everyday social democracy: January 2010

CREATIVE CAMPAIGNS CAMP - 7 FEBRUARY

Posted on Friday, January 22, 2010 No Comments
Labels: all doled up, campaigncamp, organising campaigns

Do you want to learn creative campaigning techniques and use them to help shape our campaign?

We’re launching "All Doled Up" our campaign on youth unemployment and we want you to try out new techniques to help develop it!

Almost one in five young people are out of work. Unemployment affects us all, whether we're out of work or our friends and family are.

That's why we want to work with you so you can do something about it together. So you can get together with other young people to campaign on youth unemployment where you live or study.

Toynbee Hall and Compass Youth want to invite you to an all day training day. So you’ll be able to

Use stories young people have shared with us on youth unemployment to spread the word about our campaign and get those in power to support and act on our pledges

Learn creative campaigning techniques - such as making viral videos, get your message out to the media and designing campaign visuals

You'll be able to try these out on the day itself with other young people and most importantly what you create will be what we use to campaign on youth unemployment - your videos, your slogans, your flyers!

This is what our last campaigns camp was like, just imagine you could take part in our next one!

Creative Campaigns Day 09 from Creative Campaigns Day on Vimeo.

What are you waiting for?

THE CUTS DON'T WORK

Posted on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 No Comments
Labels: all doled up, organising campaigns

Do you want to vote which ideas we campaign on youth unemployment?

Do you want to help develop how we campaign on this?

The Cuts Don’t Work
Saturday 30 Jan - 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Congress House, Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

Why do we have to pay the price for their crisis? When they want to charge us more to get into university and get housing? While they carry on slashing our pay, our jobs and our services. It’s time to fight the recession. It’s time to take back our future.

Whether you’ve been involved in organizing before or not, you’re probably curious about how to campaign and maybe even fired up about an issue you’d like to campaign on.

You’ll be able to help develop campaign strategies on issues that are affecting young people the most through the recession. You can then work out with us and other young activists how we spread the word and how we target those in power to act.

We’ve also invited a cracking line up of speakers who are organising for young people right across the country:

Noel Hatch – Chair of Compass Youth

Rowenna Davis – Journalist at the Guardian, Independent and Headliners

Sam Tarry – Hope not Hate Organiser and Chair of Young Labour

Nizam Uddin – President of University of London Union

Bell Ribeiro-Addy – Black Students’ Officer for NUS

As well as the Mercury Music Award Winner – Speech Debelle!

So come and join us and Progressive London on Saturday 30th January between 10-5pm.

Sign up here!

Everyone who signs up to this session will get a free campaign toolkit on the day

Ideas are nothing without action. But together we can build the London we want to see.

This session is part of a wider conference that will bring together leading figures in London and beyond to discuss the most important issues for progressive politics in 2010, nationally, internationally and in London and the ideas, alliances and policies we need to move forward.

Progressive London was initiated by Ken Livingstone in 2008 as a cross-party, multi-community forum involving politicians, artists, trade unionists, bloggers, community activists and campaigners to promote social progress in the capital.

What will you pledge?

1. Sign up now

2. Bring along three of your friends

3. Come along

WHERE ARE THE YOUNG WOMEN IN POLITICS?

Posted on Saturday, January 16, 2010 No Comments
Labels: all doled up, organising campaigns

With the current political debate taking place on families and marriage it looks like issues close to women will be being discussed in the coming election campaign.

That's why we at Compass Youth hope we can use the platform to discuss women's representation in UK politics and beyond as well as 'women's issues' on the political agenda.

All four of our amazing speakers have different areas of interest and expertise so it should make for a really broad meeting and hopefully we should get some ideas for the future too.

Speakers confirmed:

Emily Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury
Dr Rainbow Murray, Politics Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London
Bellavia Ribeiro, Black Students' Officer, National Union of Students
Tulip Siddiq, Labour Party council candidate in Regent's Park and BAME Officer for Young Labour

Contact our Vice Chair - Cat Smith at cat@catsmith.co.uk if you have any queries.

What will you pledge?

1. Sign up now

2. Bring along three of your friends

3. Come along

THE RESOLUTIONS WON'T BE TELEVISED

Posted on Saturday, January 16, 2010 No Comments
Labels: developing ideas

I’ve been reflecting on some of the trends of 2009 and thinking about what New Year’s resolutions public services could start thinking about.

Thanks to digital technologies, more people are creating content and collaborating online in ways that weren’t possible before.

If we want radical efficiencies, it can’t be about doing the same for less, but about doing things differently and better, as well as measuring what matters.

If we look at where the web is most successful at driving social change, it’s where it mobilises untapped resources – people’s energy and innovation – for mutual benefit. It’s what we could call the gift economy.

