timdavies – Page 12

Generation Y and Digital Participation: RIGP 2011

[Summary: Notes for a presentation on ‘Generation-Y’ and public services hosted by Institut de la Gestion Publique (Institute for Public Management), delivered on 27th June 2011, Paris]

Below is a copy of the draft I wrote for a round-table discussion starter at today’s ‘Generation-Y and public services’ conference hosted at the Institut de la Gestion Publique in Paris. Whilst most of the conference had explored issues around ‘Generation Y’ as employees in public service (disappointingly without, I must add, any other members of ‘Generation Y’ taking part!), the round table I took part in looked at how government can engage ‘Generation Y’ in policy making. I promised to share this draft, and to add a few links to further resources, which I’ve done below. You can find a write-up of many of the other sessions in Andrew Krzmarzick‘s excellent live-blog on the GovLoop site.

Generation Y and Digital Participation: RIGP 2011

“It is a pleasure to be speaking with you at today’s conference.

I get involved in a number of different youth policy related events and activities – and having just turned 26, I often have to check the definition of ‘youth’ being used to see whether I quality as part of the ‘youth caucus’, or whether I’m really there solely as a contributor or facilitator. Fortunately, when people define ‘Generation Y’, the usually pick either 1980 or 1985 as the years when technology started to become ubiquitous. These years are used to pick out the birth of a generation who came of age with the Internet, mobile phones, multi-channel and interactive media all around: so fortunately, with a 1985 birth date, I don’t need to always check whether or not I’m ‘in’ Generation-Y. And yet, defining a generation: drawing a boundary around it and assuming that there is more similarity between children, young people and young adults born over a particular span of years, than there is similarity between certain sections of that group and other age groups; or emphasizing the commonality of the generation over it’s diversity, can be dangerous and misleading.

The digital platforms that particular groups of teenagers or young adults choose to use, and how they choose to use them, will be affected not only by their age, but by their socio-economic status, by the pressing concerns at particular stages of their lives, and by ‘network effects’. As an aside: understanding networks and network effects is really important to understanding contemporary communication. If, for example, the thing that is most important to you right now is communicating with friends, you will choose the communication tools that best allow you to do that. That’s why we saw students adopt Facebook on campus when it first emerged; and why we now have lots of anecdotal accounts of young people in the UK, particularly teenage girls, turning to the Blackberry phone and BBM, Blackberry Messenger, as their communication platform of choice: it offers low-cost instant messaging, with the important advantage that you can control who is on your friends list and retain some privacy – something increasingly important as Facebook has shifted it’s privacy settings to a more public default and become a place where parents are increasingly joining the network.

Even when we understand that Generation-Y is diverse in itself, and that no-one approach will engage a whole generation, we also have to also recognise that communication technologies, whilst often adopted and explored en-masse first by young people, diffuse throughout society over time. New communication technologies create new possibilities for all of us. The pioneers of new approaches to policy making come from all age groups. Just over a week ago I was at Local Gov Camp – a Saturday gathering of committed local government technologists in Birmingham, giving up their own time to talk about digital possibilities for government practice. I looked around the room, and it wasn’t age that defined the community: it was a commitment to improving public services, and an interest in how communication technologies could help us do that.

So, I’m not going to talk much about Generation-Y in what follows. But I will talk about two things: (1) how technology creates new opportunities for public participation in policy making; and (2) how it creates new ways to include young people – not as generation-Y, but as a group who have consistently been excluded from policy making.

Identifying the gap

There is undoubtedly a gap between the way public services communicate, and the way many citizens want to communicate with their government. And that gap has been created, to a significant extend, by communication technologies.

But we can understand that gap in two different ways. Firstly, we could understand it as a channel gap. Government is not communicating through the right channels. It’s still using letters, leaflets, posters and broadcast channels as it’s default mode of communication. Where government is online, which is almost always now is, it creates static websites with limited opportunities for interaction. The channel gap analysis highlights the need for government to be present where citizens are – taking government onto YouTube, to Twitter and to Facebook – providing services on digital TV and mobile phones – and being more dynamic in how government information is presented. However, the gap is not just about the channels through which government communicates. Having a Facebook page isn’t digital government. Digital technology has also created an expectations gap.

The expectations gap is far harder to bridge: but much more important to address than just the channel gap. It involves far deeper organisational and cultural change in the way we do government. What new expectations have we got to meet?

1) An expectation of open information – with the cost of publishing brought near to zero – the expectation is that all content should be available just a search query away. Yet much public sector information remains hard to find. And whilst some areas of the public sector are embracing open data, data on what government is doing remains hard to find. And there is an expectation of personal information too: when I order a product from an online retailer, I can track it’s progress to me – yet when I recently had to order a form from the UK Tax Office which I was promised would be sent out by the next post, I had a frustrating wait of two weeks with no way of checking whether it had been sent and lost in the post, or simply not despatched yet.

2) An expectation of comment – research by Consumer Focus found that “UK consumers are leaving well over 100 million comments a year” on the web about services they have received. A chunk of those will be about public services. Consumer Focus also found people are far more likely to trust what other consumers are saying about a service than what the company (or government) are saying. Just about everything on the modern web has a comment feature, or a ‘like’ button, or some way to leave your mark on it or share it with your network. How often is that the case with government spaces?

3) An expectation of interactivity. Getting good information online and making space for citizens to leave comments as feedback, or as peer-support for others, is relatively easy. Meeting expectations of interactivity requires more attention. More than once I’ve posted comments on Twitter mentioning particular companies and problems I’m having with their services, and within minutes I’ve had replies from those companies offering to help solve the problem. The expectation of responsiveness created by instant communication highlights the slow replies I get when I contact my local council, or the even slower replies (if there is any feedback or reply at all) when I engage in a public consultation.

4) An expectation of collaboration. When communication was slow it made sense to to package problems up into processes based on a limited number of communication transactions. I fill in a form or respond to a survey; government thinks about it; maybe a request for more information comes out; I reply; a decision is made. A slow process, and one of interaction rather than collaboration. But when tools like Google Documents hold out the promise of collaborating together instantly on documents and plans; when I realize that I can input better into the policy process by joining online discussions rather than filling in consultation forms; and when digital technologies allow communities to self-organise and take ownership of their own problems, the need is for government able to collaborate through new communication tools, not just use some new channels for old processes.

