Working Things Out
I recently took up a new role as the Children and Young People Digital Engagement Manager for the Children’s Commissioner for England. This and subsequent posts are my attempts to work out what that actually means.
Establishing a new role as part of a high profile organisation with bold and important ambitions is daunting to say the least. However, if twenty years doing ‘web stuff’ has taught me anything at all it is: if you don’t know how to do something — ask.
So, this is me, asking myself, and any passersby, to help turn ideas into something that can improve the actual lives of children and young people.
Digitally Engaging
The best place to start something is usually at the beginning.
The Children’s Commissioner has responsibility in law for promoting and protecting children’s rights in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This includes listening to what children and young people say about things that affect them and encouraging adults making decisions to always take their views and interests into account. …
What does ‘digital engagement’ mean in this context?
An easy answer could be ‘likes, views and comments on whatever platform is flavour of the month ’.
However, I hope, as an organisation, that we can be more ambitious — moving beyond mechanical metrics to an approach that appreciates, adopts and adapts the best aspects of digital in supporting children to understand, value and claim their rights. To do that, I need to clarify, for myself, how this ambition relates to the term ‘digital engagement’
The word ‘digital’ gets thrown around a lot in discussions about children and young people — ‘we should make it digital’, ‘children are digital natives’, ‘if it’s digital they will like it’… The word digital has ‘gone viral’ :)
It is reasonable, therefore, to ask: is ‘digital’ meaningful at all? The trans-media, multi-platform, augmented reality that children are growing up in blurs the distinctions between online and offline to an impressionistic extent. In a world in which we have outsourced so much of our memory and computational capacity to smart devices, separating digital from ‘real’ is also increasingly problematic.
However, for now, I think digital does still have meaning in the context of consultation and youth participation. There are still significant differences between face-to-face and face-to-screen interactions. Communication, collaboration and creation all gain and lose from being mediated via the web. Recognising and making the most of those differences is key to achieving ‘engagement’.
‘Engagement’ is another of those massively overused/little considered words, particularly in regards to children and young people. Whilst the intention may be grander it can easily become reduced to just plugging users in to your machine — gears engage. When we say we want to engage children and young people do we mean we just want their input to feed our outputs or are we genuinely making space for them to join us and help guide the ship in new waters?
If we replaced ‘are engaged’ with ‘work alongside us’ it may change what we measure and what we aspire to as organisations.
In my experience, digital activities are most effective when:
- they are mobile, malleable, and scaleable (both up and down)
- there is opportunity and support to take action at many levels
- actions can be easily linked together to create personalised pathways
- individual actions and progress generate quick, useful feedback at a personal, community and public level
- there is space for quiet
- people can move easily between online and offline activities and gain different benefits from both
- they are incomplete
I have started to flesh out some of these ideas here and hope to revisit and refine them as things develop.
Next…
I guess what I am feeling my way towards is a definition of ‘digital engagement’ that reflects my own experience, meets the ambitions of the Children’s Commissioner and serves children and young people in the best possible way.
‘Identifying and utilising the benefits of digital technology to create opportunities for more children and young people to work alongside us in exploring, celebrating and improving their lives’ …is closer to that aim and an exciting challenge — although it does make for a terrible business card.
What the response to that challenge might look like is something I hope to shape and share here as we go.
