Afternoon papers….

Three presentations at the Young People, New Technologies and Political Enagement conference looking at different ways of engaging citizens and young people online:

Google turns up over a billion online forums – and there has been a lot of rhetoric in the past about using online forums to support e-democracy deliberation – but Kerill Duanne's research seems to show online forums are not working to help political deliberation online. They're inactive or inneffective. So do we need better designed spaces?

Sophia Collins told us about the more structured, time limited and fascilitated 'I'm a Councillor'. Can this engage young people in democracy? What about beyond the time when I'm a Councillor is running? It seems to have been successful at engaging 'the greys' – those who wouldn't otherwise be getting involved. It seems that the 'big brother' time-limited vote-one-person-out-a-week interaction of I'm a Councillor engages young people and meets a need young people feel in getting to know and trust political representatives – but should we always be having to manufacture these opportunities to build trust? How can they be made an organic part of the political process? How can we build on the positive experience of I'm a Councillor?
Also look at: http://www.bigvote.org.uk/outcomes

Anna McDermott from Brisol shared information about Bristol's 'Viewfinder' video consultation project (drupal based by the look of it..) where video was used to launch an online consultation process. Responses to a consultation can be sent in by text, through the online forum, or as video. The project team seeded the site with content gathered through outreach work creating video interviews (it would be interesting to know how many videos were directly submitted to the site…). The site hosted an discussion on the Bristol young people's manifesto which fed into the Bristol young people's select committee. Some reflections on video below.

From the discussion that followed:

  • We can move away from a defecit model – 'this technology is the panacea for engaging this particular group' – and can simply admit we all have different access preferences – and we need multiple-channels of communication to be able to engage people with different communication preferences. (And we need these to be integrated – with different pathways into the same process.)
  • Video inputs might be used to 'back up decisions that are made' – rather than influencing the decisions. It's a equivelent the the 'free text' option on a survey. But is the free-text analysed well enough? Is it consultation-lite without the substative element? How can we make sure people going down the video input route still get the option and are encouraged to contribute to consulation-stats after inputting via video/free-text discussion?

Short reflections:

  • There's a lot of looking at the role of citizenship in promoting e-democracy – but there seems to be a lack of looking at spaces where young people should have power and a right to input. The way to build in e-democracy seems to me to be to build it around Setion 6 rights of young people to influence Local Offer provision, and other local activities. Where power is given, it's harder for it to be taken away.
  • Video can carry a lot of information – but I wonder if its not too much. I can't process 15 video inputs as quickly as I can 15 text-inputs to a consultation or a dialougue – and so the risk is I can hear less views… Do we need better technology to allow analysis of video? Or is video mainly a red-herring technology in consultation and e-engagement – useful only in a limited range of situations? It certainly seems useful to give information – but how is it for gathering information? Bristol transcribe video inputs into text reports – but also make the videos available for decision makers to watch to understand an issue on a deeper level.
  • The design of tools matters. In the same way physical space affects the way interaction works – the 'public digital architecture' (by which I mean how it works for the user, not back-end systems architecture) really matters. But the power matters as well (if not most of all…)

Stephen Coleman on The Policy Challenges of E-Citizenship

Professor Stephen Coleman has written widely on e-democracy, and has looked a lot of young people and e-democracy.

In his opening keynote, Stephen proposed dealing with the anxiety both manfest and latent in our fears about politics being in decline and crisis, and just not working right – by opening up spaces online for young people to engage not just in talking to young people and being heard – but in gaining power and influence.

Stephen's focus appeared to be on encouraging government to lead in creating spaces for young people to participate in real, relatively unconstrained and politically effective discussions, disagreements and deliberations. His vision sounded, on some levels, a radical one – calling on government to allow space for young people to question the very foundations of citizensip – and for government to accept that a legitimate outcome of the discussions that take place could be civil disobedience and a rejection of legal frameworks – and thus discussions leading in these directions should not be supressed and the space should be maintained. However, it seems to me that this is driving not at the creation of government owned spaces – but a recreation of the commons and a creation of a digital dialogical commons – space 'owned' by civil society and not government. Governments role is not to supress this – but as a bureaucracy and with its bureaucratic logic – government is surely not best placed to provide it?

A couple of other reflections jotted in the margins of my notes:

>Drawing on a recent dialogue on Big Brother, Stephen identified that young people might be turned off by the 'symbolic practise of politics' – the grey suited Question Time debates – but that young people are not a-political or apathetic because of that. There seems to be an interesting question in this about why other groups are not turned off by the 'symbolic practise' – and that is perhaps because other groups see that participation in those symbolic practises in a means of accessing power – but for young people, either they cannot see that this would be the case – or the power is not available to be accessed.

>In questions, the issue of how to ensure the already engaged, or those with an axe to grind do not dominate the discussion. Stephen's reply seemed to suggest that we should take this as a separate issue from opening up the spaces. Opening up the spaces is one issue. Making them emancipatory for the excluded is another. This seems a very Schumpetarian understanding of democracy – and not one I'm overly comfortable with. I would argue we cannot disagregate opening spaces up from considering their emancipatory aspects. We may find we have to sequence to create spaces before we make them emancipatory -but this must be a decison reflectivly arrived at with considerations of building a free and fair democracy in mind.

