Civic Tech Toronto’s Youth Employment Challenge

I spend a lot of time feeling grateful to be part of a community like Civic Tech Toronto. It’s a group of people with diverse backgrounds who get together every Tuesday night to work on projects that use technology, data, and design to address civic issues. While I’m there every week the energy seems normal, but occasionally I am reminded of just how special this community is. It’s pretty remarkable to see how much people care about civic life, and how much energy and creativity they bring to improving it.

Recently, Civic Tech Toronto played host to the Youth Employment Challenge (YEC). The YEC took place over six weeks in late 2016, as a collaboration between Civic Tech Toronto, Employment and Social Development Canada, and Urban+Digital. It was designed to answer the question, “how might civic tech be used to improve youth employment in Canada?”. The challenge coincided with the launch of the federal Expert Panel on Youth Employment, tasked with exploring innovative practices to improve job opportunities for youth. In short, the challenge was an experiment in channeling the community’s energy towards a specific topic, and supporting that energy with access to information and expertise courtesy of subject-matter experts in government.

User research and prototyping

During the six-week challenge, teams scoped ideas and did research, then created and tested prototypes. A total of 16 participants on six teams submitted prototypes, with some of them tackling complex technical challenges.

The six prototypes demonstrated a range of approaches for how civic tech could help improve youth employment in Canada. Some highlights included:

• A Facebook chatbot that helps users find and research job opportunities.
• A crowdsourced job and volunteering map that allows users to search opportunities by location.
• A proposed authenticated vouching platform designed specifically for young job seekers and their employers.
• A curated website offering young job seekers guidance targeted at specific stages of the job search process.

The prototypes were clever, compelling, and really well thought-out. Every team did initial user research, and also tested their prototype with potential users before submitting. The result? All the prototypes were grounded in user needs from the beginning, and can be refined further based on user feedback.

(For more about these prototypes, you can watch team presentations here.)

Enabling collaboration

The prototypes themselves were exciting, but what was under the hood was equally wonderful. The YEC was different from many other civic tech challenges and hackathons in a few significant ways. The YEC was non-competitive, offering honoraria to any team that met the challenge criteria. The criteria emphasized careful process over a slick final product. Finally, the YEC incorporated opportunities for government policymakers, participants, and challenge hosts to meet and share knowledge.

Because participants knew that they weren’t competing with one another to submit “best” prototype, they freely shared resources and feedback over Slack, Google Drive, and in person. This was particularly evident during one hacknight, when Peg Lahn of the ESDC Innovation Lab visited Civic Tech Toronto. All the YEC participants gathered together in a breakout group to talk about their ideas and share feedback with one another. Several participants credited that roundtable discussion with helping them move from idea to prototype, and many noted how great it was to talk about their work with other participants and someone from within government.

Having government policymakers at the table is valuable in a way that really can’t be overstated. In addition to Peg Lahn’s participation in a breakout group, participants also benefitted from discussing their work with the Chair of the Expert Panel on Youth Employment, Vass Bednar. Peg and Vass not only helped participants refine their ideas, but also demonstrated that government sees the value of the work communities like Civic Tech Toronto do.

The energy and expertise that is present in communities like Civic Tech Toronto is certainly valuable on it’s own- anything that gets people working together, thinking about civic issues, and learning from one another is a worthwhile endeavour. But the range of opportunities that open up when government comes to the table is even wider. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible.

What’s next

I think the YEC is a great model for how civic tech communities can collaborate with government to channel the energy and expertise that comes together at hacknights. We’d love to build on the great foundation that the YEC established.

In the meantime, the Civic Tech Toronto community is continuing to hack away on civic tech projects. Since the YEC, we’ve had some of our biggest hacknights yet, and a few more government guests!

You (yes you!) are welcome to join us any time- we meet every Tuesday night. Check out our Meetup page for details about upcoming hacknights. I will be there, sometimes organizing, but mostly being in awe of the community of energetic and collaborative folks who dedicate their Tuesday evenings to making their corner of the world a better place.

As always, I’d love to chat more about community engagement and civic tech. You can reach me here, at lia@urbandigital.ca, or @liabadia.

A full report detailing the Youth Employment Challenge design, prototypes, and learnings is available here.