Archive for the ‘Research’ Category
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Visualising the views of young people with Voicebox
As this blog demonstrates, there’s a lot of excitement around social innovation right now. At the beginning of July myself and my colleague from Sidekick Studios went along to Nesta’s Reboot Britain conference, which was all about how we make the plethora of social tools now available to us all online more useful. Can we start to create a more open dialogue between the public and the government through social media? Can the public provide feedback from the service-user viewpoint and help the government make better decisions? And will the government listen?
What’s massively interesting is the fact that people really do think change is possible, it might not be an almighty revolution as the idealists (or is that anarchists) predict but it looks certain that a shift is on the horizon. Finally the government and policy makers have cottoned on to the fact the internet can provide a cost efficient way of getting closer to the real issues for public services and perhaps more importantly that participation in these conversations will make them more popular with their constituencies!
A couple of interesting examples of service-user platforms we’ve recently heard about are Patient Opinion and MyPolice. The latter of which was born at the most recent Social Innovation Camp in Glasgow, a series of events that facilitate face to face brainstorming and problem solving between service users, web developers, producers, social entrepreneurs and creative marketeers. With all that talent and experience in one room, people are coming up with some really smart ideas.
With this kind of stuff going on as the back drop, Sidekick believe that it’s extremely timely for v‘s Voicebox project. We know that v is committed to being youth-led and empowering young people, so when presented with the brief to create an open research project that would not only engage young people but create a useful youth insight tool for the voluntary sector, we jumped at the opportunity.
What we have created for v is a platform that facilitates youth representation. Our hope is that through interactive opinion polls, a growing community blog space to discuss social issues and data visualisations that bring the survey results to life, we will bring people closer to young people’s views.
Not only this but we will help young people get their views heard by the government and policy makers and we will be developing our work further in this area. And by finding out about the causes and issues that most affect young people, v can ensure its programmes are creating volunteering opportunities which are relevant to them.
Voicebox is an open project, anyone of any age can complete the survey and anyone can download the data or play around with the filters on the results page so they get a visualisation specific to their own queries, there’s even an Application Programming Interface (API) so that the real geeks can take the data and create their own data visualizations.
More than anything we think its fun, but with a very serious back bone – it’s an experiment in using social media to inform public policy. The more people that take part in the surveys, the more meaningful the results become – so spread the word.
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Promoting a Creative Generation
Today marks the start of Promoting a Creative Generation, a two-day conference in Göteborg looking at the role of children and young people in the new culture and media landscape.
Taking place within the context of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation and hosted under the Swedish Presidency of the European Union, 350 experts and participants will discuss the creativity and cultural habits of children and young people.
Gunnar Seijbold/ Regeringskansliet.
Swedish Minister for Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth says, “this conference is to learn more about both the possibilities and problems of the new culture and media landscape that our children and young people encounter. The digital cultural platforms create new and often difficult issues that, despite their different starting points, are clearly related. And it is almost always young people who are affected”.Keynote speakers include Renad Qubbaj from the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Ramallah and Professor Bamford, Director of Cultural Programmes for Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), London.
The conference programme focuses on different aspects of daily life for children and young people, recognising that, today, children and young people are to a great extent not only consumers but also producers in the new media landscape. Sessions will look at how to strengthen children and young people’s right to culture, how traditional cultural institutions can find ways to remain attractive and accessible for the new generation, promote the exchange of experience and knowledge on how public investments can help to ensure that children and young people’s right to culture in all forms is guaranteed and will also include participants trying out the younger generation’s world of digital communication.
The opening and closing sessions can be watched via webcast
In the UK, very similar questions are being raised by The New Deal of the Mind coalition, chaired by the journalist and former political editor of the New Statesman, Martin Bright. The New Deal of the Mind is a grouping of like-minded individuals who believe we must not let the recession crush creativity and innovation. Learning the lessons of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, the coalition believes the creative and digital industries can help provide a route through the recession for young people and others. Check out their latest report, ‘Do It Yourself: Cultural and Creative Self-Employed in Hard Times’, exploring self employment options in the cultural and creative sector.
Of course this blog celebrates how creativity and innovation are changing youth volunteering, but revolutionising how young people can share their time and talents with others is becoming of much broader concern, across many sectors.
Any thoughts on these issues?
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Strong foundations for homeless young volunteers
This week Crisis released a report on engaging young homeless people in volunteering. The report captures good practice from Crisis experience of running a one year v funded programme providing volunteering opportunities for homeless young people. The report is an excellent example of the type of information we need to be widely available to enable us to get better at involving disadvantaged young people in volunteering.
As Angela Ellis Paine, Director for the Institute of Volunteering Research, spells out in her introduction to the report ‘rather than providing (more) ‘good’ practice advice and guidance in the traditional sense … the report tells it as it was or at least how it was for one organisation … in an honest and engaging way’.
As part of v’s 2009/10 research programme we will be looking at engaging disadvantage young people in volunteering with the aim of providing practical information to support organisations. A literature review will be a key part of this work, if you have relevant reports or documents please get in touch.
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