Hello, my name's Andy Dow, and I'm presenting our work on behalf of my co-authors Kyle Montague, Shauna Concannon and John Vines.
And I'll be talking about how we were scaffolding young people's participation
in public service evaluation through designing a digital feedback process.
So a little bit about the motivation for this work.
So the young people that we were working with often faced marginalisation through having certain types of disability,
through being a young carer or a young parent or being excluded from school, such young people might often rely on services for support.
And in England, there has been with a succession of governments, a chronic lack of investment in public service provision in England.
This has led to a very mixed economy of care service provision with voluntary and community sector organisations,
or VCO's often coming to fill the gap in provision.
And those organisations do rely for their funding on a competition for for awards for
applying to funding pots from local government national government from different places.
Often, those awards come with the stipulation to demonstrate some kind of user engagement and participation in shaping how services are delivered.
This, of course, comes against the backdrop of a voluntary, a vibrant,
voluntary youth sector in England that is committed and underpinned by values of being responsive to users,
of being user led listening to the people that make use of their services for our own background.
We are HCI researchers particularly interested in the emerging area of digital civics,
which sees a range of projects aimed at creating new infrastructures for creating new pathways for civic engagement,
capturing and recording civic dialogue and debate. Raising awareness about local issues,
technologies that help people or non-experts to collect data to create an evidence base
to effect change in relation to local issues and in particular work by Peacock et al.,
exploring youth inclusion and decision making processes.
These are groups of young people who have been brought together by project work with
local councils with the aim of getting them involved in evaluating local services.
So looking at ways that we can capture that experience about services,
looking and getting their feedback and thoughts on service provision
So community based in that we will working in a very embedded way within a community, within community groups,
working very closely with the young people who where are our main end users,
and employing participatory design for the inclusive and emancipatory values that underpin its use.
That resulted in a 20 months long engagement with project partners, not just with our national group of young ambassadors,
but with two further groups of young people interested or who's working with
organisations interested in supporting young people to have a say about public services.
All in all, we ran 12 workshops involving 24 young people together aged between 11 and 24,
and that resulted in us bringing together some prototypes, prototype data collection software, an app called Appraise.
And we tested it with young people on field trials where they went out into the world with different digital tools that were
trying out, to capture data about services that they were interested in and to capture the experiences in relation to those.
And we rounded that off with 14 stakeholder interviews.
So very quickly here you can see allows you to set up an appraisal,
which is what we call an evaluation, and you can decide what it is you're evaluating.
So one of the visits to our young people went on was to evaluate a job centre.
You can say why are you replacing? You can invite your friends or family to appraise with you, add them to the appraisal,
and then they can contribute to an appraisal by capturing images, capturing video, capturing audio,
So altogether, our young people got on very well, collecting data with the Appraise app.
They were able to go to four events altogether and captures you can see mostly photographs, some videos,
very few audios with the app that you could then bring back and go through to help create these evaluative reports.
Now, this long study resulted in a very large data corpus.
As you might imagine,
I don't have enough time to go through all of these findings here, so I'm just going to pick out some of the top, you might be interested in hearing about
So thinking about what were the challenges with capturing digital media with the praise?
So of course, our young people were very enthusiastic to go along to events to capture media.
We're very confident to do this,
but soon found that that can be socially awkward in a particular space to suddenly be putting the camera in front of people,
to be asking people for interviews about service provision, whatever they decided they were going to collect with with the app while they were there.
Also, we found some contextual bias and constraints.
As you might imagine, you can't just go into a job centre and take out your phone and start recording things as well as this media shown here
captures that, and there's a lot of restrictions in the spaces and places where public services are provided
to contend with by young people were up to the challenge of coming up with workarounds.
So to address some of that social awkwardness, we we saw young people going up to people instead of recording a video and carrying out an interview,
just speaking to people and getting a quote off them and then writing that down, taking a photograph.
Then that became part of the data that they collected. And then also, instead of directly photographing or interviewing people,
young people work together to capture the information that was on display at different events.
And
But something that we thought was really good was that we saw that, so it's come off the back of some of these.
And so I'd like to share this quote. So a social enterprise manager that was interviewed said that he could appreciate when he saw a recording
of a young person talking about the music that was playing in the gym where they were working.
He could immediately see how he could respond to that, saying, I appreciate that and we can change that, like the music thing
If we had an iPod that was linked to iTunes or Spotify thing, that would really be good.
And I'll probably take that on board, to be honest.
So we had these moments from carrying through the process, presenting this information in this way to service providers.
We had these moments of insight in these very pragmatic actions that could be taken off the back of it.
that structured its use with young people that was able to not only shape but reshape young people's participation with public services.
And we saw how, through the app young people could build the capacity to participate in evaluation processes.
We also saw how having a particular process where young people could come in different
stages and that this was successful in addressing the very fluid nature of such groups.
Some people, perhaps through ill health, aren't able to come to all of the different stages,
but through appraise, they were able to see a record of a visit that people had gone on,
or if they weren't able to go on the visit, they were able to take part in going through the data and to the presentation for the report.
And we saw that this allowed for a more flexible participation that could take place over a longer period of time.
And this leads us to recommend that such technologies need to allow young people with different disabilities to contribute,
And to participate to an extent that is comfortable for them and through that lift,
and reconfigure the barriers of, to participation
Thank you very much to all our project partners, thank you to you for listening. I'd be very happy to answer any questions.