HuWY job
From E-Consultation Guide
Back in February 2009, we started a new European e-participation project, Hub Websites for Youth participation (http://www.huwy.eu/).
Queen's University Belfast is the UK co-ordinator for this project, and the project lead on collecting content on Internet governance. We advertised for a part-time research assistant to help in this work, and found one. Feargal O'Kane started working on the project in June.
This post was available for 22 months, assisting in the planning and delivery of e-participation activities that will get hundreds of young people telling national and European policy-makers how to govern the Internet.
Here we gave some background information on what we will be doing in the UK, and how the research assistant can help. This page is now of only historical interest.
Contents |
Main activities of RA
Are listed at http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUBJobVacancies/JobDetails/?vac_no=09/100858&ref=09/100858
There are 5 main stages in this work.
1. Content design and collection
We need to identify, collect and prepare content on Internet governance issues that will be discussed by groups of young people (16-21) in the UK (and, after adaptation, by youth groups in Ireland, Germany and Estonia).
Early on, we have to lead the international effort to choose the Internet governance issues that will be discussed by the young people. These issues need to be important to the policy-makers, and young people need to find them interesting enough to discuss. This has to be finished in May.
As part of that process, we need to prepare material for a youth-led workshop where young people will turn the boring questions into ones that relate to the experience of young people, and will inspire active discussion.
We also need to work out how to categorise the outputs from the discussion in ways that are sufficiently organised to meet the needs of policy-makers.
Then between May and July, we need to collect content that will go on the UK hub website.
2. Recruiting participants
We need to identify, contact and engage participants in the project, both groups of young people, and policy-makers. We need to get lots of young people involved. The target is 20 groups (formal or informal), ranging from half a dozen participants to hundreds. We also need to get a range of different policy-makers to look at the material the young people create. Without large-scale participation, the EU will judge this a failure.
We don't have any money to pay participants (apart from some prizes for best contributions), so we have to spend more time encouraging them to join in.
We have to have youth groups signed up by the end of 2009, for the next stage. We need some policy-makers involved early on to help us in the content definition (above), and many more ready in early 2010 to read the material put on the hub websites by young people.
3. Launch workshops
We need to prepare and run one or more project launch workshops for representatives of participating youth groups. These will take place in January 2010.
In each workshop, 2 representatives from each group will learn about the issues, how they will report their conclusions on the hub websites, and discuss how they might run their own discussions when they get back to their groups. If they find this too difficult, they will give up. So we will need to do a mixture of hands-on training, and group discussion, making it an interesting and engaging day.
We will pay travel expenses, meals etc. for the participants, so at least they get a day out at our expense.
4. Supporting participants
We need to give technical, subject-matter and administrative support to the participants during the exercise. Any difficulties young people or policy-makers have need to be solved quickly, so that they don't drop out.
This would be done mostly on-line, but there may need to be some telephone support, and even visits to larger groups for follow-up demonstrations.
We expect the young people to run their own discussions on YouTube, Bebo, Young Scot or whatever they fancy at some time between January and May, then a couple of people from each group will enter their recommendations and creative ideas on the hub website.
As soon as there is some material entered by the young people, we then need to get policy-makers to look at and evaluate the material. This could run into September.
5. Evaluation
We want to understand what works better: which technologies, which kinds of group, which Internet governance issues. So we will need to find out from young people and the policy-makers what they think of the process and technologies, judged by their own criteria.
It will be fairly easy to do an on-line survey, but we will also need to do some interviews, and focus groups with a few of the participating groups. This is likely to be done between June and November 2010.
And then, as in the earlier stages, there is a report to write, finishing in January 2011.
Requirements
The formal requirements are listed on the QUB Jobs website (http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/QUBJobVacancies/ResearchJobs/). In brief we are looking for someone who:
- Has experience of on-line participation and deliberation, particularly of the tools and sites used by young people.
- Can engage young people in even something as boring as Internet governance.
- Can learn to work with policy-makers.
Although the successful applicant will be required to work part-time for the majority of the project there will be a need to work full-time for short periods to ensure that the project objectives are met (especially at the beginning, and at the end of 2009/beginning of 2010).
Our target age range is 16-21. But a few of the groups may involve younger people. Before working with younger people, s/he will need to get a disclosure certificate.
A lot of the job is online, but it will also include some travel across the UK (to support participants), and to meetings in partner countries. In particular, the first part (on content) requires frequent visits to Belfast, to work with staff at the university and local youth groups. The supporting participants bit takes place across the UK. So the job cannot be done remotely from outside the UK or Ireland.
