I'm currently at the Civicus World Assembly, which, for the first time this year, has included the Civicus Youth Assembly.

The Youth Assembly has brought together 130 young people from 65 countries, spending two days before the main assembly exploring global issues, and inputting into the main assembly. The Youth Assembly is a positive step for Civicus on the journey to meaningfully engaging young people in its work, challenging age-based discrimination and drawing on the innovative spirit of youth* - but it also illustrates how essential it is that the rational for engaging young people is clear in each context when it is explored.

There are at least two ways in which young people might engage in the Civicus World Assembly.

Firstly, as young practioners, involved in the same daily struggles and facing the same set of problems as 'adult' world assembly delegates. That is, involved in the building of civil society organisations, in the provision of service, in the development of new sollutions.

Secondly, young people might be involved as young stakeholders, affected by the work of 'adult' delegates and their organisations. That is, service recipients, involved in day-to-day personal struggles, or representing** communities facing practical struggles in claiming their own rights to healthcare, employment, food security and civic engagement.

(Of course, these are not mutually exclusive - one can be both a service deliverer, and a service recipient - but we are interested in the 'role' through which a young person may be selected for involvement in a participation process)

The role in which young people are invited to engage in the assembly alters the role which they should play.

Young practioners may need training and support in contextualising issues - with the aim of them participating in shared problem solving, knowledge sharing and work-based-networking with 'adult' delegates.

Young stakeholders may need space to critique the ideas presented, make claims of adult delegates on behalf of their selves and their communities, and, within the right processes, to contribute to the generation of innovative sollutions to shared problems.

(Again we are not dealing with polarities - but the difference is important)

If the agenda is a 'young stakeholders' agenda - then it arguably only makes sense without a broader stakeholder involvement agenda. This agenda is an important one... but I'm not clear that bringing a large population of 'on-the-ground' stakeholders to the Civicus Assembly would be the most productive or coherent approach.

As far as I understand the work of Civicus at present, the second 'young practioners' agenda fits best. If this is the case - then if follows that (in the longer term at least) the distinction between 'young delegate' and 'adult delegate' should be broken down. Rather, it should be recognised that to fully participate in shared problem solving at the assembly, some individuals may need more 'induction', more space to be introduced to particular issues and more training or support to be heard against the already confident voices. There will be a higher number of young people in this group of individuals - but the group will not exclusively be young.

On Sunday, young delegates at the World Assembly will make a presentation in the closing plenary... at the moment that presentation suffers in part from a confusion about the role of young people at the assembly... though it is heading in the right direction. And how that presentation is received should take us further to understanding the rationality on which Civicus is seeking to deepen its engagement with young people.

Footnotes:

*A suggestion that youth has a monopoly on innovation would provide some alternative rationality for their engagement. But of course, such a suggestion would be flawed. And in-so-far as young people have greater capacity for innovation, we should be seeking to learn from them so that we can all become more innovative - and innovative, creative problems solving becomes the domain of all...

**I'll blog more on the concept of respresentation at some point soon...

Just a quick post to point to this diagram from Jane Berry over at the Open Innovation Exchange which I think has some relevance to the conversations we've been having recently about The Enfusion Network, and trying to gain an understanding of the profile of potential members and how they might interact with the site...

Over the past few weeks at http://www.innovationexchange.net/ a team led co-ordinated(?)/fascilitated(?) by Simon Berry from ruralnet|UK and including a really diverse and interesting selection of innovators, thinkers and actors have been putting together an £1.2m Open Source bid to the Office of the Third Sector to run an 'Innovation Exchange' (i.e. the bid has been developed in a way that allows anyone to contribute and potentially feed into it's contents...)

I've made a few comments on the website, and reviewed and commented on version 4.2 of the bid document. And it's a real demonstration of the openess of Simon and the core team for the bid that my comments, and those of others, have been very clearly worked into the bid and the workplan it would lead to.

The experience of contributing to a collaborative document with the Open Innovation Exchange has got me thinking again about all the different policies, strategies and documents that organisations write about young people, without young people having the chance to be involved in them. Would an Open Innovation Exchange model work for the creation of these documents? What if every strategy a Children's Trust wrote was created in an online collaborative environment and young people had the chance to comment, edit and shape the document?

I'd like the updated Map and Plan sharing spaces [E.g. 1, 2, 3] on the Hear by Right website (coming soon...) to go someway towards 'open sourcing' the Hear by Right process, and allowing greater space for children and young people affected by a particular Hear by Right process to see and act on the 'documents' it generates - but I also think there are broader needs for us to explore open document creation across the world of youth participation.

Of course - there would be challenges fascilitating access to the technology and the context so that young people could meaningfully input - but providing open strategy creation didn't replace other methods of engagement - it would surely be no bad thing. Not least because if the organisations that are looking to engage young people turn to more open working across the board, then the journey to young people influencing decisions within them is, potentially, a lot more straightforward.

For The Enfusion Network to function at its best, we need to encourage practioners and consultants to engage with an open working style that allows the benefits of a network to emerge.

But as Seth Godin's post on bananas suggests... (and as our experience working to encourage organisations to embed young peoples engagement backs up...) 'selling' and encouraging change is tough.

But if we're serious about the need for Enfusion (which we are). And if we're serious about avoiding 'organisation building' and making sure that we have a responsive network that really serves to aid improved practice and impact in youth engagement (which we are), then we need to stick at it.

We've just had a working weekend to explore the next steps for the network, and from that I think our core challenges are:

• To keep our vision focussed on creating connections between practioners and consultants focussed on embedding youth engagement in organisations and communities - and to find ways of clearly keeping that focus while being open to allow interdisciplinary connections to emerge...
• To find creative ways of engaging potential network members in Enfusion - both showing the value of making small changes to working patterns in order to be able to engage through the network, and through creating positive opportunities for connections to be made (developing on from our conference calls and coffee house chats...)
• To find sources of funding and ways of becoming sustainable that don't rely on 'organisation building' and allow the network to remain agile and effective, responding to the needs in the field for critical discussion space, networking space and reflection space.

We're going to be working on meeting these challenges over the coming months, so all pointers and suggestions most welcome...