Fun

I've just been sitting outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank watching adults and children alike run in and out of the 'fountain rooms' on the terrace. It looks fun. In fact it is…

When we ran the Actions Speak Louder awards, one of the top criteria set by the young judges for winning projects was that they must be fun.

How much fun will there be at the Youth Summit conference over the next two days?

One of the reasons I'm keen to find good visualisations for the information that we gather through Youth Summit Live is that visualisation have the potential of making information processing, if not fun, a lot more interesting. But should we be going further? Should we be exploring how games can play a role in events like the Youth Summit?

Anyone know any good games to play at conferences (buzzword bingo aside…)?

Youth Summit Live

On Monday and Tuesday next week I'll be at the Youth Summit co-ordinating 'Youth Summit Live' – an online space for capturing input from the conference, and opening up the conference to a wider audience and range of inputs.

The billing for the Youth Summit sets out a big challenge:

The Youth Summit will herald the new era of service provision for young people with emerging priorities from the Government’s ten-year strategy for children and young people and the Comprehensive Spending Review. The event will explore the Government’s ‘youth offer’ and map out the policy landscape for outcome-driven services for young people and their communities. It will hear directly from a wide range of young people as experts by experience.

This two-day event will bring together Government Ministers, senior officials, leading policy makers, service providers and a panel of 100 young people from across England, forging dynamic links between young people, communities and government. Delegates will take an active part in moving from words to action to help ensure improved services and outcomes for young people.

ScreenshotAnd the plan is that Youth Summit Live will create a platform to capture the mapping, whilst also recording and opening up to wider dialogue, plans for action.

The platform itself is a quickly put together Drupal website set-up with four types of content which both those at the summit and interested parties who aren't there on the day can contribute to:

  • Blog posts – inviting narrative and free comment
  • Where are we now? – Assessment of provision for young people at present (linked to the workshop discussions on day 1)
  • Where do we want to be? – Space to identify priorities for action (linked to the workshops on day 2)
  • Supporting Evidence – Additional content which can inform the dialogues at the Summit

The Summit itself is structured around the Every Child Matters (ECM) outcomes framework, with workshops taking place on each of the five ECM outcomes on both the first and second day. Content submitted to Youth Summit Live can therefore be categorised by ECM outcomes and the plan is to pull out all the content under each heading at the end of day 1, and make as much of it as possible physically present in the workshop rooms for day 2.

I'm also on the look out for good visualisations that can be projected up on walls to help the information collected make a big impact straight away. Suggestions on that front welcome. I'm making use of the timeline widget for drupal, and news bubbles, and I'm exploring some RSS screensavers – but I've so far failed to find an easy-to-implement system to convert rss feeds to newsmaps.

Challenges
One of the challenges we face is that the conference centre WiFi is too expensive to be made available free to delegates, so we have relatively conduits for content input and output. We've got paper versions of some of the 'Where are we now?' and 'Where do we want to be?' input forms – so we can capture content directly from workshops and then convert it into a digital 'live' record – and we'll be running a small blogging station when laptops are not being used by workshop fascilitators – but we are limited in the chanels through which we can invite input and share live feeds of content from the Youth Summit Live site. That said, we will have a team of young roving reporters with us at the event creating an overnight newsletter – so that should provide some extra space sharing the outputs of Youth Summit Live – and I'm off to explore mobile-phone enabling the website…

Opportunities
Whatever the challenges, Monday and Tuesday are certainly set to be really exciting (if exhausting…). We've got over 100 young people taking part in the Youth Summit, and we've got a number of digital and social media activists joining us, including DK from Mediasnackers, Steve Moore from Policy Unplugged, and a group of young people from a radio project linked to the Ministry of Justice. There is a lot to go into the mix – and, as the youth summit billing says, we quite probably are on the edge of “a new era of service provision for young people”

Civicus Assembly in Review

The Civicus Youth Assembly has left its mark on the Civicus World Assembly in this statment, presented to delegates in the closing plenary (as well as in young peoples contributions throughout the event).

At one point – with the TerraViva news reporting a 'Youth Rebelion' , and many of the young delegates at the world assembly disaffected and despondent – it looked like the positive step of inviting young people as active participants to the Civicus World Assembly 2007 was going to be seen as a bad mistake. But, the dedication of a core of young delegates to bring a positive youth voice to the centre of the Assembly, a committment to collaboration that far surpasses that seen between many NGOs, and late nights huddled round a laptop screen meant 2007 can be seen as a significant step forward for Civicus, laying the foundations for further and deeper youth engagement in furture World Assemblies.

