Posts for #blog12daysxmas

I'm trying to keep up with the #blog12daysxmas guys over at my Posterous blog this time. I'll set up auto-posting so they should all link in here too.

Participatory service design

These are some notes from some sessions at Industry Day of the Participatory Design Conference, held for the first time ever in the Southern Hemisphere at UTS 28 November to 3 December 2010. From the conference website:

Participation is the complex, contested, changing, creative and celebratory core of participatory design. The theme calls us to explore the current and emerging equivalents to the pioneering Participatory Design focus on involving people in the introduction of technology into their work. This PDC will take up the challenge of extending the design approaches and understandings of participation that informed the first 20 years of Participatory Design towards those that were needed to enable the field to continue to generate major innovations in design in the future.

Shaping Practice - Mariesa Nicholas, Inspire Foundation (Industry Day keynote)

http://www.inspire.org.au/ A youth suicide prevention program.

They built their service by having youth design it themselves. Participation is used there to promote mental health & wellbeing. Involvement of youth is seen as critical to the success of the service.

How Inspire’s practice is shaped (principles):

1. Being flexible and responsive

· Completed a year long evaluation on impact, service development & health/well-being

· Diversity of youth reflected to increase engagement

· ROMP (reach out to an MP) uses social networks

· RO has youth reporters telling stories.

· Hard to reach groups are specifically targetted.

· Using social technology to take message to youth (they use Habbo http://www.habbo.com/?migrate_from=AU). Face-to-face workshops proved unpopular, but Habbo was! People waited up to an hour to get access to a 15 minute facilitated online discussion in Habbo.

2. Communicate openly & often

· Very important & often forgotten

· Youth are OK not to be involved in all decisions, but want to understand reasoning, and need to know their role (else they get frustrated and cynical). Also want to know who else is involved & they want updates. Process must be transparent.

· Empowerment is important for youth or they become cynical

· Must be clear and open! Tokenism is to be avoided at all costs

· Mistakes: roles were not clear/checked; participants not kept updated; mistakes not addressed publicly (this is seen as a good thing).

· Conversion of one-of participants to engaged participants is important & then they become involved longer term.

· Frank & personal communications are important to build trust & genuine relationships.

3. Building a foundation for sustainable participation

· This offers opportunities for professional development is important for young leaders

· Barriers were removed to (to becoming a Youth Ambassador) in order to increase diversity & improve participation but it didn’t translate to much long term participation . . .

· The emphasis on just letting users take the initiative (alone) was wrong. Inspire found they had to provide structure & direction

· Formal staff-led programs were important

· Being a youth ambassador (YA) was seen as a privilege (so opening it up to all took away status)

· There is potential for some YAs to become over-commitment/invested and this isn't healthy - staff needed to manage these challenges

4. Participation is properly resourced

· Not a hobby or something to do in your spare time

· It needs the resources it deserves

· Initially they underestimated what was needed including time

· Participation is difficult, does not come naturally, is costly and it is complex. But the benefits are potentially great.

· Staff training was very necessary & the appreciation of time to engage youth were underestimated.

· Effective participation isn’t spontaneous or a natural process (something that just happens of its own accord)

5. Fostering a culture that values participation

· This is the secret to their success

· Inclusiveness is an organisation value

· Everyone participates in this including the CEO and they enjoy that part of their work.

· Leading by example is very important and valued by colleagues

· They include a youth rep on interview panels - to identify people (staff) who relate to, and work well with youth. (Maybe we could at least try that too with students on panels for reference librarians?)

· They have surveyed stakeholders: and the YA program is central to meaningful participation

· Staff & youth seek opportunities and improve their work

Concluding remarks

The leading mental health service in Australia is ReachOut now.

Inspire now has program, research & policy and consulting arms.

Staff get an extra week annual leave called “reflection leave” - how can it be introduced into other not-for-profit organisations?

They are now also consulting to the NFP sector & Government

They have an “exit strategy” for young people post 25 & they’re developing an alumni program (as advocates) - “setting them free” is seen as critical.

Deus Cycle Swap Meet, November 2010

Sydney Open (architecture tour)

This tour was organised by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW. I'm very grateful to them for encouraging us to get out and see these buildings and stunning views.

Images from London & Berlin

I returned to work earlier this week after a rather hectic two weeks in both London and Berlin. Initially I had a workshop and a short presentation about our future library at the Internet Librarian International conference in London, and I made a lot of side-visits to some libraries and other recent buildings, some of which were recommended by our Library Retrieval System building architects, Hassell.

My visits in London included:

• The London School of Economics and Politics (LSE) Library (a Norman Foster rebuild)
• The British Library (in particular the inspirational Business & IP Centre and the Growing Knowledge exhibition)
• The Natural History Museum (in particular the new Darwin Centre "Cocoon" structure)
• The Victoria & Albert Museum
• The National Gallery (no interior photography allowed)
• The National Portrait Gallery (no interior photography allowed)
• The Tate Modern
• The British Museum (particularly Norman Foster's Great Court enclosure)
• The Serpentine Gallery Pavillion 2010 (just before it closed) and
• Norman Foster's 30 St Mary Axe building (twice because it is so awesome)

I then spent three nights in Berlin around visits to three relatively new academic libraries that my boss had identified as being of interest to us: the Philological Library of the Free University, the VW-Haus of the Technical University and the central University Library of Humboldt University in Berlin "Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum". In addition, I managed to visit the following sites:

• The Memorial to German Resistance
• The Bauhaus Archive
• The Berlin (Modern Art) Gallery
• The external areas of the Jewish Museum and
• The Topography of Terror Museum & Library

I will present my findings to staff at some stage and also write a couple of blog posts about what I saw and learnt, but in the meantime, you may like to take a look at the images I've uploaded to Flickr (last ten sets): http://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/sets/

Vivid & Sydney Film Festival 2010

I hope you all stayed up late waiting for this. It was a late night. And I must say that tonight Rage is playing the worst music I've heard in ages (apart from the stuff after 5.30 am). Terrible guest programming.
So tonight I went out to two flicks at the 2010 Sydney Film Festival. Firstly there was the Australian premier of The Tree at the State Theatre. It is a decent film about loss, grief, imagination, families and country Queensland. As I've recently lost my brother in an accident it was all a bit close to the bone for me. Everyone is going to say it is beautiful, poetic and lyrical, but I'm not so sure. There was a lot I liked, but overall, I don't think it grabbed me or convinced me. Sorry.
After that we walked down Macquarie Street to look at all the Vivid lights and then entered the Sydney Opera House for Nosferatu with Darth Vargus. The band and score were excellent as were the sound effects by Miss Death. Jamie Leonarder's introduction just went on for too long. And for me the film is just pretty corny. It may well be historically significant, but I'm glad we didn't have to sit through it without the amusing live soundtrack. Even so I fell asleep a number of times.
I have to add that the seats in both venues were excellent and I had heaps of leg room. You cannot say that about all film venues in Sydney, especially some old cinemas in Oxford St.