These are by no means universal expectations. Many of the most excluded in our societies have learnt to expect very little from governments when it comes to participation and policy making – and we must pay attention to managing expectations – both by helping the most demanding to understand (and engage with) the challenges of government, and by working to raise the expectations of the most disadvantaged. However, these expectations, perhaps more common amongst younger demographics who don’t have other expectations to replace them, but expectations found across society, present challenges for governments to meet.

A mix of approaches – engaging children and young people

I want to turn now to look at a number of quick case studies of online engagement, and to talk about how they offer opportunities to challenge age-discrimination by involving young people in decision making. When I talk about young people I’m interested not only in young adult employees, but also children and teenagers. I believe that children, young people and young adults are all key stakeholders in policy-making and should have say in decisions that affect them, and affect society as a whole. I also believe children, young people and young adults all bring particular contributions to policy making and are an asset to be drawn upon.

I’ve got three brief case studies: one of individual engagement; one of policy opened up for comment; and one of collaborative policy discussions.

Firstly, three years ago I was working with youth workers (I think the French term for this group of professionals may be ‘social pedagogue’) who wanted to involve excluded teenagers in decision making. They found that, with young people living across a wide geographical area, it was expensive to get groups together to talk about issues face-to-face: and the inconsistency of the groups who could get together at meetings made developing conversations difficult. Based on feedback from young people, they started to explore using social network sites like Facebook as a low-cost tool for holding discussions and engaging (PDF). It involved the youth workers switching to a new channel to engage with young people, and to support them to identify how to get their views into the policy process. Some of that work feeding into the policy process still involved writing reports and making presentations – but it was facilitated online. But more than a new channel, it involved youth workers finding new ways of working and developing their skills and working practices in order to operate in a new environment: checking in regularly with young people. The choice of Facebook worked because the workers understood it was a space based on relationships. There are many different ways to be present in Facebook, from using it as a broadcast channel, through to engaging in participative conversations. The workers had to identify the right approaches for their participation project. (Useful links: See www.youthworkonline.org.uk for a wealth of sharing learning around youth work engagement with digital communication. See also other posts here on ‘Youth Work 2.0’)

Secondly, and this was specifically mentioned in some of the conference literature, the UK Government has experimented with a number of initiatives to get citizens to comment directly during the policy making process. These started at least under the last government, with some great projects exploring ways of publishing draft government reports for paragraph-by-paragraph commenting. One of the high-profile initiatives of the current government though was to ‘crowd-source’ ideas for public spending cuts in an initiative called the Spending Challenge. Citizens were asked to submit proposals for areas where the government could save money. Submissions were published online, and visitors to the site could vote for those proposals they thought most interesting. Whether or not the initiative was a success depends on who you talk to. Whilst some have objected that many of the comments were abusive, racist or otherwise offensive, it had 1000s of serious submissions, and similar exercises have been tried with suggesting laws to be removed, and a currently regulation-focussed exercise, the ‘Red Tape Challenge’, is ongoing. The team behind the initiative also worked hard to turn it from commenting into conversation – posting regular blog posts updates highlighting the way they were analyzing the input, and what themes they were identifying to take forward into future discussions. (Useful links: See this page for a government analysis of the initiative outcomes and costs; and these posts from delib who built the platform. For examples of different approaches to comment-able policy documents, see the community run WriteToReply, or the Read and Comment platform increasingly used by government departments, and initially developed based on pilot projects within the civil service)

My own experiences of an earlier, similar project*, inviting comments on the coalition agreement, also highlighted some very positive interactive government when I noticed that the terms and conditions prohibited anyone under 18 commenting on the site without parental consent. Under 18s can join the army, have sex, drive a car, pay tax – and many other things, without parents consent – so to need parental consent before you can engage in public policy making seemed wrong. I wrote a brief blog post to that effect. And very soon after the Central Office of Information, who were responsible for the terms and conditions, got in touch asking for more details of why the should, and how they could, update them. As I understand, through a brief collaboration, started on a blog and by Twitter, and continued by e-mail and phone-calls, this ‘accidental’ exclusion of young people through the selection of terms of conditions was removed, and the default terms and conditions for future projects updated.

More work is still needed to make sure the language of initiatives like the spending challenge is accessible to young people, and to equip intermediaries to support young people to engage with them, but at the very least removing artificial barriers to young peoples’ involvement is important.

Thirdly, I want to mention two recent experiences using collaborative online documents in policy-focussed discussions with teenagers and young adults. With the Dynamic Youth Coalition at the Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius last year, and the Youth Forum of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum in Cardiff this year, we’ve used online documents allowing anyone present at the event (or participating from home online) to collaboratively draft the outcome statements. Everyone was editing the same text from their own laptops – and common power dynamics that mean those with the loudest voices shape the text most of all – were challenged. To often in participation processes we find authorities gate-keep the shaping of the policy itself – preferring to ask people for their views, and then go away and remain in control of final texts and documents. Yet with digital technology the chance for real collaborative drafting arises – and in some contexts has a lot to offer.

Of course, these different approaches introduce their own power dynamics – but they also offer great opportunities for improved participation.

If I had longer I would sketch out for you how different digital approaches to participation can fit together – offering young people a range of choices about how to get involved in civic life, and creating a ‘pathway of participation’ that allows both broad and deep engagement through digital media. But for now I will close with some very brief remarks on moving from where we are now to being ready for this digital world.

Addressing the barriers

When your analysis is based on the idea of a channel gap, it’s natural to think the solution lies in investment in new platforms or channels for communication. The real investment needs to be in culture change and skills. I’ve been asked before what is the biggest barrier to government engaging with ‘generation Y’, and I’ve not been able to point to one big barrier. Rather, there are 100s of small ones. Some are technical: for example, if you can’t get a picture of yourself loaded from a digital camera onto your office computer, you can’t have a picture next to your online profile, and that changes the nature of engagement you will have in an online forum. Others are organisational: it takes too long to get sign off to be able to hold a digital conversation. Others are cultural: a fear of failure, when being allowed to, in safe circumstances, fail and learn from failure is a key part of collaborative conversation.

