Growing event-based participation into wider youth movements
June 17th 2008
Last June, 17-year old Isaya Yunge from Tanzania became the first young African to meet face-to-face with G8 leaders as part of the UNICEF-supported Junior 8 (J8) Summit. The idea that young people needed to speak out on global issues at the highest level was first realized as the Group of Eight (G8) world leaders met at Gleneagles in 2005, and UNICEF convened a group of young people to meet in the C8 Children’s Forum. As G8 leaders followed up on Gleneagles commitments in St. Petersburg a year later, young representatives from the J8 Summit, now an annual UNICEF-supported event, discussed G8 issues directly with their respective heads of state. By 2007, young people’s participation at the G8 had increased the J8 Summit’s profile and young representatives met as a group with G8 leaders in Germany to make recommendations about issues including climate change, poverty and HIV/AIDS.
This year, the Junior 8 Summit participants plan to again meet world leaders face-to-face in Japan, strengthening a platform from which young people speak directly to some of the world’s most powerful political decision-makers. J8 participation has set a global precedent for young people, but what comes next? How do we harness J8 momentum to move young people from event-based participation to larger continuous and connected communities? Put simply, youth participation needs to move from a focus on one-time events into a more meaningful community, one that connects participants with a wider youth audience based on themes that are the actual substance of the event itself – for J8 participants, the topics on the G8 agenda, including climate change, global health, and poverty and development.
By its very nature, event-based youth participation like the J8 Summit limits what it sets out to create. A physical event is attended only by selected participants: no matter what the budget or scope, a majority of young people simply cannot attend. Likewise, events’ time-bound nature confines input from young people to a handful of days, and as the agenda’s content recedes into memory, maintaining momentum becomes difficult. With the J8 Summit becoming more and more a cornerstone of high-level youth participation, it makes sense to move event-based participation towards a platform that replaces the constraints of face-to-face participation with a wider definition of youth dialogue and activism.
Three online platforms currently support young people participating in the J8: a public J8 Website, and internal Workspace and UNICEF’s existing Voices of Youth community. Both the Website and the Workspace link to a discussion forum on Voices of Youth, connecting young people who want to have their say on J8 issues to an active and supported online community. In addition, a video platform on both the Website and the Workspace will show the J8 competition entries, videos from participants, and encourage young people from around the world to send a message to G8 leaders. This then points to a larger challenge: how do we innovate new approaches to youth participation that connect young people in the most meaningful and accessible way?
Young people are a powerful force for change and our most valuable resource for the future, and must be approached as partners in development with their own areas of interest and expertise. Channeling J8 event participants into thematic communities based on G8 themes allows them to focus on the knowledge sets they’re interested in. Using an online platform to do this further enables them to connect with other like-minded young people also active in their countries and communities. Using a Wiki-based platform encourages them to create and control information around what interests them, but the connections don’t stop there. Directing event participants towards larger thematic platforms enables a wider audience of young people to have their say and reach out in turn to other young people in their own networks. For example, returning from Junior 8 Summit, young people already give presentations in their school and communities. Connecting these young people on an online platform will harness the motivation of their peers to participate around the issues that interest and affect them, moving the outcomes of event-based participation towards online thematic communities to convene dialogue around real issues of interest.
Even more meaningfully, thematic participation on online platforms allows connections to be made with partner youth organizations, NGOs and communities all over the world. For example, the J8 community can be connected with youth activists engaged in fighting climate change, improving global health, or learning more about how the cycle of poverty affects development. For the Junior 8, this means that not only are participants supported in continuing their advocacy and activism in a meaningful way, but that a wider audience of young people can add their online voices to those of the physical participants. Ultimately, using online platforms, there will be little difference between Junior 8 event participants and participants online: young people will have a platform on which they can communicate no matter their location. Using the Internet as a space to convene youth dialogue around thematic issues builds a movement of young people’s participation in the widest sense.
References
UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. As the world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.
UNIWIKI is a customized MediaWiki installation that is designed to address some common wiki usability issues. Following ideas from the folks at wikiHow (www.wikihow.com), UNIWIKI has a template and editing interface that makes working with wikis easier for the not-so-tech-savvy.
Beginnings
March 24th 2008
Just over a year ago, we started to look at how “innovation” for development could change the lives of millions of children, many of them living in areas that are difficult to reach with the most basic of services. These are children that are not protected by society’s safety net, do not have access to health-care, and are not in school. These are the children that UNICEF serves.
The UNIWIKI project started when we imagined an environment where young people could participate on the internet without a computer or internet connection, contribute to global knowledge through mobile phones, access information from the internet on radios, and participate in the language or non-language of their choice.
To allow all to participate instead of a few, we decided to concentrate our efforts in three areas: the open source approach, the power of collaboration, and achieving accessibility.
