HUWY

From E-Consultation Guide

The problem

getting young people involved in policy-making

The European Parliament was worried that fewer people are voting in European and national elections. So they funded an e-participation programme to see how to engage more citizens with legislatures. They were particularly concerned that fewer young people are voting and joining political parties.

Not working

citizenship education, teaching youth about the old-fashioned, pre-Internet ways of civic behaviour.

But young people are not apolitical. They wear armbands, join boycotts, turn out in millions to cancel debt or protest wars: it is just traditional politics and traditional consultations that put them off. So the challenge is to see how to adapt government to the ways young people communicate, rather than bore them with the old ways of influencing policy in citizenship lessons.

The solution

change democratic processes to use the ways young people naturally communicate and engage socially.

Since many young people spend a lot of time on the Internet and mobile 'phones, not just reading, but creating words, music, pictures and videos, why not let them discuss policy issues there? Then all we need is a mechanism for collecting their creative ideas, recommendations, organise them by issue, and present them to policy-makers.

• In 4 countries,
• 80 groups of young people,
• will discuss the Internet,
• on their favourite on-line sites (Bebo, YouTube, Young Scot, …),
• then put their ideas to national and European policy-makers

The diagram above show how we will do it.

1. 20 groups of young people from each country will run discussions on their favourite sites.
   • Some will use Bebo or Facebook groups, others may edit and upload videos to YouTube, yet others may use a discussion forum or chat room set up by a youth group or school.
2. A few of the young people will pick out the things they want to tell the politicians and officials, and enter their ideas into the country hub websites.
3. Then policy-makers will look through the results of all the discussions and pick out creative new policy ideas.

The topic

Internet governance

As the Internet becomes an enduring feature of our lives, politicians are faced with designing policies to govern it. But few politicians or newspaper editors have the same understanding of the Internet as young people who have grown up using the Internet. Quite often policy-makers react to the latest scare without thinking through all the unintended consequences. We are inviting young people to discuss all Internet policy issues: not just child protection, but all the issues of privacy, security, freedom of expression, ethics of copying, e-commerce, jobs and skills, etc. In other words, everything on which they might have an opinion.

We hope to get:

• 80 groups of young people involved
  • small ones of a dozen members, large ones of hundreds
  • youth work sector, schools and colleges, unaffiliated on-line communities
  • could be thousands involved
• a range of policy-makers to read and comment on what the young people say
  • local, regional, national and European
  • representatives, officials, think tanks, agency and QUANGO staff
• a demonstration of large-scale distributed deliberative democracy

Interested? Then contact one of the partners below.

Project title

Hub Websites for Youth participation

Funding

€0.5 million from the European Commission on behalf of the European Parliament, under the eParticipation programme.

Starts

February 2009

Ends

January 2011

Partners

International Teledemocracy Centre at Edinburgh Napier University (Project co-ordinator) <e.taylorsmith@napier.ac.uk>

Queen's University Management School (UK national co-ordinator) <d.r.newman@qub.ac.uk>

Letterkenny Institute of Technology (Irish national co-ordinator) <paul.mccusker@lyit.ie>

Youth Work Ireland

University of Tartu (Estonian national co-ordinator)

Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (German national co-ordinator)

Dog Digital (Technology)

Policy-makers, starting with the Ministry of Justice (UK), Pat 'the cope' Gallagher TD, State Chancellory (Estonia).