ICTlogy

Study on the Impact of the Internet and Social Media on Youth Participation and Youth work

The Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission has just released the Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work, that was coauthored by Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva, Alexandra Theben, Federica Porcu and myself.

The study analyses 50 good practices and 12 case studies to examine the impact of the internet, social media and new technology on youth participation and look at the role of youth work in supporting young people to develop digital skills and new media literacy.

In my opinion, the main result of the study confirms what others have already found and that is increasingly becoming the trend in inclusion and development: top-down approaches only do not work, and bottom-up, grassroots initiatives are necessary for projects to work. In other words, weaving the social tissue has to come first for any kind of community intervention one might want to deploy.

The 10 pages of conclusions can more or less be summarised this way:

• Socio-economic status is crucial at the individual level and the knowledge gap has to be addressed immediately before social interventions.
• Enabling the social tissue at the micro level contribute to strengthen the community and thus improve the diagnosis and mobilise social capital.
• As people act in different communities, weaving networks at the meso level makes sinergies emerge and synchronise multilayer spaces. Skills and training are key at this level.
• Once the initiatives have begun to scale up, it is necessary to mainstream and institutionalise them at the macro level, which means fixing them in policies and regulation. Quadruple helix of innovation approaches are most recommended.
• The acquisition of digital skills has to be based on digital empowerment, on a sense of purpose.
• Digital participation and engagement has to aim at being able to “change the system”, to structural changes, to digital governance.
• The now mostly deprecated approach of build it and they will come should leave way to an approach in the line of empower them and find them where they gather. That is, to look for extra-institutional ways that young people participate and engage to design your capacity building and intervention scheme.

Abstract:

The study examines the impact of the internet, social media and new technology on youth participation and looks at the role of youth work in supporting young people to develop digital skills and new media literacy. It is based on an extensive collection of data, summarised in an inventory of 50 good practices and 12 case studies reflecting the diversity of youth work from across the EU. It confirms that youth work has an important role to play, but more has to be done by policy makers at both EU and national level to respond to the challenges and adapt policies in order to foster engagement and active citizenship of young people.

Downloads:

Full report:
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Theben, A., Porcu, F. & Peña-López, I. (2018). Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work. Brussels: European Commission.

Executive report:
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Theben, A., Porcu, F. & Peña-López, I. (2018). Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work. Executive report. Brussels: European Commission.

Annex 1, Inventory of good practice:
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Theben, A., Porcu, F. & Peña-López, I. (2018). Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work. Annex 1, Inventory of good practice. Brussels: European Commission.

Annex 2, Case studies:
Lupiáñez-Villanueva, F., Theben, A., Porcu, F. & Peña-López, I. (2018). Study on the impact of the internet and social media on youth participation and youth work. Annex 2, Case studies. Brussels: European Commission.

When we speak about Open Government, it is easy to getting lost in the lingo of names and concepts and not being able to bring things down to Earth. In the past I draw a simplified scheme for Open Government. Now I want to highlight some practical applications of that scheme.

The table below presents, on the one hand, the three layers of Open Government:

• Transparency: let people know.
• Participation: let people speak.
• Collaboration: let people do.

On the other hand, it lists the five stages of public decision-making (there are other models with more or less stages, of course):

• Diagnosis: what is going on, what do we need, what do we want.
• Deliberation: what are the impacts, what are the options.
• Negotiation: what are our preferences.
• Vote: what is our decision.
• Assessment: which were the results.

By crossing these two axes, I suggest some lines of action, some specific projects that can be put into practice. This is of course not an exhaustive list, and many projects can be placed in more than just one cell. It is, as I said, just a showcase of where to begin with.

Juan Romero: managing conflict to improve the democratic process

The democratic process is not only a model for governance, but a model for living together.

How do we manage conflict in democratic processes? Define, make explicit, mediate and measure. There are two different issues in conflicts: the dimensions of the conflict and the actors of the conflict.

Measuring the debate can be difficult and especially difficult to manage if we had not prepared it in advance. Technologies and methodologies can help to structure deliberations. Argument mapping can be very useful to achieve such structuration and thus improve deliberation and the whole democratic process.

Miriam Sol & Carla Cordoncilo: evaluation system for the programme of active democracy

The system was designed after the logical framework approach. A matrix of indicators (simple and complex indicators) was created and then came the design of the sources of verification. Finally, the evaluation system was created.

Active democracy includes:

• Citizen initiatives.
• Participatory processes.
• Citizen consultations.
• Participation bodies.

In this project the focus was put on participatory processes.

Main dimensions: accessibility, diversity, plurality, traceability, transparency, operations.

These aspects should not be measured outside of their context, as most of them are very sensitive to it. Thus, quality or achievement of specific thresholds in indicators should be measured in relationship with environmental values. E.g. diversity in participation has different meanings in neighbourhoods that have a multicultural social tissue or in neighbourhoods that are socially or culturally more homogeneous. Less diversity in the latter is to be expected, while low diversity in the former should be considered as a failure.

