
 
Please join us via the above link on Thurs 4th August at 11:00 – 13:00 to hear more about the approach and discuss:
  • which social media tools young people wanted us to develop and which ones they told us they wouldn’t use
  • how social media increased the uptake of positive activities
  • how a youth-led approach helped to promote youth participation in a range of activities, supporting wider agendas such as anti-social behaviour, community engagement and civic participation.
Speakers:
  • Frances Howard, Arts & Education Officer, Nottingham City Council
  • Esme Macauley, Marketing and Communications manager, Nottingham City Council
  • Tim Davies, Director, Practical Participation.
 
Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage with their peers in discussing the findings from the projects .
If you are unable to join us on the day please feel free to add any questions beforehand. All the information will remain on the Communities of Practice place so can be revisited at any time.
If you want more information about how hotseats work – please go through this link –

Open Personae: a step towards user-centred data developments?

[Summary: reflections on data-shaped design, and adding user persona as a new raw material in working with open data]

A lot has been written recently about the fact that open data alone is not enough to make a difference. Data needs to be put into the hands of those who can use it to make a difference, and if the only way to do that is as a programmer, or someone with the resources to hire one, we end up with a bigger, rather than narrower, data divide.

Infomediaries, with the technical skills to take data and create accessible interface onto it; to integrate it into existing systems; and to make it accessible to be communicated to those who need it, are a key part of the solution. However, unlike common software and resource development challenges, which often start from a clearly articulated problem and user needs, and then work backwards to source data and information, open data projects often have a different structure. A need is recognized; data is identified; data is opened; and then from the data applications and resources are built. The advantage of open data is that, rather than data being accessed just to solve one particular problem, it is now available to be used in a wide range of problem solving. But, there is a risk that the structure of the open data process introduces a disconnect: specific problems drive demands for open data, but open data offers general solutions – and those with the skills to work with data may not be aware of, or connected with, the specific problems that motivated the desire to open the data in the first place; nor with other specific problems which the data, now it is open, can be part of solving.

When open data is the primary raw material for a project, that data can exert a powerful influence in shaping the design of the project and its outputs. The limitations of the data quickly become accepted as limitations of the application; the structure of the data is often presented to the user, regardless of whether this is the structure of information they need to be able to use the application effectively. Data-shaped design is not necessarily good design. But finding ways to put users back at the heart of projects, and adopt user-centered design approaches to working with data can be a challenge.

The frictionless nature of accessing data contrasts heavily with the friction involved in identifying and working with potential users of a data-driven application. For technical developers interested in experimenting with data in hack-day contexts*, or working in small, time and resource-limited, projects, the overheads of user engagement are a big ask. It’s an even bigger challenge in projects like the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), where with aidinfo labs I’m currently trying to support development of informediary apps and resources for users spread across the globe: users who might be in low-bandwidth/limited Internet access environments, or in senior governmental positions, where engagement in a user-workshop is not easy to secure.

So – without ignoring the need to have real user engagement in a project – one of the things we’re just starting to experiment with in the aidinfo labs project, is adding another raw material alongside our open data. We’re creating a set of ‘open personae’ – imaginary profiles of potential users of applications and resources built with IATI data, designed to help techies and developers gain insights into the people who might benefit from the data, and to help provide a clearer idea of some of the challenges applications need to meet.

So far we’ve created four personae (borrowing one from another project), simply working in open Google Docs so that we can collaboratively draft them, and leave them open to comment to help them develop. And we’re planning to create lots more over the coming months (with fantastic support from Tara Burke who is researching and writing a lot of the profiles), created as an open resource so others can use them too.

I’m keen to explore how these personae can provide a first step to greater user-centered design in data use – and how we can use them as an intuitive tool for us to explore who is being best served by the eco-system of applications and infomediaries around IATI data. I’m also curious about the potential for a wider library of open personae to be used to help other open data projects include users as a key raw material for app building.

