Crowdsourcing Ideas for Youth?

The GovLab is taking the idea of community solutions to a whole new level. In partnership with MIT Media Lab’s Online Learning Initiative, GovLab is aiming to help government institutions “open their institutions and work more collaboratively to solve public problems that improve people’s lives.” 

 I immediately jumped at this idea of creating a way for a broad spectrum of folks concerned about youth issues, including young people, to tackle the youth unemployment crisis. Imagine if we were able to have a virtual and on-going (no more of these one day meetings to address enormous issues) conversation with people poking, prodding, and helping to put together the ideas that could actually address the crisis. This is too big for the Department of Labor or Congress to figure out on their own.

GovLab is trying out new ideas about how to open up government to more participatory solution-building. Today they are doing a Hangout on crowdlaw – bringing together people that are helping to shape new governance laws and constitutions. They are using a number of tools to support this event including Google Hangout, blogs, twitter, and Zotero folders for groups. Here’s the link if you want to check it out. 

From what I can tell GovLab is funded by the The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and builds off of the work of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Open Governance. This level of pushing the envelope, experimentation, and setting new values and parameters about how we and institutions operate is one of the best examples of how foundation investments can make a difference. They aren’t just sitting in their offices imagining a whole new world: There is lots of engagement with practitioners and academic researchers through the Research Network that are building out the ideas of open governance. GovLab is taking it the next step, helping to build capacity and offer tools about how to go forward. 

We need to look at this and other types of participatory processes that can help us think beyond the way we’ve been doing business for youth.