By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Collaborate Towards a New Civic Holiday

For the second round of the civic imagination convening that took place in March-April 2015, we decided to move to a more accessible format by eliminating both Google + Hangouts and the hosting of materials on a WordPress site. Instead the entire convening was hosted on a private Facebook page based on the assumption that all interested individuals would already have personal Facebook accounts. One of the weaknesses of the first round was that participants did not really collaborate on their holidays or provide written commentary on each other’s proposals. In shifting to a Facebook page, the MAPP team hoped to drive more written collaboration.

The goal of collaboration was also built into the structure of the convening itself. This convening was designed as a "sequential" hotspot model in which each contributor will submit their (max 500 word) hot spot contribution in response to an explicit challenge by another. They then challenged another member of the group to respond to what they wrote (very much like the ALS Bucket challenge), and so on.

The six participants were all added to a private Facebook group, which was moderated by MAPP Program Specialist Alexandra Margolin. The group was made up of a mix of individuals from the previous cycle as well as some new participants:To start things off, each of the participants were asked to provide a brief self-introduction, which served both as an icebreaker and as an opt-in indicator of one’s participation. Below are two examples of what that looked like.

Alexandra then kicked off the hotspot itself building on the work of the first round of the civic imagination.

The hotspot model did serve the purpose of facilitating a more collaborative creative process, especially because Facebook discussions more easily facilitated participants to build upon each other’s submission.
Were a Cycle 3 of the Civic Imagination to be organized, the challenge would be to increase the informal commentary and discussion surrounding each submission.

Much like the first cycle, participants responded when directly called upon but not necessarily to group messages or without being prompted. Moving forward, the question this raises for the MAPP team is to see how to increase more self-directed participation.

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