This said, the process that led to the young peoples declaration was far from perfect, and throws up crucial learning and a reminder that in all participation, especially young peoples engagement – holding the right principles at the core of all planning is crucial.

The notes below try to explore some of the difficulties youth involvement in the World Assembly faced, and to suggest some possible (but not definitive) approaches to tackling these. The tone is of contructive criticism, and I should start with the strongest celebration and commendation of Civicus's strides forward in making it to this point, bringing together an impressively diverse group of young people and committing to the involovement of developing involvement of younger generations in it's work.

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Workshops at speed: going deep enough

The challenges began in the Civicus Youth Assembly – a two day gathering of 130 young people from 65 countries. Day 1 of the programme consisted of near-back-to-back hour long workshops exploring particular issues in development. However, these sessions simply led into a short feedback plenary, and the issues discussed in them were not woven into the later programme in any way. Such short workshops gave neither the space for an introduction to an issue for the unitiated, nor time for in-depth discussion by those already aware of or working on the issues – and without a clear outcome led many participants unsatisfied.

Suggestion: Create a speed-learning series of interactive introduction presentations (given by participants) where a breadth of issues can be covered in 15 minute slots, and then invest two-to-three hours in longer in-depth sessions exploring a limited number of issues in depth – with a clear 'question' for those sessions to consider.

Participation needs principles

The lack of clarity about purpose continued to dog day 2 of the Youth Assembly, and the three-hour session on 'participation' – far from resolving the challenges – deepend the problems and left a legacy of confusion which hampered youth involvement in the rest of the World Assembly. The Participation sessions in the Youth Assembly programme were introduced as a chance to explore three different methods of participative dialogue – and with external fascilitators the group was split arbitarily into three. I can only reflect on the sub-group I was in, but therein the piecemeal issuing of instructions meant that by the end of an hour of break-out time, we 'discovered' that we were to perform a tableaux communicating a bullet pointed 'issue' affecting young people, and that this issue was to feed back into selecting a set of youth priorities out of the Youth Assembly. Not only were the methods chosen inappropriate for the short time available (trying to develop participative drama in 20 minutes with an international group) but we were given no clear idea of where our inputs were to be used.

Comment: All participation should be based on core principles of openness, informed consent and transparency. Where there is not time for a process to be used effectively, it should not be used. Where a question is asked of participants (e.g. 'Identify the key issues facing young people in your area?'), it should be clear how the answers will be used – and what other questions they go towards answering ('E.g. What are the top issues for young people globally?') – and if this isn't possible prior to the first questions being asked, there should be opportunities to modify answers when the 'big picture' is introduced.*

I was greatly disappointed by the Participation Sessions at the Youth Assembly – as they were a real missed opportunity. That the '9 point list' they led to lacked legitimacy was, however, the spark for young people to really come into their own as effective collaborators, salvaging the 9 points and bringing a coherence to them in the World Assembly… and more on that in a moment.

Suggestion: The idea of a set of outcomes from the Youth Assembly needed to be build in from the start, and open to negotiation throughout. Processes suited to the outcomes sought should have been used, and participation made a 'thread' running through the Youth Assembly, not something that can slot into a three-hour session.

The articulate are over-empowered by poor processes

Credit: Steven Giron (I'd welcome other Youth delegates reflections on the story of the declarations development – as I had thrown myself into the wider World Assembly by this point, and was only on the periphery of the declaration drafting)

As confusion about the 9-points developed in the Youth Assembly participation sessions grew during the World Assembly, a number of Youth Delegates began work to redraft the points and work them into a coherent declaration. Without clear meeting space of sceduled contact of youth delegates, the group that formed was relatively ad-hoc, although it was collaborative and sought to include all those who were interested in taking part. This fluid group worked through Thursday and late through the night on Friday – regularly checking in with a wider group of youth delegates to gather suggested changes to the text of the document. The final declaration was an immensly positive product.

However, I have the strong impression that the strongest influences on that text will be the voices of the most articulate in the group – those with the stongest English, and the greatest experience of 'essay writing'. This is not to say that other voices did not impact the declaration – but it does suggest that in the absense of an inclusive and well designed participation process, the articulate and confident voices shape the text.

