How to use multimedia tools to engage children and young people in decision-making

[Summary:Trying to undo a bit of scarcity thinking from the voluntary sector: this time, PW How To Guides]

A long time ago I wrote a resource for Participation Works called “How to use multimedia tools to engage children and young people in decision-making”. The work was funded through a Big Lottery Fund (BLF) grant to Participation Works to support the third-sector with youth participation, and all the published resources were being made available freely online.

It seems that since that grant has ended, Participation Works have decided to restrict free online access to all the digital copies of the resources that BLF money funded, including the guide I wrote: they now want to charge for it.

I don’t. I didn’t write it to be sold. I wrote it to be shared and on the understanding that it would be freely available online. So you can grab your copy here: How to Use Multimedia to Engage Children and Young People in Decision Making (PDF)

[Update 22nd July 2010: With much reluctance I have had to remove the download link to this guide. It was my hope that this blog post would (a) ensure the continued availability of a resource which was written for free dissemination; (b) register my feeling that Participation Works had breached the trust on which the original writing of this resource was based and ensure that others were not suffering from that breach of trust also; (c) provide a gentle provocation to encourage PW and others to think about the messages they are sending out to the sector. Sadly, it does not seem that the Participation Works Consortium took it in that spirit.

I bear no ill-will towards members of the Participation Works Consortium. It is possible some interpreted my posting of this guide as a ‘competitive’ or aggressive act and an act of  Practical Participation. It was neither.

This is my personal blog, and whilst I don’t draw a strict distinction between personal and company posts – intended this post in a personal capacity, expressing my belief in the importance of openness, abundancy thinking and values-based practice. If any offence was caused to any individuals or organisations – my apologies.

For potential users of the guide: I believe the How To guide contains some useful concepts, although it’s technical content is now out of date. If you are interested in the topic of the guide, and can’t find other resources that support your practice, please get in touch as I hope to be able to put together a freely available Creative Commons resource on this topic in the near future.]

It’s only a basic resource, and you will no doubt find lots more information online in space such as Youth Work Online but I thought it important to make sure it did remain freely available on the web.

(As a serious point: it’s pretty worrying to see how many voluntary sector organizations, particularly infrastructure organizations, are shifting into scarcity thinking right now – imagining that by starting to charge, or charge more, for resources in a time of scarcity they will be able to sustain the same old work. A time of scarce financial resources is no time to start restricting your reach by putting in pay-walls. It’s time to build and innovate on legacies of work, not to try and commercially exploit them. Perhaps this is easier to say when freelance and I’m used to the uncertainty of the future – but organizations with a social mission need to remember that the missions are bigger than the organizations – and it’s social change, not organizational maintenance that should come first…)

Money Saving Council.com?

Filed under: ideas that I’d like to explore more… but that someone else is probably better placed to take forward (with a bit of political commentary thrown in too at the end).

I’ve been dealing with quite a few local authority finance departments over the last few weeks as bookings have been coming in for the Connected Generation conference. And I’ve been somewhat startled by how much time and effort it takes for a local authority to make a simple payment for a member of staff to attend an event being run at cost.

Some of the finance systems and processes clearly have room of significant small savings to be made on every transaction – by switching to electronic communication and BACs rather than cheque for example. However, I suspect some of the other cumbersome processes I’ve come across are the result of past attempts at efficiency savings. And in some cases, there are good reasons (audit purposes etc.) for extra steps involved in the local authority process – albeit that those extra steps need not be quite as convoluted as many appear to be.

All of which got me thinking: there exists the potential for many small savings across government. But just cutting costs from on high is often counter productive – in many cases failing to create real reductions in spending, but also in many cases, leading to unintended consequences down the line.

So where is the online resource allowing government staff to share the tips and tricks they have used to reduce costs? And sharing learning about unintended consequences of certain cost-cutting approaches?

In response to a Tweet yesterday which shared this pondering, @lmbowler suggested that might be a ‘SaveMyCouncilTax.com’. Perhaps. Although personally I’m more for ‘MakeOurMoneyGoFurther.com’. I know we’re heading into a period of cuts, but I don’t need government to put money back in my pocket – I want government to be addressing social injustices and inequalities – making sure that it’s making the most of our funds: not wasting money, or taking on roles that people can now take on themselves through digitally mediated collective action, but investing in the (many) places where we still need government to be building the foundations of a more equal and happier society.

Where is DFID spending money on youth, and other interesting project data mash-ups

I was down in London again on Saturday for the AID Information Challenge – another data-focussed event, but this time looking at International Development Data.