If there has been one big omission however, by the advocates, of all ages, calling for us to take advantage of digital technologies to improve government, it is that they have neglected established models of organizational change and have assumed that others will simply follow their lead. Connecting digital possibilities, with established processes and strategies for managing change: ensuring all of government is able to engage with new tools and ways of working; and making sure citizens and civil servants in all generations can understand this as an opportunity, not a threat; is one of our biggest challenges.”

(*Note, in the talk I incorrectly suggested that the conversation around T&Cs took place in relation to the spending challenge. In reviewing blog posts I’ve realised I was incorrect on that assertion).

Blended services: bringing digital and face-to-face together

[Summary: Instead of funding new ‘online’ services, what happens when we fund ‘blended’ services: can we get realistic cost-savings, and enhanced provision – rather than inefficient pseudo-savings and restricted services]

Each face-to-face contact in the delivery of service is expensive. On online contact can be a lot cheaper. Plus, quite a lot of service users are asking to be able to access services online. It might be a support group for carers; careers advice for young people; mentoring and counseling, or any number of other services that I could be talking about. I’ve seen a number of cases where services take note of the above, and quickly decide that what they need is an online service. Perhaps to replace their current provision, or perhaps as a pilot in addition to it. But generally as a distinct service from existing offerings, and more often than not, with plans to build some new platform for delivering their online service – with a very linear process of consult->build->use.

But, as some of the presentations and discussions at today’s imh2011 (internet & mental health) workshop suggested, that doesn’t really make much sense.

Firstly, evidence was presented from trials of online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Broadly – it was only with a blend of online self-service CBT, and continued direct meetings with practitioners – that positive outcomes, equivalent to those from existing face-to-face services were maintained. Comparing the £50 per-contact cost of a face-to-face session, with the £5 cost of an online intervention, and supposing online offers a £45 saving* only makes sense if the two lead to equivalent outcomes. If what’s really needed is £25 worth of practitioner time, and £5 worth of online provision, including online in the mix can still lead to savings, and significant savings: but it’s important to have a realistic sense of what the savings can be.

Secondly, the challenge with delivering online services is widely acknowledged to be not so much to do with having the right tools, as with having skills and organisational culture to be able to work in new digital ways. So spending all the budget on building an online platform (and expecting that a £5k, £10k or £20k budget is going to deliver a platform to rival existing off-the-shelf offerings that have had £millions invested in them) doesn’t seem the most worthwhile investment. Investing time instead in exploring different ways that a service should communicate digitally – iteratively negotiating different platforms to find those that work for service users and staff – makes a lot more sense.

(There was some, in my opinion, unhelpful talk in a few presentations and workshops about ‘digital natives’ and presentation of statistics on particular technology platforms with the largest market penetration (SMS; Mobiles; Social Networks), with the implicit or explicit suggestion that, as these were the widest used platforms, these were the ones which services should be adopting as digital service-delivery channels. It’s far too easy to gloss over the subtleties of how different communication tools work in practice: and to miss the dynamics that mean how a tool works will change as different network effects kick in. Even if the majority of service users say they want access to services via mobile phone for example, it’s only when you pilot and take an ethnographic or grounded approach to researching how your service works over SMS or smart-phone channels that both you and service users can come to understand whether such a service really makes sense and will have enough uptake to justify more investment. And even then, chances are that changes in the market (e.g. when low-cost data plans on mobile become available to young people), the structure of the network (e.g. when parents started joining Facebook), or innovations (e.g. when the next platform comes along…) mean that you’ll need to take your service to new spaces within the next few years at most. The notion of ‘digital natives’ is particularly unhelpful when trying to understand how young people and adults with complex needs and different life-experiences use, adopts and appropriate technology. Finding low-cost experiments that can help staff teams and service users explore different potential communication tools (why not try holding a planning meeting via skype? take notes on an etherpad? or even try a field-trip to a virtual world or other online community?) and then reflect on their various merits may prove much more valuable than many meetings spent discussing statistics on popular platforms or drawing up specifications to build new platforms).

Thirdly, the culture change needed to engage effectively with digital service provision – a culture change involving being more agile in moving from platform-to-platform – needs to apply to ‘offline’ services as well. If you’re running an online support group, and it becomes apparent that members would find a face-to-face meeting useful too, can you easily find meeting space and resources to help that happen? Rather than booking rooms and times for regular sessions, and then worrying about making sure there are always people there: are there some groups who would prefer online engagement, with the option to organise face-to-face meetings on-demand – perhaps even choosing the coffee shop over the community centre as the meeting place. If the available budget is more transparent to service users, how can they negotiate the balance of how much of it gets spent on digital services, and how much is spent on enabling other provision? Some ‘blended services’ (blending online and offline) might be predominantly face-to-face, enhanced by a bit of online interaction (as simple as using Doodle.com to arrange meeting times, or Facebook to remind people about sessions); some ‘blended services’ might be predominantly digital enhanced by the occasional face-to-face meet up or service. Some blended services could turn out to have no face-to-face at all, but retaining it as an option.

Of course there are big challenges transforming services to work in these ways – but if the alternative is either seeing more services set up ‘online-only’ side-projects based on false cost-saving or demand assumptions, or seeing services fail to take advantage of opportunities to enhance practice, and find reasonable efficiencies through delivering some of what they do in digital ways – then the challenge is, I think, worth engaging with.

So, this post rather unexpectedly seems to have got me to three draft principles of blended provision:

Identify realistic cost-savings from going digital if you budget for a mix of online and face-to-face
Invest in skills, understanding and iterative development rather than platforms
Allow services to be agile in how the mix digital and face-to-face provision; engage service users in setting the balance.

What do you reckon?

(*Figures are illustrative only.)

Reclaiming reflective space

[Summary: Reflecting on reflecting.]

I’ve been blogging far less that I’d like to here over recent months. I’ve been thinking about why that is:

Firstly, the focus of my interests and work since I started writing here regularly have been on quite a journey. I started out with a focus writing on participation and youth engagement; I’ve written a lot on digital media and youth engagement; on fair trade and social issue campaigning; on social reporting and digital dimensions of local democracy; and over the last 18-months on open government data. Right now I’m spending most of my working time exploring open data and linked data in the world of international development, although I’m still involved in projects on all the other themes above. For me, there are connections between all these different issues – reasons I’m spending time exploring them – yet, to most people, I’m sure they don’t really make up a coherent set. So I’ve been self-editing before starting to write posts – worrying that they won’t be of relevance to people still signed up to get e-mail alerts whenever I post anything here.

