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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Measuring and Sustaining Participatory Politics Success webinar and twitter chat

Measuring and Sustaining Participatory Politics Success, the first webinar of the By Any Media Necessary: Scaffolding & Sustaining Participatory Politics webinar and twitter chat series, was held on February 5, 2015 and hosted on the Connected Learning website. Zachary Cáceres (Startup Cities Institute and MPC Creative Learning Community), Ilse Escobar (Miguel Contreras Foundation), and Paul DeGeorge (Harry Potter Alliance) joined moderator Henry Jenkins to explore questions such as when big moments or events have come and gone, how do you keep energy and interest levels high? And how do you know whether your efforts have been “successful?”

The participants discussed the following framing questions during the webinar:

Describe what you see as the most successful political action you have ever taken. What happened and what made it a success in your eyes?
How do you personally define/conceptualize success for your work/issue/organization?
Is it important to measure success? How do you measure success in your work? Who do you measure success for? Why measure success?
How do we move past numbers when setting goals? Which numbers are important?
Is there an endpoint?
When big moments or events have come and gone, how do you keep energy and interest levels high?
And how do you know whether your efforts have been 'successful'?
Once you achieve/reach the point of success, how do you prepare new goals?

Building on the work of the storytelling webinar series, we sought to ground the webinar in the personal experiences of the webinar panelists. At the heart of the discussion was a reframing the idea of “success” to look at outcomes that may not be easily demarcated. While some successes, like the Harry Potter Alliance’s (HPA) Not in Harry’s Name campaign, are easily identifiable others are not as easy to track. But the panelists were not particularly interested in discussing these more easily identifiable success. In fact, when facilitating the discussion moderator Henry Jenkins would have to directly ask participants about outwardly visible “successes” as the panelists rarely brought such examples up themselves. Rather than discuss HPA’s four year Not In Harry’s Name Campaign (which had concluded a few weeks prior to the webinar), co-founder of the HPA, Paul DeGeorge kicked things off by discussing the Occupy Movement, stating: maybe Occupy “did not effect change at that moment, but I am hoping to see implants of those seeds of change, and you see grass roots levels are starting to pop at local levels.” Longtime immigration rights activist Ilse Escobar continued this thread by highlighting the power of narrative and the agency that comes with communities of color knowing their histories. Building on Paul and Ilse, entrepreneur Zachary Cáceres reminded viewers that it is easy to fall into the trap of traditional methods of measuring success, which are not truly indicative of behavioral change because of the need to clearly identify successes for a variety of stakeholders. For the three webinar panelists the successes that resonated most strongly were those that served as catalysts for future action.

Drawing from themes that emerged from the first webinar, the MAPP team created a list of follow-up questions to be discussed in a corresponding twitter chat the following week on February 12. Led by Jon Barilone from the Connected Learning Alliance, with support from MAPP team members Alexandra Margolin, Raffi Sarkissian, Diana Lee, and Ritesh Mehta, participants used #ByAnyMedia to discuss questions such as:

How do you move beyond numbers to measure civics success? What metrics do *you* use?
How do you show that minor/singular successes (campaign, events, etc.) are part of a larger success story?
When measuring success how do you balance what you DID versus what EFFECT you had?
How can entertainment fandom serve as a catalyst to become active in civic politics?
Lack of technical knowledge can be an involvement barrier. How do you make specialized info accessible?
Knowing your community's history can give you power/language to act. How do you use history in your work?
How do you keep up morale after setbacks or failures?
When a campaign like #NotInHarrysName can take 4 years, how do you decide when a campaign ends?
Civics/social justice work is never done. After achieving your goal(s), how do you start setting new ones?

Don’t have time to watch the full webinar or read through the twitter chat? The MAPP team also published highlights from this series on Henry Jenkins’ blog, and key moments from Webinar & Twitter Chat 1 and Webinar & Twitter Chat 2.

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