Old and new models
(WORLD) Back at the turn of the century I was busy working my way around a couple of local authorities here in the UK. I ended up in one where the Chief Executive took a shining to me and basically allowed me to write a job description for the post of 'Corporate Youth Officer', focussed on embedding youth participation into the councils operations—it was the first ever post of its kind in the UK.
One of the things I held dear at that time was Roger Harts 'Ladder of Participation' (which is still very much in use today and which every youth professional knows backwards across the globe):
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Spring forward into the latter end of the last decade and I'm delivering keynotes and masterclasses to several youth services across the country (and world) and mashing up the above ladder with another one which show how people use the web (below is the latest verion):
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Looks familiar, huh? Maybe great minds were thinking alike here or maybe the Forrester guys were inspired by Mr Hart?
All I know is that participation as a term and model can be substituted for many of the social media phrases such as conversation, community and/or user-generated content, and maybe that's why I feel so at home in this space as I've been doing stuff like this for over a decade.
