Posts Tagged ‘API’
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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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