Remixing Citizenship: E-Participation Research

I snatched this from Roman's website, a hothouse of ideas (and film reviews for that matter).

Carnegie Young People Initiative - Remixing Citizenship: E-Participation Research
May 24, 2005

Carnegie Young People Initiative has invited Professor Stephen Coleman of the Oxford Internet Institute to write a research report on the relationship between young people, the Internet and democratic citizenship.

Remixing Citizenship sheds new light on how young people access democracy via new media. It argues that the nature of civic and political participation is changing and young people are the first to recognise it.

Remixing Citizenship draws on existing evidence as well as new research about how young people use the internet to gather information, express themselves and exercise power as pre-voting citizens. Its starting hypothesis is that much of what is offered to young people in the name of ‘active citizenship’ lacks appeal because it seems to be remote from their everyday experience and disconnected from the levers of power.
The research

The research was conducted online as well as face-to-face. A dedicated website: www.eparticipation.org.uk was set up and a group of 100 13-18 year-olds were recruited who agreed to visit various web sites and respond to questions about them in a web forum. Approximately 800 comments were contributed by these participants. Face-to-face discussions with groups of 13-18 year-olds year-olds were run in eight schools.

We are grateful to Chris Rowe for co-ordinating the research and for keeping the young people involved motivated.

Why was this report commissioned?

It has been three years since the Carnegie Young People Initiative commissioned Demos to produce Logged Off? How ICT can connect young people and politics. The report was a response to emerging policy and practice around young people’s participation at local and national level. It focussed on the opportunities of and barriers to of online participation .

Logged Off concluded that new technologies could only encourage greater participation if they were used to engage and empower young people. It argued that examples of good practice needed to be scaled up and repeated extensively across the UK, and offered practical solutions for taking the agenda forward.

This new report was commissioned to find out what has changed since then.

We are pleased to announce that the report will be launched on the 8th June 2005 at Channel 4. The event will be chaired by Millie Banerjee of Ofcom and Vice Chair of the Carnegie UK Trust. Speakers are:

* Stephen Coleman, Cisco Professor of eDemocracy, Oxford Internet Institute
* Adam Gee, Commissioning Editor-Interactive, Channel 4
* Louise MacDonald, Vice Chief Executive, Young Scot