Tim Davies tells us he’s off to the pub having just finished a substantial revamp of the Hear by Right website. Hear by Right sets out standards and principals designed to help organisations involve young people in what they do and how they do it.
The mapping tool looks promising as a means to encourage collaboration between organisations, although there seems be a bit of a gap where brum sits. It’s great to see Tim so closely involved because he is working methodically and intelligently to explore how social media will improve participation. With the site they aim to:
Create a space to share learning from the many 100s of authorities and organisations using Hear by Right to map and plan for change.
Curate and share some of the best resources to support the participation of young people in decision making Encourage organisations to be more open about the challenges and successes in engaging young people in decision making.
Make clear the neccessary link between participation in decision making and real change for the lives of young people.
Our experience with podcasting as a tool to encourage conversations (and using the microphone as a tool which a lot of people find gives them a bit of extra power and confidence) is that we can relatively easily share skills and engendered huge amount of enthusiasm. However maintaining the momentum is the challenge – it needs to be planned for from the start.
Loads to learn and this site is a great place to start learning.
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Hey Nick
Thanks for the Hear by Right mention 🙂
I know local groups have used audio and video recording as part of their participation work before – but it would be really interesting to promote that idea more on the Hear by Right website. In fact – I’m hopefully going to be doing some writing on how different multi-media tools can be used in participation… your point about altering the power dynamic is spot on.
I once designed a consultation session for a Children’s Fund project where young people with physical and learning disabilities ended up interviewing their carers and support workers. The fact that the young people were holding the camera’s and microphones to the workers created an amazing power dynamic that really altered some of the worker-child relationships.
In fact – thinking about getting good case studies off of local users of Hear by Right I wonder whether we should look just to record some more audio interviews for the site… you’ve inspired me to think about that more… will have to work out how to record from skype calls…
I’ve just blogged about borrowing ideas and the Hear by Right site over at our consultation for ruralnet| online http://www.ruralnetonline.org.uk/sharing-borrowing-ideas-people-cleverer-yourself-happy-mapping
Looks really interesting and I can see lots of potential overlap, we’re doing it in the open, a la Innovation Exchange, so come and join in!