I hope I've not misinterpretted Stephen anywhere. As mentioned, I'm almost-live blogging – so I'll return and fill in links / tidy up posts later this week.

Online forums and hacks (of the journalist variety)

In a presentation about a local Finnish youth website: Vaikuttamo.net

In research conversations with journalists in the local area where the website is based – it was found that all the journalists interviewed used the site as a source for stories. In the case of young people calling for a skating hall in the town – it sounds like journalists were taking young peoples discussions and views from the online forum and putting them to decision makers to get answers on their behalf – and to keep the campaign going in a way that led to a skating hall being built… (!)

That raises some interesting questions:

How many local journalists are picking up positive stories from your local youth website? Is there anything for them to pick up? How can a local youth discussion forum provide positive space for young peoples' voice to cross over into the mainstream media? Or are we going to need some Finnish journalists before we can see the same happening here?

Young People, New Technologies and Poltical Engagement

I'm at a conference on Young People, New Technologies and Poltical Engagement for the next few days and I'm going to hopefully be experimenting with blogging as a way of distilling insights gathered and making sense of the wealth of ideas, learning and input I'm expecting. (battery power and WiFi permitting).

I'll probably be posting without links at first, and I'll come back to posts later in the week to tag and link – as the blogging client I'm using seems not to like tagging posts properly…

Also experimenting with twittering short nuggets that I'm not going to be able to turn into blog posts…

A knowledge jam session

I've just spent a very interesting two days taking part in a online Global Knowledge Jam around 'Collaborative Technology Requirements for Social Change'.

What's a jam?

The online knowledge jam formula (the name parallels a musicians 'jam session') is something along the lines of:

Bring together a group of interested / relevant participants and set aside a time-window when participants will regularly drop into an online 'jamming space' to contribute to discussion space on a specified topic.

In this case, the Jam consisted of around 150 participants from 40 countries with a diverse range of backgrounds but shared interests in online community and its role in social change. The time window was 48 hours. And the discussion space was a moodle forum. And the outcome was fascinating. I'm not sure that discussions stuck that closely to the core questions posed, and it was at times a little tricky to keep track of what was going on (the version of moodle we were using seems to lack a way of just looking at posts updated since you last visited) – but the content was both challenging and inspiring.

To jam again?

The time-limit and narrow nominal focus of the jam (coupled with the fantastic participant list it recruited) meant it was able to generate an impressive breadth and depth of content in a short time. The jam model is certainly one I'm going to explore more – particularly for brining together practioners and other actors in developing further thematic spaces on the Participation Works youth involvement portal.

Arising from the Jam?

That breadth of content generated means I'm going to need more time to fully digest all I've seen in the discussions – but a few headlines arising:

  • Shifting frames of reference
    • Users: My 'frame of reference' for thinking about users of online community and interaction is someone at a desk in an office / home office using their own computer on a broadband internet connection. I'm not thinking about the internet cafe user in Akra in Ghana, or the library user in the UK, the shared computer in a family home, the NGO office where there is just one computer or the remote vilage where the mobile phone is the communication tool, not the computer.
    • Tools: Following on from thinking about the role of mobile phones – near the end of the Jam someone commented about how 'keyboard and screen' focussed the discussions had been. Yet we need to be thinking beyond our online interaction with the online world being QWERTY and 800×600 or above.
  • Drupal for Communities of Practice: There was interest in the Jam in exploring how Drupal Installation Profiles could be used to support Communities of Practice. I'm hoping there are going to be some opportunities to explore this more with some action towards a flexible toolset Jam members and others may feel comfortable using.
  • Requirements for online community: I was suprised by how few of the tools I'm coming to think of as essential were on the radar. I found that perhaps I am coming at online community with a stronger focus on the 'data' than I found in others… which leads me to be really interested in tools for managing the data (visualisation tools / re-mixable content feeds / adding as much semantic data to posts as possible without burdening users). I need to focus some more reflection on whether a focus on the data can be fully compatible with a focus on the relationships mediated through online community – and whether there is a map for making sure they don't come into tension.
  • Technology stewarship: All of which leads me to needing to reflect more on how my work is taking me more and more into the role of (or the 'cult of'…) technology stewardship.

 

More reflections will no doubt unfold soon. But for now I have to head off and make a cheese sauce for a Lasange for visiting parents… (hmm… not sure I'm so good at these informal notes in blogging… but perhaps something else I need to explore more…)

Consultation responses: putting some backbone into it

One of the joys I find in blogging is that just when I'm strugging to find a way to express an idea, I stumble across an idea with similar roots elsewhere that can, hopefully, help make sense of what I was thinking about.

