Curriculum Programme

Session 2: Experience of e-participation initiatives (What works and what fails?)

FIRST PRESENTATION

Andrew Stuck spoke about Young TransNet that is a website which is designed by young people; the young people regularly review and submit news items for inclusion on the website.

The site was set up with funding from Social Care, Dept of Health and also Transport and had being running for 5 years. There is a questionnaire on travel to and from school which pupils can complete and then analysis tool sorts the information and compares their journeys with others. Schools register and give passwords to their pupils.

The site gets a lot of hits just before holidays with young people seeking places to go in the holidays. The site is used a lot outside school hours. Several LEAs have bought into the system but have not made much use of the facility so far.

SECOND PRESENTATION

Jonathan Briggs of the Other media and also Kingston University spoke first about his 15+ years in ICT work and currently of projects he has running first Hyper Island in Sweden and now in Kosova to provide education for people unable to attend learning institutes for various reasons such as geographical locations or war. In the first instance staff are flown out to meet the students and thereafter work through the net. The Kosovan experience had built on the Swedish model but it had been adapted to include more on participation and leadership to help to build a new society for their country.

THIRD PRESENTATION

Andrew Acland of Dialogue by Design spoke about how e-participation could greatly increase the number of people involved in a consultation. If you are restricted to face to face interviews time constraints severely limit the number of people involved. If you held public meetings you hear from the most vocal only; others can be intimidated. E-participation allowed much larger numbers of people to be involved and they are all free to say precisely what they think, unprejudiced by other people.

Inclusivity

• look for hard-to-reach groups to make sure everyone is involved. It is necessary to send paper back-ups in case some people cannot copy entirely on the web.

Interactivity and Transparency

• participation must involve value to the participant. Feedback needs to be given e.g. in the form of a draft report which contains information/comments drawn from the individual responses. Participants are given the opportunity to comment on the collation of their response - to correct something if their comments have been misunderstood.

Responsibilities

• there have to be ground rules e.g. anonymity makes people feel safe

Respect

• for the software as well as the participants

OTHER PROEJCTS MENTIONED IN DISCUSSION

• WWF Learning has been experimented with on-line debates and discovered that they need a great deal of orchestration if participation is to be effective.

• Science across the World is a project run by the Association for Science Education which uses the internet to connect classes all over the world to enable them to explore and exchange views on issues related to the environment, energy use and health.

• The BA has been experimenting with various form of mass participation on line. See 'Mass participation experiments' and 'Visions of the future' in the quick-find menu of the BA web site.