Comment: Participation processes need to be concious of power and influence and how to be inclusive in light of the way in which language skills, experience and confidence will impact on these. We 'fell back' on creating a declaration, because we didn't create the space to explore other possible products of the Youth Assembly and youth involvement in the World Assembly – and had we really engaged with creative participative processes we may have ended up with a very different mark left by young people on Civicus 2007.

Adults need induction too

“There is a mix of interest, dis-interest, enthusiasm, confusion and resentment about young peoples' presence here.” Whilst young people had a two-day induction to the World Assembly through the Civicus Youth Assembly – 'adult' delegates had little induction to the youth presence. As a result, most delegates were unclear on what young people had to offer to the Assembly. I've considered the different rationales for involving young people in this post here and it strikes me that some induction to help all delegates understand the different forms of and values in intergenerational dialogue would contribute to more effective youth involvement in future.

Suggestions: More 'induction' or scene setting information is needed for all delegates about youth involvement (at least while we are in this transition period before youth involvement is fully mainstream…). That might be as simple as a page in the printed programme giving a welcome, or it might be some specific sessions on youth participation and engagement early on in the World Assembly programme. Perhaps a young-delegate hosted 'youth hub' as a physical space in the delegates lounge would help create a structured meeting of generations that could break-down barriers throughout the assembly…

Briefings are important

I've just found a copy of 'Civil Society Legitimacy and Accountability' in my bag which I picked up from outside a session at the Assembly on one of the last days. After reading just three pages I've already got a far better handle on the accountability focus of the events – on the problems the assembly was addressing. Why didn't I read this before? Well – partly because Youth Assembly delegates were not briefed on the briefings – and when we discovered that reading them would be helpful – we couldn't get hold of them…

Suggestion: Make sure Youth Assembly delegates get clear information about all the briefings and papers that might be relevant – and if if is felt these are too involved to be 'light background reading' – explore whether some of the 'Youth Assembly' induction can be used to unpack key issues before the main Assembly – so that a youth perspective can be input into the discussions of these papers…

Get creative and intercultural

I have a confession. I left the World Assembly a day early. Youth Hostels are great places to stay most of the week… except Fridays… then the singing till 5am can cause tiredness in even the most resilient… and turning up to a really interesting sounding session on two hours sleep, only to find it is three-hours of dry presentations is enough to finish anyone off.

The World Assembly brings together over 100 different nations, and many more cultures – so why is there so little creative space? Space for storytelling, music making, visual arts and craft activities. On Thursday I went on a 'learning exchange' to the Village Story Telling Centre and in the informal space that afforded had some of the best conversations of the whole Assembly, significantly leading to some of the strongest networking I was a part of.

Suggestion: Create creative spaces around the World Assembly. Rooms or corners where people can gather around the arts and share in informal conversations and relationship building that strengthens the bonds of civil society, breaks down cultural and intergenerational barriers, and, um, well, is fun.

Keeping the Conversation Going

I took part in a few discussions on the Civicus Assembly website forum before the event, and I tried to encourage social media use at the Assembly – but by-and-large I've found the Assembly appears, at least from the persepective of a non-member of Civicus, to be a storm of networking activity, in a year of relative calm. Social media could provide a powerful way of laying the foundations of conversations before the event, continueing conversations beyond the event – and helping make sure networking is structured and supported.

Suggestion: If pre-event materials make clear reference to online discussion spaces, or social bookmarking 'tags', and the conference programme re-iterates those messages – then over time a 'social media' aspect to Civicus could emerge as a key element of the communication, discussion and networking mix…

Summary:

These notes – long as they are – are just a brief summary of reflections… and I'll hopefully be able to develop more points in future posts soon…

 

*I'm aware I'm guilty of breaching all these principles in a number of participation processes I've planned – and some I've only become adequately aware of through being on the participant side of a poor participation process. Sticking to these principles is challenging – but its a challenge I shall be renewing my committment to meet since by experience in Glasgow.

Young Practioners and Stakeholders – two engagement agendas – not one…

I'm currently at the Civicus World Assembly, which, for the first time this year, has included the Civicus Youth Assembly.

The Youth Assembly has brought together 130 young people from 65 countries, spending two days before the main assembly exploring global issues, and inputting into the main assembly. The Youth Assembly is a positive step for Civicus on the journey to meaningfully engaging young people in its work, challenging age-based discrimination and drawing on the innovative spirit of youth* – but it also illustrates how essential it is that the rational for engaging young people is clear in each context when it is explored.

There are at least two ways in which young people might engage in the Civicus World Assembly.