One of the main datasets we had to work with was the DFID Projects Database – a list of all the different development projects the Department for International Development has been funding over recent years, and has funding committed to in the future. Given I’ve recently finished getting the DFID funded ‘Youth Participation in Development‘ guide online, I initially thought I would explore how to link project data to the case studies in that guide. However, I soon found myself joining in with a team of others who were trying to visualise the projects dataset in more general ways.

The result: a faceted browsing mash-up using the fantastic Exhibit framework – turning this into this.

The faceted browser means that you can select different countries (only by their country code at the moment), years, funding types or funding programmes and explore the different project funding DFID has been giving out to these.

Click through to the Map view, and where funding went to a specific country you’ll be able to see a map of where the funds were distributed. (A lot of funding goes to regions or is non-specific geographically – at the moment this just display under the ‘could not be plotted’ above the map).

Even though I didn’t work directly with the Youth Participation in Development Guide, down at the bottom of the list of facets you will find one to help explore youth-related funding: you can pull out all the projects which include ‘Youth’ or ‘Young People’ in their project titles or descriptions.

Thanks to the Publish What You Fund and Open Knowledge Foundation teams for organising the day 🙂

Where will you be on 7th May?

I’ll be thinking about the future. Not necessarily political futures, I doubt the dust will have settled by Friday 7th, but the future of work with young people and the impact of digital technologies whilst chairing the Connected Generation 2010 Conference.

This will be the third Connected Generation event (well, the first was called UK Youth Online, but we changed the name to avoid confusion with UK Youth), but this time we’re doing things slightly differently – holding it on a week day to enable new participants to come along through their work – and including some speakers and workshops to spark discussions before we go into an afternoon of open space sessions.

I’ve mentioned the event already on this blog just a few posts back, but as it gets closer we’re keen to make sure everyone who wants to come along is signed up before we finalize plans for the day. So, if you’re thinking of coming, but you’ve not registered yet, get your booking in before the end of the week (16th April) and you can use the discount code ‘TIMSBLOG’ to get £10 off the already very-good-value price.

More details and booking here…

Youth Participation in Development: A Guide for Development Agencies and Policy Makers

Today saw the launch of DFID of ‘Youth Participation in Development: A Guide for Development Agencies and Policy Makers‘ – a new guide created through the work of the DFID Civil Society Organizations Youth Working Group and a young team spanning the UK, Nepal and Uganda, to act as a resource supporting Development focussed organizations and funders to explore how young people can participate as actors in development, rather than just as subjects of development interventions.

You can browse the entire guide online (another little bit of Practical Participation Drupal work) or download a copy from the guides website.

Building things at Rewired State: The Bump Game

[Summary: Documenting the card generators from ‘The Bump Game’ built at Rewired State DotGovLabs]

Update 21/03/10: More details on the project and background now on the Rewired State site.

I often write about youth engagement. My wife, Rachel, works with older people. But the last two days I’ve been part of a team at Rewired State DotGovLabs exploring how digital technologies and local data could be useful for those at a different stage of life, parents-to-be and their babies. This is a brain & link-dump of the two days work.

Rewired State DotGovLabs was a two-day hack-event in which developers and designers started day one with presentations from the teams behind UK Government ‘super sites’ NHS Choices, Directgov and Businesslink, and were then invited to come up with ideas for projects that helped those sites meet some key challenges, or which drew upon data available through those sites. The group I worked with chose to focus on information and data around pregnancy, creating a paper and web-based game (working title ‘The Bump Game’) which provides an engaging way for a mother-to-be and her partner/birth-partner to explore key issues that will arise over the nine months of the pregnancy.

The web-based version of the game should be available at TheBumpGame.com in the near future, but I spent most of my time working on a generator for printable game cards. You can find the final version, as of the end of Saturday, available here.

How does it work
There are two sorts of cards created by the generator.

Game Cards
The cards are created from demonstration questions that were entered into a Google Spreadsheet directly and using Google Forms. The questions are based on content from NHS Choices, particularly a list of content which another team at Rewired State had categorised and meta-data tagged for it’s relevancy to different stages of pregnancy.

The spreadsheet is then pulled into the card generator as a CSV file (Google Spreadsheets can be published to the web as CSV) and a php script works through each question and creates cards.

To add images, we make use of the code developed by Ben Webb for Plings which allows us to tag Creative Commons images on Flickr that will appear in random order on the cards according to the trimester of pregnancy that the question cards relate to.

If a link is provided to back up the information in the question, then we use the bit.ly API to generate a short version of the URL (although members of the team noted that http://nhs.uk is as short as http://bit.ly and an NHS URL Shortener would certainly be a quick-win development for someone to implement). We then include on the card an image tag pointing to the very handy Kawya QR Code generator which means that anyone with a QR Code reader on their phone can simply point the camera of the phone at the square barcode you see on the Answer side of the cards and can get taken direct to extra information.