Secondly, things have been busy. Really busy. Time spent writing reflective blog posts can feel like a luxury. It used to be something I could see as part of a mornings work, but a lot of the project I’ve been working on recently have been based on a set number of days, rather than on tasks, which changes the decision about spending an hour in the morning or afternoon on reflective writing.

Thirdly, I have been writing, just elsewhere and project-specific. I’ve been blogging for the Making a Difference with Data Blog, and on my Open Data Impacts blog. I’ve been trying to contribute to the Youth Work Online shared blog regularly, and I’ve been working on a number of papers that may become blog posts at some point in the future. But for some reason I’ve not been blogging here.

Fourth, I’ve been tweeting. Twitter provides a great space to capture and share insights and ideas day-to-day – and I’ve certainly been benefiting from the ideas, links and resources others share. But it does lack the sort of reflective canvas that blogging can provide, and tweets exist in a stream of context – whereas a blog post can capture and archive more complete thoughts, albeit often provisional ones.

Fifth, I’m aware that when I post something here, Feedburner kicks in and e-mails it to around 100 people who subscribe to this blog by e-mail, and a number of other people get alerts about posts via Twitter or through RSS readers. That can make posting something a little daunting, both for reflective posts like this and for quick announcements of things – as it’s never my intention to clog up your inboxes (particularly as I know my posts get a bit verbose and ponderous on times…).

Sixth, I’ve been frustrated with the design of this blog. I’ve tried a number of routes to a better design – but not found anything that works for me. I’ve been a bit ashamed of how the blog itself looks.

Ok. I think I understand a bit more of why I’ve not been blogging here so much. I’m hoping that taking the time to write down those reasons, and reflecting on them, will help me to reclaim blogging as essential reflective practice.

Rather than having too much on to find time to blog, there’s too much going on not to. In the past I’ve found blogging to be an essential part of making sense of what I’m working on – and I’m in need of that sense-making on a few projects right now. Rather than worrying that the different topics I’m exploring make for a disjointed feed of posts, personal blogging provides a space to reflect on those different threads, to explore them as distinct interests, and to explore where they come together. For all the things that don’t fit into any of the other spaces I’m writing in, or that I want to archive as part of my thinking, this blog can provide a space to put things. Readers always have the option to unsubscribe. The design: well, I’ll just have to put up with it.

So:

I’m going to try and return to keeping this blog as a space for reflective practice. There will still be announcements of things, and content that I want to share somewhere, but I make no promises as to the relevance of things posted here to topics that have gone before.
If you subscribe by RSS or e-mail, I won’t be offended if you don’t want to anymore. I know there are a lot of people interested in participation and youth-work on the e-mail subscribers list who might find reflections on the intricacies of linked data somewhat outside their area of interest, and vice-versa.
I’d off to spend some time reflective writing on topics other than reflection…

A simple story, but a complex strategy

[Summary: A ~~short~~ post of reflections by way of contribution to the Youth Policy Symposium on Participation]

I’ve just been tuning into Howard Williamson’s introductory speech at a Youth Policy Symposium on participation taking place in London today and tomorrow, convened by the Open Society Foundations and the British Council, with help from friends at CYEC. Nicolo from YParticipate summed up Howard’s talk in the following tweet:

“We need a simple story to tell about youth participation, and a complex strategy to implement it”

Which seemed as good a provocation as any to offer some thoughts and connections on that simple story, and complex strategy.

Children’s Human Rights

In the RightSpace project we explored the importance of shifting from a narrative based around ‘exceptionalism’ of children and young people, to a focus on the fundamental rights and personhood of children and young people, and the rights to be involved in decision making that flow from that.

A recognition of the personhood of young people, and a recognition that there are systematic patterns of discrimination against children and young people in society (which Adam Fletcher of Freechild labels ‘adultism‘ highlighting their similarity to other ‘isms’ of racism, sexism, castism, and ageism), cannot be met only by changes to systems and institutions, or by the introduction of policies – but requires – as other isms do – a change of individual and societal attitudes towards those discriminated against.

There are at least two aspects to participation rights:

A right to be heard, and to influence what happens to me as an individual – far too often talk of participation jumps straight in with a focus on large-scale collective decision making, ignoring the many domestic and seemingly mundane contexts in which the views of children and young people are not taken into account. From the moment we can communicate we can express preferences about a situation: from decisions about what to eat, to where to live, to what should happen in a family. These preferences may not be perfectly formed (whose are?), and in general in any social decision making there are many people’s preferences to weigh up. In good decision making, negotiation over preferences leads not only to a decision, but to a transformation of the preferences involved as well. The fundamental simple story of participation is that whenever there is a decision affecting children and young people, they should be part of the negotiation around it.
A right to participate in collective decision making – which might simply be direct negotiation with more actors, or, more often, involves ‘representatives’ discussing issues on behalf of a wider constituency. In global (or even national and local) decision making the groups involved tend to be far from demographically representative of wider populations, and the procedures by which people are selected to participate in these systems have inherent bias against young people being equally likely to be selected to participate. Sometimes this is because of particular structural properties of youth (having had less years to gain certain key experience), and at other times it is down to discriminatory attitudes (implicit or not) of adultism. However, we also have to recognise that many other groups are systematically excluded from these decision making fora (and even when young people are included, it is often only a particular sub-set of young people to do get included – the bias towards young mens participation over young women’s in some contexts being one example). To promote children and young people’s participation in collective decision making on the basis of rights and democracy, without promoting deeper forms of democracy which seek far wider inclusion than those we conventionally operate with is inconsistent.

This suggests that whilst one simple story might be tricky, there are two simple, but radical, narratives we can draw upon in advocacy for youth participation:

Children and young people, are people;
We need deep democracy open to all to participate as equal parties in negotiation;

But what about a pragmatic story?