Just such a thing occured with this post from Annecdote about 'Story Spines'. As Shawn explains:

I asked the groups to grab an issue and tell a story explaining what happened. People busily jumped into the activity but I noticed they were just writing dot points detailing their opinions about what had happened. No one wrote a story.

It seems that they didn't know what to do to write a story. I had just assumed that everyone else thinks about stories like I do and has a sense what one looks like. Big mistake!

My next opportunity was at another knowledge strategy workshop but this time with a government department in Canberra. I had remembered Andrew introducing us to story spines so I dug out the blog post. Here is the simple story spine (Viv's example is more elaborate).

Once upon a time…
Everyday…
But one day…
Because of that… (repeat three times or as often as necessary) Until finally…
Ever since then…
And the moral of the story is…(optional)

The Story Spine helps groups to structure their responses to a question or request into the format that is needed to move things forward.

What has this got to do with consultation you might ask? Well, as I was working with colleagues to analyse the notes from flipcharts created at the 3D Dialogues we came to realise that a lot of responses lacked verbs.

'What is good about this?' 'Youth Workers'.

But youth workers what? 'Youth workers helping us'? 'Youth workers being there but staying out the way unless we need them'? 'The particular youth workers we know'? 'Any youth workers'?.

The form of answer illicited by the standard flip-chart recording isn't really what we need to make sense of the dialogue and discussion that has taken place. And that is where some sort of 'spine' for consultation responses might come in handy. A mechanism for encouraging statments with enough specificity to be able to feed meaningfully into future decision making.

So what should the spine for a consultation response look like?

When we were looking at the 3D response we discussed preparing a series of cards with a range of verbs on, and then asking those recording on flip-charts to make sure everything written up includes at least one of these cards – but I fear that a manageable set of verb-cards might be too limiting.

Perhaps instead simply providing some sentence starters like:

“We would like it if…”

“We need…”

“Things are better when…”

Would encourage the more complete sorts of responses we need.

I'll certianly be looking to try something along these lines for the next consultation I'm involved in… and I'll be sure to report back with how it works…

A Civicus World Assembly Portal

Since the Civicus World Assembly I've been wondering about how technology could be better used next year to create more connections and capture more of the discussions that were taking place.

I experimented earlier this year with content-tagging and aggregation – but its reach was very limited. One of the challenges with trying to create an online collaborative dimension to a big event is encouraging those not accustomed to online interactions to view and engage with it. I think, however, Michele Martin has it cracked in her suggestion here that we should be making use of online portal systems as our platform for creating better, more online-integrated, conferences:

Create portals to support better concerning. A few weeks ago, I was thinking about how to improve the conference experience. Portals are another option. Imagine sending an email out to all conference participants with a Netvibes or Pageflakes portal link that includes feeds to weather, newspapers, events, etc. in the location where you'll be holding the conference. It could also include a calendar of events and feeds to the wiki pages I suggested that you use to develop the conference agenda and get the conversation started. It could also include access to MySpace and Facebook modules, audio and video feeds on related content, email, etc. This can also become a way to follow-up on a conference, by adding feeds to those bloggers who are blogging the conference.

Bringing together useful pre/during-conference practical information like local maps, weather etc. with a space to share feeds of content from the conference, and tools for interacting during the conference seems like the ideal solution. For an event like Civicus, it could lead to some really exciting things…

So – all I need to work out is who at Civicus to suggest this to…?

UK Geocoding for Drupal

Interactive maps can be really effective ways of visualising information with a geographic compotent. For example, if you want to find participation workers near you making use of Hear by Right, the Local Network Map lets you see who is around far easier than any listing would.

Up until now, finding out the co-ordinates of a UK address to be able to plot address-linked information onto a map either meant paying a lot to commercial providers for access to a postcode or address database that could tell you – or putting (as the HbR Local Network Map does) with being accurate to within one or two miles by using free postcode databases and geocoders.

No more.

The lovely people at Google have somehow managed to get around the prohibitive costs to provide free UK geocoding giving street-level accuracy.

This makes a big difference to the sort of non-commercial geo-information services it could now be possible to provide for the UK. I'll certainly be looking again at whether we can finally exlore getting a good UK Fairtrade Map system working for local Fairtrade Town Campaigns.

Geolocating the UK in Drupal

Given my firm belief that the best possible Content Management System for almost all forms of web-application has to be Drupal, I've created an update for the Drupal Location Modules UK include files here which makes use of the new UK google geocoding.

Combined with my generic fallback patch which uses the fantastic geonames service to make sure Drupal returns a location wherever possible, this means worldwide geolocation coverage can be very workable indeed.

Still a way to go

Even though Google have made UK geocoding available to the masses, there is still a long way to go before we can really get the full benefit of UK geodata without being saddled with prohibitive costs. Even with the fantastic efforts of Open Street Map we still have no country-wide mapping data that anyone can freely print off to create a local community map, or to use for creative applications. Citizens continue to be charged stiffling fees for accessing public data. For more on the need to bring in big changes to the way public geodata and other data is managed – keep an eye on the Free Our Data blog here.