Ella Taylor-Smith

Distributed Discussion: An Integrated eParticipation Model for Engaging Young People in Technology Policy

This chapter describes an eParticipation model, designed to be especially appropriate to young people and complex topics: distributed discussion. It draws on the experiences of the HUWY project, which piloted a distributed discussion model, in four countries, to assess how this supported young people’s engagement. The pilot revealed that young people valued structured and well-supported discussions, particularly well-facilitated offline discussions. Integrating online and offline, national and international elements are the advantages and challenges of this model. This chapter aims to give an overview of the theoretical basis, process and impacts of the model and to provide recommendations for future development and use.

Non-public eParticipation in Social Media Spaces

This paper focuses on the importance of non-public social media spaces in contemporary democratic participation at the grassroots level, based on case studies of citizen-led, community and activist groups. The research pilots the concept of participation spaces to reify online and offline contexts where people participate in democracy. Participation spaces include social media presences, websites, blogs, email, paper media, and physical spaces. This approach enables the parallel study of diverse spaces (more or less public; on and offline). Participation spaces were investigated across three local groups, through interviews and participant observation; then modelled as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs) [1]. This research provides an alternative and richer picture of social media use, within eParticipation, to studies solely based on public Internet content, such as data sets of tweets. In the participation spaces studies most communication takes place in non-public contexts, such as closed Facebook groups, email, and face-to-face meetings. Non-public social media spaces are particularly effective in supporting collaboration between people from diverse social groups. These spaces can be understood as boundary objects [2] and play strong roles in democracy.

Youth participation through distributed discussion

The paper describes an eParticipation project, piloted in four EU countries: Estonia, Germany, Ireland and the UK. HUWY, Hub Websites for Youth Participation, was an initiative where young people were invited to think about current and future problems of the Internet and propose solutions, within the framework of a distributed discussion. This paper reviews this implementation of the distributed discussion model to highlight its possibilities for supporting eParticipation of young people.

Investigating the online and offline contexts of day-to-day democracy as participation spaces

ABSTRACT Citizen-led participation in democracy is explored through studying the online and offline spaces where people work together to influence those in power and improve their communities. The concept of a participation space is introduced to describe these contexts. The spatial theme guides the research, from literature, through methodology, to findings. Case studies of three community/activist groups provide the data to identify participation spaces and model these as Socio-Technical Interaction Networks (STINs) (Kling, McKim, & King, 2003). These participation spaces include social media, email, and blogs, as well as paper media and offline spaces, such as rooms. The STIN models of these participation spaces reveal that the characteristics which influence their use for participation are the same for online and offline spaces. These can be understood in terms of spatial characteristics: the spaces’ perceived boundaries and inhabitants, combined with ownership and access, including costs. As well as recording the roles of these spatial characteristics, the participation space models map the day-to-day activities of participation. Collating these activities reveals that participation primarily takes the form of communication: organising and increasing solidarity, sharing information, encouraging involvement, and trying to influence events. The models also reveal that most of these activities are non-public. This sociotechnical study describes the relationship between the activities of local, grassroots democracy and the characteristics of the online and offline spaces where it takes place.

Towards graduate employment: exploring student identity through a university-wide employability project

Abstract Students have expectations of their university education leading to graduate careers, with universities investing considerable resources in institution-wide initiatives designed to enhance opportunities for student work placements and work-related learning. However, there are large variations between courses and disciplines in student uptake of these opportunities, with limited evidence explaining why this might be the case. Recognising recent approaches which consider student identity in transitions, this study explored student attitudes to work-related learning across a range of subject disciplines. The first phase of the study used in-class surveys (N = 199) to focus on students’ self-identification and perceptions of employability initiatives. Follow-up interviews were conducted to further explore themes emerging in the survey data. The study found that, while some students drew on resources for identity work in their recognition of and approach to work-related learning, access was limited, and university resources were not always recognised or effective. The findings have implications for the design of effective graduate employability initiatives.