The story above, about what youth participation is and should be, is liable to charges of idealism. However, unless advocacy for children and young people’s participation is based upon deep principles, we will continue to have many stories: many different pragmatic reasons for youth involvement, and many different ‘strategies’ for promoting participation that flow from them. As I wrote in 2008, having different pragmatic reasons for young involvement is ok, providing you match your engagement approach to the goal. But a foundation in common principles is useful to identify when an youth participation project is an attempt to move towards a realisation of principles of young people’s rights, and principles of deeper democracy, or when projects are uncritically replicating existing power structures and co-opting young people into undemocratic decision making.

Strategy

If finding a simple story is challenging, finding strategies for promoting and evaluating participation is also.

However, rather than further dissertation on strategy, I’ll simple point to two tools I’ve found immensely helpful in strategic approaches to participation:

Hear by Right, co-written by Practical Participation co-director Bill Badham, Hear by Right uses an organisational change framework which puts shared-values right at the centre, and provides a simple model for addressing a wide-range of organisational issues that support participation – from addressing participation in job descriptions, to involving young people in governance.
I ran the shared learning website for Hear by Right for a number of years (now sadly discontinued by The National Youth Agency) as a space for people to share their journeys in promoting participation within their organisations.

Perhaps the one strategic weakness of a Hear by Right approach in the way it was most commonly implemented was that a focus on organisational change could allow organisations to see participation as something done by a particular part of the organisation, rather than working more explicitly to challenge the adultist attitudes of staff and stakeholders right across the organisation.
The Matrix of Participation (a copy is in this post) which sets out a grid of participation methods, and uses the (contested) ladder of participation to highlight that participation is not a one-dimensional thing in organisations or communities. Just having formal structures for participation is not enough, they need to be linked to other forms of participative structure – allowing a range of ways for children and young people to be involved in decision making.

Change

The question of “What changes?” has already come up in the Youth Policy Symposium (as I watch on the webcast). A big elements of later versions of the Hear by Right tool was a focus on collecting stories of change as a means of ensuring participation was not just tokenistic, but led to visible and measurable change. However, if participation is based on the principles I’ve suggested above, of personhood and democracy, the fundamental question is not necessarily “what has changed?”, but is “who was empowered in the negotiations?”.

Youth participation often seeks after fast change: after all – the time in which one can be ‘officially’ part of youth participation structures is a limited one – and we all want to see change as a result of our actions. But sometimes all democratic decision making has to face that decision making in diverse groups is complex, time-consuming and difficult.

As I write I realise the role of change in participation is something I need to give more thought to, but at least we can separate out two key questions:

What has changed on the substantive issues children and young people were bringing to the table?
What has changed in making the decision making environment more inclusive, and more deeply democratic?

Too often we mix up those two questions.

A changing world

This post has already become longer than I’d planned, and raised various issues I need to go and explore more. But I want to also mention the importance of recognising the global, digitally connected nature of the world we are living in when developing any strategies for promoting participation.

Although early days of utopian thinking about the democratising potential of the Internet are passed, it still has phenomenal potential (and existing impact) as a tool for creating new forms of participation, models of negotiation, and spaces where ageism and discrimination can be challenged.

I hope discussions at today’s Youth Policy Symposium will help develop further visions for participation in the 21st century and will explore not only formal structures, but also more fluid ways of children and young people participating in public debate and decision making.

Connected Generation 2011 – unConference on digital media and youth

I’m just coming to the end of the formal Youth Work Online Month of Action where I’ve been working to explore ways of taking forward action to promote digital skills, literacy and practice amongst professionals and volunteers working with young people. Lots to blog about it in the coming weeks, but for now I just wanted to let you know about the most important bit of the month, which, due to somewhat slack organisation on my part, is in fact taking place on the 21st May rather than this weekend: Connected Generation 2011 – the annual free unconference of the Youth Work Online network – open to anyone working with young people wanting to explore digital dimensions of their work.

Booking is now open – and more details are below…

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The annual event for anyone exploring digital dimensions of work with young people.

The Connected Generation unConference is back for 2011 on 21st May at The Hub Kings Cross, London.

This one-day free open space event brings together practitioners from youth work, participation and voluntary youth projects with digital media developers and experts to share ideas and practice, to explore what the digital world means for young people’s lives, and for services seeking to support young people as they navigate growing up in a connected world.

The agenda for the event is set on the day, and built around the ideas, experiences and questions that participants bring. Topics at past events have included: understanding young people’s digital media use; creating an online presence for your youth project; digital literacy; keeping young people safe online; creating policies and guidance for practitioners; social media tips and tricks; identifying the right tools for the job; social media for youth participation and local democracy; building websites with young people; virtual volunteering; mobile technology for youth work; and much more.

This years event is running in partnership with social innovation specialists Hub Kings Cross and is hosted at the inspiring Hub venue in central london (2 minutes walk from Kings Cross Tube and Railway station), and offers new opportunities to connect digital youth work themes with ideas of social enterprise and innovation.

Register now for your place!

Comments from participants at Connected Generation 2010:

“Great event, good organic feel to it, how conferences should be!”
“A brilliant opportunity to find out about what other professionals and young people are doing with social media.”
“A real get together of great knowledge from great people!”
“Inspiring”

New to open space events?

An unConference is created by the participants – and it works best when everyone comes prepared to offer a session. Your session could be a short presentation of a project you have recently worked on using digital media for youth engagement; or it could be a topic for discussion; or an issue you want to get the insights of others on.

When you register you have the opportunity to suggest a session you may offer; and on the day Tim Davies will facilitate an agenda setting session where we gather together ideas for sessions. We will then break out into spaces around the Hub Kings Cross

If you’re never been to an unConference before and are wondering what to expect – here is a rough outline of what the day might look like:

10.00am – Arrive, coffee and introductions
10.30am – Suggesting Sessions – participants will be invited to announce and introduce sessions they would like to run during the conference. These will be assigned to a time-slot and break-out room. There will be around 6 break out spaces, allowing 30 different sessions to take place during the day.
11.00am – Parallel Session 1 – some of the sessions just announced will take place and you can choose which to take part in.
11.45 – Parallel Sessions 2 – more sessions taking place
12.30 – Lunch – Pizza & salad
13.15 – Parallel Sessions 3 – more sessions taking place
14.00 – Parallel Sessions 4 – more sessions taking place
14.45 – Break and review – A change to check if any new ideas for sessions have arisen throughout the day so far, and to plan in a few extras
15.00 – Parallel Sessions 5 – a last round of sessions
15.45 – Plenary – come back together to share learning from the day and present findings to our invited panelists.
16.45 – Close

You will get to take part in at least five sessions on key topics in youth engagement and new technology. You are free to move between Open Space sessions – using ‘The Law of Two Feet’:

If you are not contributing to, or taking anything away from a session, you may find there is another discussion you can move to;
If you find a topic you want to discuss is not being covered, you have to opportunity to suggest a new session to explore it – and the facilitators will do their best to make your new session idea take place.