If ‘Data + Data-use skills + Involvement of Users’ is a part of ‘effective use’ of open data, then ‘Data + Skills + Understanding of users’ must be a step in the right direction…

Call for Papers: Digital Campaigning Knowledge Exchange

One of my favourite events to be part of over the last few years has been the E-Campaigning Forum – an gathering of online campaigners convened around open space discussions. At the last two annual ECF gatherings we’ve tried to include some discussions of recent research, and, thanks to a great team coming together in 2012 we’re hoping for a full ‘knowledge exchange’ track bringing academics and practitioners together.

The call for papers is below. General registration for the E-Campaigning Forum is likely to open later in the year.

Call for Papers: Digital Campaigning Knowledge Exchange

Charities and campaigning organisations increasingly employ campaigners with digital expertise, with many developing dedicated digital campaigning teams to work on furthering social change goals. The eCampaigning Forum (ECF) has, for the last 10 years, brought together e-campaigning practitioners from across the world for an annual knowledge-sharing event. For more information see www.ecampaigningforum.com

The Digital Campaigning Knowledge Exchange will be a new element of the 2012 eCampaigning Forum (21st-22nd March, Oxford, UK), providing a parallel track of academic workshops alongside the open space discussions of the forum.

There is a wealth of academic and industry research into digital campaigning related topics, but this research rarely crosses over into practice discussions at ECF. Our aim is to foster meaningful links between researchers and practitioners, with a view to bringing relevant, informative research to digital campaigners, and connecting academics and researchers with live datasets and experience to draw upon.

Topics

Based on feedback from participants in 2011 we are inviting researchers with interests in the following areas to propose short papers to present, for discussion in a series of mixed academic and practitioner seminars throughout the event. Based on the papers submitted, three topics will be chosen.

  • The role of digital tools and communication in enhancing engagement to a cause
  • Demographics of digital mobilisation – Is e-campaigning inclusive? Which different demographics and patterns of technology use should campaigners consider?
  • Cross-country perspectives on digital campaigning – Including political and social issue campaigns. How do different national contexts compare?
  • Research methods for digital campaigners – How to collect research-ready datasets; how to employ innovative methods – including social network analysis and digital ethnography; how to combine qualitative and quantitative research methods;
  • Innovations in mobile and web technology; what do new services and approaches have to offer social change campaigns?
  • Approaches to crowd-sourcing and mobilising digital volunteers;
  • Data, data mining and ethics in digital campaigning.

We are particularly keen to have contributions that provoke debate or point to future directions for practice in digital campaigning. Specifically, we are keen to hear from academics that can provide practical suggestions for e-campaigners in additional to any theoretical or methodological insights. Poster submissions are also welcome.

The Digital Campaigning Knowledge Exchange will take place in three sessions on the 21st and 22nd March 2012. Each session will consist of 2 – 3 papers, followed by discussion. Knowledge Exchange delegates are invited to particulate fully in the eCampaigning Forum, including the open space sessions. Academic participants without papers are also welcome to apply as delegates to the eCampaigning Forum.

Academics making a presentation in the Knowledge Exchange will be eligible for a reduced fee if required. Accommodation and meals are available on site at an additional cost.

Papers can be submitted for inclusions in a short peer and practitioner-reviewed 2012 eCampaigning Forum proceedings to be produced after the event.

Research connections

E-campaigners also generate a wealth of data from e-mail metrics and campaign response rates, to social network data and supporter profiles. Space will also be dedicated at the 2012 ECF to creating connections between researchers looking for data to draw upon, and practitioners with live datasets. Discussions will explore how practice data can be made available for research, and how practitioners can draw upon research data and findings more effectively.

Call for Papers

Abstracts of between approximately 200 and 300 words should be submitted to academic@ecampaigningforum.com by the 16th September 2011. Accepted presentations will be notified during October.

Programme Committee

  • Anastasia Kavada, Senior Lecturer, Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster
  • Janelle Ward, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam
  • Duane Raymond, Founder and Director, FairSay and eCampaigning Forum
  • Jess Day, eCampaigning writer and consultant
  • Tim Davies, Independent Researcher & Web Science PhD Student, University of Southampton