So what’s this all about? When you receive gifts for Christmas this year, you don’t pay them the amount it was worth. At the same time, if you stop giving gifts to friends, you may find there’ll be less inclined to give you a present.

Our relationship with our citizens is different – it would be like offering a gift to a random person in the street, they wouldn’t necessarily return the favour.

So we need to find how to create relationships with people to mobilise their intrinsic motivation. Relationships affect how people behave and how they’re motivated. Transformation in society doesn’t happen when it adopts new tools, it happens when it adopts new behaviours.

That’s why developing approaches that gain a better understanding of these trends can help us find the innovators we want to work with.

Why not use techniques like relationship mapping or social network analysis? These could enable you to find people innovating to meet the needs of your customers, and they may even be working in your office.

Listen and make sense of stories

You might be able to find who’s been involved in an innovative project before that’s saved time and money but how do you come up with an innovative idea?

When someone asks you for an innovative idea, many of us feel put on the spot. Often, it’s informal conversations that spark off ideas. It’s what’s called the “water cooler” effect”.

Yet we don’t congregate around the water cooler to bounce off ideas, we go there to catch up and share stories about what’s been going on in the office – trying to get our heads around something or solve a difficult problem.

There are various ways that digital technologies are enabling that, not just in the office like micro blogging or communities of practice but also in our local communities with social reporting. It’s because people want to share their stories of what’s going on where they work or live.

So we’ve got stories and we’ve got data on what’s going on in our local areas – but how do we make sense of it all? It’s not just about evidence or consultation was carried out last year, it’s about what data and conversations people have been publishing to the web last night.

Why not use tools that can help you visualise all of this information to pick up new trends as well as open your expertise to the public so they can make better decisions on areas that affect them? With these tools, a picture quite literally is worth a thousand words.

Why not also use tools that enable people to re-use your public information and customise it create their own online information services in ways that suit them?

Get people together to make stuff that matters

So now we’ve listened to people and made sense of their networks and stories, we can start building relationship and mobilising people’s resources, their energy, creativity and goodwill.

Digital technologies make it easier to mobilise these resources. They also bring substantial opportunities for individuals, businesses and other groups to create innovative models to meet these new demands.

These models can be found in very niche web services like Enabled by Design or MyPolice. Both of these haven’t just created new models that wouldn’t have been possible before, they’ve exploited the power of the web to create approaches that offer a form of public service.

What’s more important is they weren’t created by councils or businesses – they were created by groups of people in their spare time. You might think, why would anyone want to do that? I asked the creators of both of these services.

So we can create an environment that nurtures the capacity for innovators to develop and take these models to scale.

Who not bring people together to develop prototypes of online services that meet specific challenges in just a day?

Join up the dots to involve everyone

We may have mobilised the innovators to help us tackle problems, but the strength of innovators is often at the edge of what we do, not at the centre, so how do we scale up innovations so that the wider public can benefit, especially those not online?

Why not reach out to local innovators who can use the web to help people help each other offline, so that the opportunities that digital technologies bring meet those that community engagement bring.

Transform services by transforming ourselves

The following quote captures the lesson I've learnt over 2009. "Transformation isn’t just about transforming services, it’s about transforming ourselves, it’s a new way of thinking, it’s a new mindset."

The challenge for all of us is to harness all those people in public services and the community who are intrinsically motivated to make things better – to make stuff that matters.

YOUTH RESPONSE TO THE ECONOMIC CRISIS - 23 JANUARY

Posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2010 No Comments
Labels: all doled up, organising campaigns

Crunch time - what's happening?

The number of 16 to 24-year-olds out of work is now 952,000 - the highest figure since records began. We’re in a down turn, but we refuse to believe we’ve crashed.

We’re the upside of down and it’s up to us to take action. Working with you, Compass Youth are developing a campaign that’s going to be led by you to start the bounce back.

Who's been queuing up?

Over the last six months, young people across the country from universities, youth groups, schools, graduates on the street and people in the job centre have been listening to each other and developing ideas for that we’ll then act on to make change happen.

We want your support in Barking and Dagenham

Whatever your background or situation we believe you’ve got a voice and the ability to act. Young people have come together across the country and now we’re bringing people together in Barking and Dagenham between 23 January between 10.30-3pm to explore the impact of the crisis and develop ideas for action.

From 11 to 12.30 we’ll be running a listening session with young people on the problems’s we face and the solutions we propose.

We’ll then take our conversation to the streets and campaign with Jon Cruddas on the issue of the economic crisis locally.

What next?

After listening to young people of all ages and backgrounds across the country we’ll work with you to decide the three most effective ideas for action at the session we're holding at the Progressive London conference on 30 January and then enable you to learn campaigning techniques to shape our campaign on 7th February at Toynbee Hall, before campaigning over the coming months.

What will you pledge?

1. Sign up now

2. Bring along three of your friends

3. Come along