We usually end the day at a local coffee shop or pub for those who can stay in London a bit longer. Coming to London the night before? Post in the Youth Work Online forum to find other people to meet up with?

Logistics

Location

The event is talking place at Hub Kings Cross – easily accessible from Kings Cross and St Pancras mainline and underground stations, and on major bus routes. Full directions are available here. Check thetransport for London website in advance for notice of any tube closures on the day of the event.

Lunch

Lunch is provided and will include meat and vegetarian options. If you have any other special dietary requirement please let us know. If you can, do bring a dessert to share – pack of scrummy biscuits or cake(s).

WiFi

There is WiFi available through the venue. Details will be available on the day.

Twitter Hashtag & Online Network

We’re using #cgen11 as the Twitter hashtag for the event.

Notes, photos and video from the event can be posted at: http://www.youthworkonline.org.uk

Questions & Contact Details

Before the event you can contact us via tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk or info@katiebacon.co.uk

Sponsors

This event is taking place as part of the Youth Work Online Month of Action supported by a Nominet Trust UnLtd Better Net Award.

Nominet Trust UnLtd Better Net Awards

The event is taking place in partnership with Hub Kings Cross.

Hub Kings Cross

The event has been sponsored by:

Online Youth Outreach

Practical Participation

More Open

MoreOpen

Does a Facebook focus do us any favours?

[Summary: Reflections on going beyond Facebook in online youth work. Reposted from the Youth Work Online blog]

When I started out researching Youth Work and Social Networking in 2007 I really wanted to look at ‘Youth Work and the Internet’, but the needs of focussed research meant the boundary was drawn to look specifically at social network sites. At the time, a considerable number of young people were on Bebo and MySpace, and only certain groups were using Facebook, which had not-long opened it’s doors to everyone – having started out restricted to students at selected Universities. Talk of social media would range over a wide range of tools – from YouTube and video sharing, to still take in ideas of online chat and instant messaging, and niche photo-sharing or art-sharing websites. Now when I talk about young people online, the conversation far too often becomes ‘Young people on Facebook’.

There is a tension. The youth work idea of starting where young people are means that Facebook may well be a natural starting point. Bebo and MySpace are all but gone, and Facebook is the starting point for many young people’s online lives. Yet, Facebook is not all there is to the Internet, nor should it be. I’ve undoubtedly been guilty at times of ‘promoting’ Facebook as an youth work setting and writing about online youth engagement in very Facebook centric ways. Facebook is a youth work setting; and it does offer powerful tools for youth engagement. But as well as starting where young people are, youth work principles also encourage us to ‘go beyond’ – and to work with young people to explore alternatives and to be critical about the dominance of Facebook.

What does this mean in practice?

When we think about young people’s media use and online lives – we should be careful not to focus entirely on Facebook.In a presentation today by Stephen Carrick-Davies on how young people in a london Pupil Referral Unit are using the Internet Stephen emphasized “For Internet, read Mobile Phone” and highlighted the messaging and social networking taking place through Blackberry Messenger.
We should mix-and-match different online engagement tools. Even if there is a Facebook point of contact with a project, there might be other more open tools for hosting other elements of interaction and conversations.
I’ve long advocated for making blogging platforms the ‘home’ of any open access online content, with an ‘outpost’ taking the content into Facebook. Facilitating in the online space might involve encouraging young people to move from closed discussions in Facebook, to discussions in blogging spaces or on discussion lists – reflecting in the process on the different impacts of each technology choice.
I’ve watched a recent process with interest where a discussion has moved from an open Ning network into a Facebook group. The velocity of discussion has increased in the Facebook group – but different voices are coming out stronger.
‘Going beyond’ in digital youth work isn’t just about moving from ‘consumer’ to ‘creator’ of digital content, but also from ‘consumer’ to ‘creator’ of digital spaces.
Whilst it is hard to establish any sort of online network that will ‘compete’ with Facebook, the process of setting up and running online discussion spaces (or even just exploring how to create pages and other spaces within Facerbook) can help young people gain critical skills for thinking about the online environment. And even if we don’t create Facebook replacement spaces, we need to raise awareness of the wider potential of the open Internet – beyond centralising and dominant media platforms.

I realise some of this is pretty demanding stuff. How many practitioners would feel they have the digital skills right now to set up and manage their own online spaces – working with open source software and servers to make space. Yet, if I go back to youth work values, and a vision of informal education as helping young people to be empowered in a digital world – it’s exactly some of these skills that workers and young people may need to be exploring together.

What do you think? Do we focus too much on Facebook?

(Image Credit – Webtreat ICONS Etc)

Reflections: Blended facilitation at Commonwealth Young Professionals Forum

[Summary: Reflective learning from an experience of blended facilitation at Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum]

I spent two fascinating days yesterday and Sunday with the Commonwealth Local Government Young Professionals Forum. It’s the first time that an event focussed on engaging under 35s (youth in Commonwealth contexts has a slightly broader definition than most contexts I’m used to working in…) has been organized alongside the main Commwealth Local Government Forum, which brings together 100s of delegates from local politics and government administrations. The main focus of the smaller (about 60 of us) Young Professionals Forum (#cypf11 on Twitter) was to draw out from discussions a series of recommendations to make to the main forum, sharing a young adult voice on issues of local economic development and on youth participation.