Sofia de Roa: Systems of indicators of quality

The point of departure to design a system of indicators for democratic quality is transparency.

Two types of organiations in relationship to transparency:

180º organization:

• What for transparency: to disclose information from the past.
• Why transparency: external motivation: to look nice in transparency indices and gain recognition.
• What do we make transparent: operative aspects related to production, such as people, economy, structure and processes.
• How do we become transparent: on their own, with their own tools.

360º organization:

• What for transparency: to disclose commitments and measure improvements.
• Why transparency: intrinsic motivation: responsibility, work well done, the common good.
• What do we make transparent: all the value chain, including vision and mission, values, strategies, etc.
• How do we become transparent: in a participatory way, with all stakeholders.

How to operationalize concepts such as diversity, democratic quality, gender balance, social autonomy, etc.?

Systems of quality indicators: choose, improve, etc.

Case Studies 3

Anna Przybylska | University of Warsaw (Poland)
ICT solutions for public consultations: Methodology and design of inDialogue

Abstract: The aim of the presentation is to reflect on the design of the inDialogue software that has been developed to intervene in the organization of public consultation processes in local governments. The design has been informed by the results of empirical studies. In those studies, we evaluated the practice of public consultations in Poland refereeing to the norms constitutive for the model of deliberative consultations. The inDialogue software is expected to respond to the problems revealed during the evaluation. It helps to convey the knowledge about the methodology of public consultations and supports the teamwork for their better organization in the city hall. It facilitates planning of public consultations which can be conducted through face-to-face meetings and paper questionnaires as well as through online text or voice meetings and electronic questionnaires. The presentation starts with the overview of some theoretical assumptions and associated research findings relevant to the institutionalization of deliberation in public consultations. Following part analyses empirical data collected from the Polish local governments. In this background I will discuss tools and procedures of inDialogue software.

Three areas of tension:

• When the institutions of representative and participatory democracy are being integrated.
• Between the ideal of deliberation and the results of its implementation.
• When attempting to create a consolidated venue for public dialogue in a world of dispersed communication channels.

How are we going to attract people to use these tools? Efficacy of participation is the most powerful incentive.

inDialogue is a participation software that has many functions. Not only does it deal with participation, but also planning, open government, etc. The software also features different roles/approaches, like the clerk’s interface with several actions that the leader of a participation initiative can undertake. Same for citizens, that have their own interface and the tasks that they can perform.

Factors for the absorbtion of innovation:

• Establishing partnerships: quadruple-helix model where several institutions have a different complementary role.
• Research and action.
• Evaluation and software amendments
• An umbrella or a network?
• Public sphere and scaling-up.
• Distribution roles.

José L Martí | Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona (Spain)
Crowdlaw and the internal/external dimension of online local participation

Abstract: One of the new paradigms that has been advocated to understand the new possibilities of local participation enhanced by the new technologies is the so-called crowdlaw, as a particular subtype of Open Government. Under this approach, ordinary citizens can be deeply involved in different stages of the legal cycle and through a variety of forms of participation. They can participate in information pooling, in deliberation, or in decision-making properly. And they can contribute in such a variety of forms to stages like public diagnostic, law and policy-making, law and policy enforcement, law and policy adjudication, law and policy control, and law and policy revision. This is seen by some as one of the most important innovations to come in the next years to improve government at different levels, and also at the local one. But one of the effects of adopting this new approach is that the boundaries between internal and external participation (the participation of local citizens or the participation of citizens from other towns, regions or states, is importantly blurred. In other words, crowdlaw is very good in enhancing both the internal and the external dimensions of local participation (i.e., citizens from other places, including other states may be involved in different ways in the local participation of our city and contribute largely to it. This may have crucial effects to the way we conceive local politics. This paper explores all these effects and implications, focusing particularly in the way in which public local participation should be conceived in this new scenario, and advances a new vision of how local politics, and particularly public local deliberation may scale up to extralocal (potentially global) politics.

The demos problem: the traditional response to the question on whether one should be able to participate in a participatory process or a decision-making process in one’s own city/region/state is that yes, one should be able to participate. What if one is not formally recognized as a citizen in a given city? What if I have interests (relatives, friends, etc.) in other cities? Are they “my” city too?

e-Democracy is transforming the traditional ways to approach such demos problem in a way that brings us necessarily to connect local democracy with global democracy. e-Democracy is deterritorializing politics, which were, almost by definition, always bound to a territory.

Why participatory democracy?

• It empowers people.
• It strengthens full inclusion.
• It improves the quality of decision-making.

But we must have an idea of who should be empowered, whose voices should be heard, what options should be put on the table.

• Territorially-defined demos: which refers to a formal status, which in turn is based on residence.
• Functionally-defined demos: depending on the substantive issue.

And there even is yet another principle: the all-affected principle: all those who are potentially affected by the decision should be.

The digital revolution is making the territory less and less important which, combined with globalization, makes the demos problem one of the most important now in participation. But this is where deliberation —not voting— gains a lot of meaning.