Over the past year, we have been developing solutions that allow an increasing number of young people to communicate with each other and with UNICEF. Children have a right to speak for themselves and have their voices heard. During a weekend in February 2007 we invited a select group of educators, software developers, and mobile computing brains to UNICEF headquarters. Sitting in a stuffy conference room with white boards, pizza and soft drinks, they centered discussions around “open source” software, content and thinking. This was the beginning of an education.
The Open Source Approach
As we learned more, two things became clear. The first was that UNICEF would be setting precedent and policy. UNICEF works with governments on the ground in over 150 countries to help children fulfill their rights. Given our responsibility to all children, it also became clear that any licensing fee for software or content would make it impossible to bring our solutions to scale. Using licensed or proprietary solutions limits the ability for those solutions to be locally customized and sustained.
Paying yearly fees to companies, and entering new contracts each time anyone wanted to adapt or change solutions rather than building capacity and knowledge in the places we wanted to implement change creates baroque structures which will eventually collapse under their own weight.
Why couldn’t we work with dispersed groups of developers, designers and hardware engineers who would contribute what they created to a global free software and content repository? Why shouldn’t a piece of software be developed in, or at least highly influenced by the place that it’s going to be used? Why shouldn’t our solutions be guided by local expertise and experience?
Collaboration & Partnership
In order to accumulate enough momentum around producing tools and communities for youth communication we needed some grounding. We needed experts in the private / technology sectors, in academia and from the world of development to share their experiences, be our thought partners and unite for children. The triangle logo of unisay.org expresses this collaboration. Bringing together any two sides of that triangle has been done before – private sector partners are core to UNICEF, and academia and the development sector often work hand in hand. The new element we were looking for was the tension of having all three parties in the room together discussing youth communication.
Our first endeavor – the first triangle created – linked the Art Center, a leading design school in California, with UNICEF, and mDialog, a start-up video sharing and production service. Art Center provides a classroom of skilled graduate students to develop new ways of networking youth video producers. mDialog provides their cutting-edge software and video-sharing engine. UNICEF provides the on-the-ground access and expertise to implement this solution. UNICEF’s J8 conference – the youth complement of the G8 – will launch the result of this collaboration in July 2008. We are looking to convene more of these triangle collaborations. We have been working closely with research institutions (like the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa), technologists (like the community of East African bloggers) and UNICEF country offices (who define many of the needs of our organization ) to develop some of the solutions and communities that will be showcased here on unisay.org.
Accessibility
Scale is a driving factor in our work, and accessibility an underlying mandate. We need to provide the space and opportunity for any young person to have a voice, claim their rights to education, and connect with others. If we don’t make a concerted effort to affect the hardest-to-reach cases, we will still be having the same conversation ten years from now. Children in Tanzania should have the same ability to have their voices heard as children in the EU or US. The power of seeing your thoughts up on the internet, as simple and basic as it might seem, is that suddenly the internet, with all its learning and knowledge is no longer foreign. You are part of it, transforming it into something accessible and useable. If someone can access the internet through a mobile phone (either through SMS or hearing information read out-loud using text to speech), then the internet becomes available not only to those without a computer but also to those who can’t see or are not literate. A visually impaired child can listen to the audio story of someone from anywhere in the world and leave one of their own, a mother can find out where to take her child to get immunized. If you are hearing impaired your experience of using Wikipedia is no different from that of anyone else. Your ability to participate, to leave comments and talk to others, in a space where everything is text and graphics, is at par with everyone’s around you.
If we are going to reach the most vulnerable children, our thinking and our solutions must focus on working with people’s manifold abilities.
The unisay Beginning
Please join us in this discussion. unisay.org welcomes essays and contributions from anyone wishing to discuss the various intersections and aspects of youth communication; please see the about section for more details. Your individual ideas, thoughts, arguments and queries are more than welcome. We plan to publish an essay each month. Publication may happen more frequently if we have a large number of contributions. As UNICEF and partners launch events and projects related to these essays, we will keep our audience informed. We close this opening essay and invitation for contributions with UNICEF’s vision: Unite for Children.
References
UNICEF is on the ground in over 150 countries and territories to help children survive and thrive, from early childhood through adolescence. As the world’s largest provider of vaccines for developing countries, UNICEF supports child health and nutrition, good water and sanitation, quality basic education for all boys and girls, and the protection of children from violence, exploitation, and AIDS. UNICEF is funded entirely by the voluntary contributions of individuals, businesses, foundations and governments.
RapidSMS is a web-based platform that can send out SMS messages to groups of people, as well as monitor their input back into the system via SMS or voice. It is also able to collect statistical data via forms that can be configured through the interface. The platform has been appropriated for use in several different scenarios including emergency situations and data-collection involving health and education indicators.
UNIWIKI is a customized MediaWiki installation that is designed to address some common wiki usability issues. Following ideas from the folks at wikiHow (www.wikihow.com), UNIWIKI has a template and editing interface that makes working with wikis easier for the not-so-tech-savvy.