Below are some brief reflections on two parts of the process I was involved in working on…

1) Social media orientation & encouraging social reporting

On the Sunday afternoon at the start of the forum we ran a short session introducing the Ning network set up for the event, and offering people quick opportunities to think about different social media tools that could be used for social reporting the event. I ran through posting blog posts and photos to the online network; gave an overview of how twitter could be used at events; and talked about vox-pop style video interviews. Everyone was encouraged to use their own equipment for social reporting; although as not everyone had devices available in the session we had a few practice/interactive activities that didn’t need technology there.

The first, asking people to think about the headline of a blog post they might write during or after the forum, generated some really good ideas – and the suggested headlines that delegates shared revealed a lot about their interests and aims for the event (e.g. ‘Best practices in youth entrepreneurship’, or imagining the post they would like to write after the forum ‘Local Government Forum accepts youth recommendations’).

The second activity, inviting people to practice vox-pop style interviewing of a partner sitting with them, also got people talking and sharing ideas for the event (and felt very similar to a standard ice-breaker, albeit with the addition of getting people’s permission to record them, and trying to manage a camera whilst talking).

On reflection:

A number of delegates commented on the usefulness of a social media introduction. Whilst almost all the young professionals taking part were familiar with blogging, and many had twitter accounts etc., many had not considered how to use these effectively in a conference context (for example, the use of tagging or hash-tags on Twitter was new to a number of people). Given digital communication and sharing messages online can be a key advocacy tool for the messages coming from the forum, a half-hour spent pointing to how digital tools could be used seemed to be useful investment of time.
Even with a good introduction, social reporting still needs facilitating. I switched my attention to the real-time collaboration, and running an afternoon workshop on open data in the commonwealth, and hadn’t formed a dedicated social reporting team. As delegates also got more involved in recommendations drafting, social media activity started to drop off and potentially a lot of stories and case studies that would have been useful to digitally share may have been missed.
My main take-away is to explore how the social media introduction could be integrated with ice-breakers and introductions. The blog post activity could be combined effectively with an expectation or aim-setting activity; and the vox-pop practice with an ice-breaker. Sometime to try next time…

2) Real-time collaboration for statement drafting

The process of drafting a text (statements or recommendations) from an international youth fora is an interesting one. Delegates vary in their experience of political processes, in the backgrounds they come from, and in the degree to which they are present representing a specific group or constituency – either by virtue of a formal mandate (e.g. elected youth representatives; leaders of organizations or networks), or informally adopting a representative role – or to which they solely represent and feed their own views into the process. Bringing together diverse views and voices into a text which can potentially influence policy making, and be used as an advocacy tool, is practically challenging.

There are all sorts of general process issues to be addressed in statement drafting (for example, the way in which processes generally start with a blank sheet of paper, rather than seeking to build on past statements), but one practical one we tried to address at CLGF was the process of typing up the statement itself. I’ve sat in a youth hostel late into the night before along with about 20 other people crowded round a laptop quibbling over phrases and wordings, all whilst one person: the person at the keyboard, acts as facilitator and gatekeeper of the document. At CLGF, instead of typing into documents on individual laptops, we took advantage of Cardiff City Hall’s free Wifi to get everyone typing into Google Documents – made public for anyone to edit – but with a rapporteur in each working group taking main responsibility for typing up their notes. As we moved from individual thematic working groups generating ideas, to the process of drafting a final statement, we moved into one single shared document to edit.

It might be a bit premature to assess how the process has worked, as I’m writing this as the second day of CYPF is starting (alas I’ve had to leave early) and there is still work to be done on the statement – but the process raised a number of interesting learning points.

Some reflections:

From one laptop the facilitation team were able to get an overview of the points emerging from different groups by looking at all the different docs, and to point out overlaps – either adding notes into the Google documents – or going to talk to specific groups (spread out in different parts of the room / different rooms) to suggest making connections with another group on a particular point.
We could use that access to the developing drafts to visualise emerging themes. For example, at lunchtime I put together Wordles of the drafts which a number of delegates noted were useful in getting a sense of the discussions and record being generated. http://network.cyec.org.uk/profiles/blogs/drafting-recommendations
Whilst allowing multiple editors changes the power dynamic associated with one person at a keyboard – by allowing anyone with an Internet access device in a group to directly clarify and update notes – one delegate pointed out that it can lead to (a) some people being left out, as screens become personal again rather than shared; (b) people making edits direct without discussing them – missing on opportunities for dialogue across the table (this matches my experience of sitting in silence at IGF10 drafting a statement in etherpad with a number of other delegates – all the interaction taking place in chat and on the text directly).One practice way to address some of this may be to try and project each document up on a shared screen as well – and to think about having different ‘editing policies’ (possibly enforced with the document sharing settings) for different stages of the process (e.g. during initial idea creation anyone can add anything; during refining thematic papers edits should be discussed; during final changes to a statement, all changes should be approved by the group before being made to the text).
The documents we were using were set so that anyone in theory could access, read and edit them – even if not at the forum. This was mainly for ease (no need to get people’s e-mail addresses to share the document with them), but also seems to me to be a good thing – potentially enabling more enhanced participation and allowing expertise and ideas to be brought in from across the world – regardless of people’s ability to travel to the conference. We didn’t exploit this possibility – and how it could fit into the general processes of statement drafting would need more thought – but it’s an exciting one.
The cost (or lack of) Internet access in hotels is still a big barrier to this process. I was able to set up a MiFi to allow a couple of people back at the hotel to carry on working on the draft, but a lack of affordable WiFi suddenly limited the breadth of possible collaboration.

Seeing how quickly and easily delegates adopted real-time collaborative documents for drafting in a general conference (I was wondering if the YCIG experience was unique to a technology conference), I’m keen to spend more time looking at effective and empowering facilitation techniques in this space – and to see how the process could be developed more.

Diplomacy labs

We’ve only scratched the surface of how digital tools can transform youth fora, and other international gatherings. However, the ingredients of a transformed way of doing business are coming together: remote (or enhanced) participation; understanding the digital record as a fundamental vehicle for driving outcomes of an event and real-time collaboration tools. I certainly hope institutions like CLGF, CYPG and the upcoming Commonwealth Youth Forum in Australia in October take up the challenge of innovating and living out the common conference platform claim that “we need to change the way politics is done”.

Update: Photo Credit to Dan from A-Leap (fab participation, youth and learning people in Wales) for the picture in this post.