Firstly, as young practioners, involved in the same daily struggles and facing the same set of problems as 'adult' world assembly delegates. That is, involved in the building of civil society organisations, in the provision of service, in the development of new sollutions.

Secondly, young people might be involved as young stakeholders, affected by the work of 'adult' delegates and their organisations. That is, service recipients, involved in day-to-day personal struggles, or representing** communities facing practical struggles in claiming their own rights to healthcare, employment, food security and civic engagement.

(Of course, these are not mutually exclusive – one can be both a service deliverer, and a service recipient – but we are interested in the 'role' through which a young person may be selected for involvement in a participation process)

The role in which young people are invited to engage in the assembly alters the role which they should play.

Young practioners may need training and support in contextualising issues – with the aim of them participating in shared problem solving, knowledge sharing and work-based-networking with 'adult' delegates.

Young stakeholders may need space to critique the ideas presented, make claims of adult delegates on behalf of their selves and their communities, and, within the right processes, to contribute to the generation of innovative sollutions to shared problems.

(Again we are not dealing with polarities – but the difference is important)

If the agenda is a 'young stakeholders' agenda – then it arguably only makes sense without a broader stakeholder involvement agenda. This agenda is an important one… but I'm not clear that bringing a large population of 'on-the-ground' stakeholders to the Civicus Assembly would be the most productive or coherent approach.

As far as I understand the work of Civicus at present, the second 'young practioners' agenda fits best. If this is the case – then if follows that (in the longer term at least) the distinction between 'young delegate' and 'adult delegate' should be broken down. Rather, it should be recognised that to fully participate in shared problem solving at the assembly, some individuals may need more 'induction', more space to be introduced to particular issues and more training or support to be heard against the already confident voices. There will be a higher number of young people in this group of individuals – but the group will not exclusively be young.

On Sunday, young delegates at the World Assembly will make a presentation in the closing plenary… at the moment that presentation suffers in part from a confusion about the role of young people at the assembly… though it is heading in the right direction. And how that presentation is received should take us further to understanding the rationality on which Civicus is seeking to deepen its engagement with young people.

Footnotes:

*A suggestion that youth has a monopoly on innovation would provide some alternative rationality for their engagement. But of course, such a suggestion would be flawed. And in-so-far as young people have greater capacity for innovation, we should be seeking to learn from them so that we can all become more innovative – and innovative, creative problems solving becomes the domain of all…

**I'll blog more on the concept of respresentation at some point soon…

Are we talking participation here? Starting a model

The topic of this years Civicus World Assembly is 'Accountability' and I've just been in a plenary session looking at Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and accountability.

During the session I was more and more aware that many of the ideas being explored were those I would understand as issues of participation – rather than accountability… and so I got scribbling trying to put together a model that helps me make sense of how Accountability and Participation relate to each other.

Draft Accountability---Participation Model

It's very much in draft (word version attached) – but the key intuitions are that:

  • Accountability and Participation are part of a broader process of democratisation
  • Accountability should be about the move from activity by CSOs that has the hallmarks of misconduct or bad practise – to activity that is at the least ethical and not harmful to the interests of those a CSO says it seeks to help
  • The move from ethical and non-harmful activity, to best-practise and effective activity, is a movement of participation and the tools of participation are those we should use here.

I suspect that we should be careful about 'concept creep' that overextends the concept of Accountability – as we may find ourselves taking our eyes off the key challenges in answering the linked questions (but questions that may have different answers…)

  • Who are CSOs accountable too?
  • Who should be the participants influencing and affecting CSO activity?

 

Attachment: Conceptual Framework.doc

Disability and children’s rights

I'm blogging from the opening plenary at the Civicus World Assembly. (Will try and post some notes and quick reflections as battery allows…)

Speaker Venus Ilagen from Disabled People's International has just put forward a challenge to ask whether the needs of, and accounability to, disabled children features highly enough in talk of Children's Rights, Women's Rights and in other rights dialogues.

Reflecting upon the recent UK draft report on the UN Convetion on the Rights of the Child – it strikes me that Venus has a strong point. An exploration of the rights, and excercise of rights, by young people with disabilities was not a strong thread in the draft. Do we give strong enough attention to the rights of children with disabilities?

Should we be looking at the recent UN Thematic convention on the rights of people with disabilities to see if it speaks to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and helps us draw a stronger focus on the rights of the most excluded of the most excluded?

