Monday, 4th of February: CIVICWEB practitioners meeting: presentations by producers of civic websites
It was extremely interesting to hear practitioners’ points of view on youth and how to mobilize them, since most of them are doing this for their living. All three presenters at the first discussion were girls, talking on the content and efforts made by their organisations’ websites.
- Carlijn Wiebenga
- Mireia Sabartes
Catalan National Youth Council,
- Jessica Wright Youth Voice, UNICEF
Since Jessica’s presentation was the most thorough, I am publishing only on Youth Voice.
Most of the ways of participation at Youth Voice are offline. They do, however have some interactive “stuff”: quizzes, videos, you can download banners to put on Facebook or similar. They have a mailing list of 1700 people who have joined for newsletter. What was of special interest to me was that they also have a Myspace page: they partnered with Myspace when it created Myspace Impact – for NGOs to get involved with Myspace community. They have a Bebo profile and Facebook as well. Furthermore, they did a blog with a young person in
The discussion following the presentations was quite interesting, I managed to note down some of the questions from the audience and answers by all three participants (I want to explicitly state, that this is not a direct speech from the participants, some things may have been left out, others overheard, so please take the conversations of informative nature, but not as suitable for quotations.)
Q: When young people give you an opinion, do you do something with it - get it to authorities?
Catalan National Youth Council: In National Youth Council you can not put any comments, but in xerxia you can put comments. National youth council is on organisations, if you are only an individual, it doesn't really count, it is only through organisations. The main point is that young people talk and work together.
Youth Voice, UNICEF: We have online actions, we created friendly versions of e-democracy initiatives, to send a mail to MP.
Cool politics: Cool politics is not a single issues movement; we try to promote citizenship, so we don't do that. We are not a lobby at all. We think politics is just a small part of citizenship. But we would like young people to discuss online.
Q: How were your projects set of?
Youth Voice, UNICEF: In UNICEF we had an education team. People realised there was a gap there, intially they had just one person which became a team.
Coolpolitics: Coolpolitics was organised by the director, he studied political science, his way of thinking is that young people are interested it is just not presented in a right way.
Q: How are you funded?
Coolpolitics: First four years we applied for different projects. For example, if you do a debate on environment, you go to environmental clubs. Also to
Youth Voice, UNICEF: We are partly financed by prime minister the rest from other organisations.
Catalan National Youth Council: From Catalan parliament. But you can't decide how many money you can put in each project.
Q: I think you (presenter from
Catalan National Youth Council: I myself have never been in one. What happens is that people push for a forum and I tried to do it, but it just doesn’t work.
Youth Voice, UNICEF: The international UNICEF has a youth forum which works brilliantly so we tend to send people there.
Q: I would be interested to know how your funding evaluates the outcome, does it stress for outcomes, do you need to adjust your goals?
Coolpolitics: If we get too influenced, young people will not believe us anymore, so we demand total freedom.
Q: Have you got any mechanisms for taking decisions from young people about your websites?
Coolpolitics: Every year we have one or two students who do a research.
Youth Voice, UNICEF: We try to involve young people all the time. Users can consult at the website youth advisors directly. I personally have been travelling through schools and ask them what the want from the site.
Catalan National Youth Council: We have a really good webmaster and you can send him your requests and he will do it.
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