Sprinkled stats and the search for data…

[Summary: Data-driven vs. data guided change-making. Reposted from the new Making a Difference With Data website]

I woke up to a tweet this morning from @YoungAdvisors pointing me to their new ‘Big Book of Stats’ and ‘What’s the Real Cost of Cutting’ resources – bringing together statistics from across the youth sector in a quick-to-skim PDF.

I got in touch with Gary Buxton, Young Advisors Chief Exec to ask a few questions about the stats:

Q: What inspired your to collect the figures you have gathered?
When times are tough its even more important to share and collaborate. Our social goals are about creating good opportunities for young people. Having charities, social enterprises and young people all replicating work is distracting and reduces everyone’s ability to deliver. If we all shared a little bit more, we’d all be greater than the sum of our parts.

Q: How easy was it to find the data and numbers you needed?
Both pieces were pretty difficult to pull together. It became a bit of an evening hobby! Stats came from old NYA policy briefings, NCVYS, Twitter, Facebook, Private Consultancy Companies, New Economics Foundation, Prince’s Trust and government sites etc etc. I still really want how much it costs when a young person is excluded from school!

Q: How are you now planning to use these figures?
We use the stats for writing bids and helping the young people we work with write bids and presentations that are well informed and referenced. Knowing your data helps young people make reasoned and compelling solutions to community problems. We wanted to open the data to others who might find it helpful so everyone can work smart and not hard, keep delivering great work, but most of all, make a good case to decision makers, councillors and MPs about how important investing in young people is and the risk of pulling funding from services that young people regard as important.

As the ‘Sprinkled Statistics’ recipe over in the Open Data Cook Book suggests, sometimes using open data is as simple as backing up an argument with the numbers – with no need for fancy visualisation or mash-ups. Resources like Young Advisors Big Book of Stats can make that easier for other groups.

But, as Gary notes, even just collecting the statistics you need from government reports, let alone getting access to raw data to slice and explore it in different ways, can be tricky. And as Paul Clarke questions in a blog post today, is getting the data always the most important part of campaigning for a change? Whilst we might imagine there are clear ‘facts’ about the cost of school exclusions, or patient to nurse ratios, these statistics do not come solely from direct measurement, but are based on calculations from different datasets, and, importantly, rest upon definitions (what is an exclusion; what counts as a direct or indirect cost of exclusion; do you count all the time a nurse is on the ward, or only the time they are available for patient care (not paperwork). As Paul puts it:

…does the cause need the data? Does the search for data delay the obvious? Could the open data revolution sometimes obfuscate more than enlighten? While we’re arguing over reporting standards, boundary definitions and data feeds, real people are hurting and starving.

So where does this leave us? Having access to statistics, data and figures at a local level can certainly help strengthen those advocating for change. And knowing the numbers can inform bids, proposals and smarter working. But perhaps key here is to see campaigning for change as ‘data guided’ and ‘data backed’ rather than ‘data-driven’.

Making a difference with data means knowing how to use it as a tool, but one amongst many in the change-makers toolbox.

Open data quick links: cook books; aid data; campaign camps; MADwData

[Summary: A couple of quick open data links]

The Open Data Cook Book now has a new look and a few more recipes – providing step by step instructions for working with open data. It’s also now Wikified – so anyone can sign-up to edit and add recipes. So, if you’ve got ideas for how people can use open data in creative ways – head over and add some recipes.

On the topic of Making a Difference With Data the new MADwData website is packed full of links and analysis on open data to support change at a local level, particularly organised around different sectors: health, local authorities, housing, transport, crime & education. I’m editing the education section, and have been exploring how open the EduBase dataset really is. Take a look though at the fantastic content from the other editors – all giving some great overviews of the state of data for change in different contexts.

In the MADwData forum Vicky Sargent has been asking about the use of data in library closure campaigns. I’ve been in touch with a lot of campaigning organisations recently who sense that there is real potential for using open data as part of campaigns – but unsure exactly how it should work and how to start engaging with data (and open data advocates asking the same questions from the other direction). Hopefully we’ll be digging into exactly these questions, and providing some practical learning opportunities and take-away ideas at the upcoming Open Data Campaigning Camp in Oxford on 24th March. It’s tacked onto the end of the E-Campaigning Forum, and I’m co-organising with Rolf Kleef and Javier Ruiz. Free places are still left for organisations interested in spending day of hands-on learning exploring how data could help in campaigning against cuts; on environmental issues; and in international development campaigns and funding.

And talking of development funding… (not only a post of outward links; seemless links internally as well!) – last week the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) Standard‘s first version was full agreed. I had the pleasure of working with Development Initiatives on a demonstrator of how IATI data could be visualised, the results of which are available on AidInfoLabs as the IATI Data Explorer – allowing you to pick any country and dig into details of where DFID UK Government Aid spending has gone there – and, where the data is available, digging into the individual transactions.

Skills for the job: digital literacy

In the lead up to the Youth Work Online Month of Action I’ve got an article in Children and Young People Now’s ‘skills for the job’ section, talking about digital literacy. Here’s how it starts:

A lot of what we hear about young people and the internet is focused on e-safety. But digital literacy is about a lot more than that. Digital literacy involves being able to navigate the digital world – making the most of the many opportunities it provides for accessing information, creating connections, having a say, being part of communities and developing skills and knowledge for now and for the future.

Developing young people’s digital literacy needs professionals to engage with the online world – supporting young people to move beyond narrow use of a few social networking websites or apps – to discover the full potential of the internet as a global information resource. It also involves the development of critical skills – enabling internet users to choose what information to engage with. One key part of digital literacy is to know when to multi-task, when to focus, when to be connected, and when to disconnect.

You can read the full article over on the CYPN Website.

In the upcoming Month of Action we’ll be focusing a lot more on these themes – working to build broader networks of practitioners focussed on all aspects of the digital world for young people.

P.S. I’m still on the lookout for a venue for the Month of Action’s unConference. We’re looking for somewhere in London, available on Saturday 16th April, with good Wifi, room for 100 people in break-out spaces, and crucially, either free or low-cost. If you know someone who could sponsor the event by sharing their venue/offices/meeting rooms for the day, do get in touch.