Tagging the Civicus World Assembly

I'm currently up in Glasgow at the Civicus Youth Assembly, just about to start at the Civicus World Assembly and I've not yet seen much use of digital technologies to share ideas and media, and to build conversations between participants. We've finally just got use of wireless internet here today (after two days of the Youth Assembly disconnected) – and there is a larger 'Net Cafe' space opening up tomorrow when the 900-strong full World Assembly really gets going – and I'm hoping there might be some suggested use of social media.

However, in case there isn't, I've decided to experment with how social media use can be catalysed. Can social bookmarking, photo sharing and back-channels work effectively at non-techie conferences? What is needed to make them work? Is there value in making it work?

I'm starting off by seeking to encourage use of two tags for agregating links and content:

Youth Assembly: civicusya2007

World Assembly: civicuswa2007

The two key places I'm thinking content may emerge are del.icio.us (here and here) or Flickr (here and here) – but then with the international nature of the delegates I'm concious there may well (indeed will be) complete alternate social media communities which delegates from different countries are used to…

I've put together two quick summary documents on tagging / social bookmarking that might help kick start things (if I can find somewhere to get them printed).

Social Bookmarking (2 page HowTo): http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/files/Social%20Bookmarking%20the%20World%20Assembly.pdf

Tagging the assembly: (1 page summary) http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/files/Tagging%20the%20Civicus%20Assemblies.pdf

Laptop battery and hostel wifi permitting I'll try and post a few updates soon on how the experiment goes….

Open Working and Participation

Over the past few weeks at http://www.innovationexchange.net/ a team led co-ordinated(?)/fascilitated(?) by Simon Berry from ruralnet|UK and including a really diverse and interesting selection of innovators, thinkers and actors have been putting together an £1.2m Open Source bid to the Office of the Third Sector to run an 'Innovation Exchange' (i.e. the bid has been developed in a way that allows anyone to contribute and potentially feed into it's contents…)
I've made a few comments on the website, and reviewed and commented on version 4.2 of the bid document. And it's a real demonstration of the openess of Simon and the core team for the bid that my comments, and those of others, have been very clearly worked into the bid and the workplan it would lead to.
The experience of contributing to a collaborative document with the Open Innovation Exchange has got me thinking again about all the different policies, strategies and documents that organisations write about young people, without young people having the chance to be involved in them. Would an Open Innovation Exchange model work for the creation of these documents? What if every strategy a Children's Trust wrote was created in an online collaborative environment and young people had the chance to comment, edit and shape the document?
I'd like the updated Map and Plan sharing spaces [E.g. 1, 2, 3] on the Hear by Right website (coming soon…) to go someway towards 'open sourcing' the Hear by Right process, and allowing greater space for children and young people affected by a particular Hear by Right process to see and act on the 'documents' it generates – but I also think there are broader needs for us to explore open document creation across the world of youth participation.
Of course – there would be challenges fascilitating access to the technology and the context so that young people could meaningfully input – but providing open strategy creation didn't replace other methods of engagement – it would surely be no bad thing. Not least because if the organisations that are looking to engage young people turn to more open working across the board, then the journey to young people influencing decisions within them is, potentially, a lot more straightforward.

The challenge of change and network building

I'm currently involved in establishing a network of consultants and practitioners working on embedding youth participation (called The Enfusion Network).

For the network to function at its best, we need to encourage practioners and consultants to engage with an open working style that allows the benefits of a network to emerge.

But as Seth Godin's post on bananas suggests… (and as our experience working to encourage organisations to embed young peoples engagement backs up…) 'selling' and encouraging change is tough.

But if we're serious about the need for Enfusion (which we are). And if we're serious about avoiding 'organisation building' and making sure that we have a responsive network that really serves to aid improved practice and impact in youth engagement (which we are), then we need to stick at it.

We've just had a working weekend to explore the next steps for the network, and from that I think our core challenges are:

  • To keep our vision focussed on creating connections between practioners and consultants focussed on embedding youth engagement in organisations and communities – and to find ways of clearly keeping that focus while being open to allow interdisciplinary connections to emerge…
  • To find creative ways of engaging potential network members in Enfusion – both showing the value of making small changes to working patterns in order to be able to engage through the network, and through creating positive opportunities for connections to be made (developing on from our conference calls and coffee house chats…)
  • To find sources of funding and ways of becoming sustainable that don't rely on 'organisation building' and allow the network to remain agile and effective, responding to the needs in the field for critical discussion space, networking space and reflection space.

We're going to be working on meeting these challenges over the coming months, so all pointers and suggestions most welcome…