The game cards are then output with some styling created by Josh and Ivo with the question and answer next to each other, meaning that when printed, you can just cut the page horizontally and fold it to get instant cards.

Unfortunately, most browsers don’t print background images and so-forth used in the cards, and we can’t guarantee how things will format. But, fortunately, another web-service came to the rescue, and right now the ‘Save Page as PDF‘ service from PDFOnline seems to generate two question/answers to a page for easy printing when we point it at the game cards. For example, click here to get it to generate cards for you.

We also wanted the game to have a localisation element to it (imagine GPs or Health Visitors giving a customised local game to newly pregnant women). Some of the questions are set up then to draw upon the NHS Choices API to localise questions and answers to particular postcodes.

To see that in action, press ‘Options and Details’ at the top of the card generator and enter your own postcode, then take a look again at the nearest GP question card.

Local Service Cards
I also made use of the NHS Choices API to allow the tool to generate other card-sets based on local postcodes. So, from ‘Options and Details’ you can generate a set of 10 cards each for nearest GPs, Hospitals, Stop Smoking Services, Parent and Child Services, Alcohol Services and Mental Health Services for any postcode (select type of card first and then enter your postcode).

The cards make use of the Google Static Maps API to print a map of the location of the service on the card, along with QR Codes that take users to details of the service on NHS Choices. The cards also display a count of comments that have been left on the service in question on NHS Choices, although right now only a count of comments is available in the NHS Choices API – meaning giving any further details isn’t easy without scraping the data.

Again, these cards can be printed through the Save Page as PDF service for easy printing.

Playing the Game
The draft rules of the game itself are available here – and as soon as a copy of the game board is available online I’ll put a link to that.

Next steps
I’m not sure where this project goes next – but I’ll update this post when I hear more from other members of the team about future ideas for the project.

I’m most interested in the web->printed cards aspect of the code, and will see what I can do to (a) open that code up (b) improve it and make it more general for creating cards on all sorts of services.

My own learning about the process of how a hack-day happens will also feed into the Open Data Impacts project I’m currently undertaking for dissertation research.

Costing the impacts of digital exclusion

[Summary: Oxford Internet Institute (on behalf of the National Audit Office) are consulting on a draft methodology for measuring the impacts of digital exclusion]

Principal Components Analysis - see http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/digital-exclusion/ for details. How much exactly does digital exclusion cost? Both the cost to individual without access to digital technologies. And the cost to government.  A PWC report last year put the cost at £22bn, but it’s not entirely clear how that figure was reached, or, more importantly, how such a study would be replicated to track changes in the costs of digital exclusion.

A team at the OII and LSE were commissioned last year by the National Audit Office to sketch out what a long-term method for reliably measuring the impacts of digital exclusion might be – and they’ve just launched an online consultation on the methodology.

I saw the methodology in a seminar a few weeks back – and there are some interesting elements to it well worth a look. So if you’ve got a digital inclusion/exclusion interest – do take a look and drop in a few comments.

Connected Generation 2010: The Conference

Lots of people have been starting to ask me when the next ‘Connected Generation’ event will be taking place. Well, thanks to the sterling work of Katie Bacon, we’ve just booked The Watershed in Bristol for 7th May 2010 to host Connected Generation 2010 – a one-day conference exploring youth engagement and technology in 2010. Based on feedback from participants at recent training events, and on the positive response to the Beyond Twitter event we ran up in Wrexham last year, we’re trying a mixed Conference and Open Space format again – with a morning of top-quality input from speakers and a range of pre-planned workshops, followed with an afternoon of curated unConference, where delegates can set the agenda and direct the conversations.

Bristol Watershed - the Venue

I’m delighted that key speakers at the event will include a gender balanced panel with:

We’re still in the process of confirming the workshop programme, but plans include:

  • Ethics and ICT – workshop with Andy Phippen from Plymouth University;
  • Promoting Positive Activities with Social Media with Steven Flower from Plings;
  • Safe and Sound Foundations – proactive approaches to safe social media engagement with young people, staff and volunteers;

If there is a workshop you would particularly like to see, drop in a comment and I’ll see what we can do…

Full details and online booking available here. (If you can’t order online because your organisation needs invoicing etc. just drop me a line…)

Fingers crossed, we’ll also be using the event to launch a new ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media’ resource which Katie and I are hard at work drafting, and, if you want, you can pre-order a copy when booking your place at the conference.

Content analysis, tagging, linked data and digital objectivities

I’ve tried to keep musings on research methodology & epistemology mostly off this blog (they are mostly to be found over on my just-out-of-stealth-mode ‘Open Data Impacts’ research blog), however, for want of somewhere better to park the following brief(ish) reflections:

  • Content Analysis is a social science method that takes ‘texts’ and seeks to analyze them: usually involving ‘coding’ topics, people, places or other elements of interest in the texts, and seeking to identify themes that are emerging from them.
  • One of the challenges of any content analysis is developing a coding structure, and defending that coding structure as reasonable.In most cases, the coding structure will be driven by the research interest, and codes applied on the basis of subjective judgements by the researcher. In research based within more ‘objective’ epistemic frameworks, or at least trying to establish conclusions as valid independently of the particular researcher – multiple people may be asked to code a text, and then tests of ‘inter-coder reliability‘ (how much the coders agreed or disagreed) may be applied.
  • With the rise of social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, and the growth of conventions of tagging and folksonomy, much online content already has at least some set of ‘codes’ attached.For example, here you can see the tags people have applied to this blog on Delicious.
  • Looking up any tags that have been applied to an element of digital content could be useful for researchers as part of their reflective practice to ensure they have understood an element of content from a wide range of angles – beyond that which is primarily driving their research.
  • (With many caveats) It could also support some form of ‘extra-coder reliability’ providing a check of coding against ‘folk’ assessments of content’s meaning.
  • The growth of the semantic web also means that many of the objects which codes refer to (e.g. people, organizations, concepts) have referenceable URIs, and if not, the researcher can easily create them.Services such as Open Calais, and Open Amplify also draw on vast ‘knowledge bases’ to machine-classify and code elements of text – identifying, with re-usable concept labels, people, places, organizations and even emotions. (The implications of machine classification for content analysis are not, however, the primary topic of this point or post).
  • Researchers could chose to code their content using semantic web URIs and conventions – contributing their meta-data annotations of texts to either local, or global, hypertexts.For example, if I’m coding a paragraph of text about the launch of data.gov.uk, instead of just adding my own arbitrary tags to it, I could mark-up the paragraph based on some convention (RDFa?), and reference shared concepts.From a brief search of Subj3ct for ‘data’, I quickly find I have to make some fairly specific choices about which concepts of data I might be coding against, although hopefully if they have suitable relationships attached, I may be able to query my coded data in more flexible ways in the future.
  • All of this raises a mass of interesting epistemic issues, none of which I can do justice to in these brief notes, but which include:
    • Changing the relationship of the researcher to concept-creation – and encouraging both the re-use of concepts, and the shaping of shared semantic web concepts in line with the research;
    • The appropriateness, or not, of using concepts from the semantic web in social scientific research, where the relatively objectivist and context free framing of most current semantic web projects runs counter to often subjectivist and interpretivist  leanings within social science;
    • The role of key elements of the current web of concepts on the semantic web (for many social scientific concepts, primarily Wikipedia via the dbpedia project) where the choice of what concepts are easily referenceable or not depends on a complex social context involving both crowd-sourcing and centralised control (ref the policies of Wikipedia or other taxonomy / knowledge base providers).
  • The actual use of existing online tagging, and semantic web URIs as part of the content analysis coding process (or any other social scientific coding process for that matter) may remain, at present, both methodologically challenging, and impractical given the available tools – but is worth further reflection and exploration.

Reflections; points to literatures that are already exploring this; questions etc. all welcome…

Curating a conference: young people in a digital world

This is a quick blog post to link to the videos and social reporting content from last week’s Young People in a Digital World conferences in Wales which are now available through the newly launched Digital Youth Wales network.

You can find over five hours content, including a fantastic panel discussion with young people from Swansea schools and colleges, insights from e-Moderation and Moshi Monster’s Chief Community & Safety Officer, my interview with Tanya Byron, and some great examples of digital youth work from Swansea. You might even find a clip of me trying to unpack how, through the lens of youth work values, the Internet provides an exciting opportunity space for youth work.

Curating social reporting

As well as the webcast recordings (created by the ever friendly and professional Richard Jolly and Diarmaid Lynch) the event was also comprehensively ‘socially reported’ with live-blogging, video interviews and more being co-ordinated by David Wilcox and Chie Elliott.

All of which, thanks to the kind support of Sangeet from WISE KIDS who organised the conference, gave me a chance to try out further exploration of curating content from social reporting. Building on the IGF09 Drupal+FeedAPI framework, I’ve put together a micro-site within the Digital Youth Wales site which links together a record of live-blogging, with the webcast video, and any informal social reporting videos for each session.

Take a look here to explore the individual sessions – and do let me know your ideas for how this sort of social reporting aggregation could be improved or further developed…