Participation Works Home » About Participation » Online Tools » 7Cs of Multimedia Participation
Login   		 Text Size Normal Text Medium Text Large Text

Participation Online
Participation Rooms

7 Cs of Multimedia Participation

When you think about any opportunity for young people to be involved, you should first think carefully about:

  • Your aims for involving young people;
  • The outcomes you are looking to achieve;

Once you have thought about this you can think about where multimedia and social media may fit in the process.


7 Cs of multimedia participation
Multimedia and social media can be used for:

  • Context setting – introducing discussions and providing key information and insights about an issue.
  • Creativity and creative expression – engaging young people and exploring and expressing ideas in different creative media.
  • Consultation  - using the internet and interactive tools to ask for young people’s views in dynamic and accessible ways.
  • Conversation – starting and hosting discussions in the spaces where young people are active.
  • Collaboration – providing a space (online) where young people can work together across boundaries.
  • Campaigning – engaging with a wider range of people to convince them of the need for changes and gain their support for change.
  • Change – the goal of participation and something that can be celebrated through multimedia and social media.

The Seven Cs are not a checklist that every multimedia participation project must tick. They show that you can use the same multimedia tool in many different ways (for example, think about how you could show a video for context setting, record video as part of a consultation, and edit a video with a group as part of a conversation). Thinking about which ways you want to use it will help your use of multimedia to be effective.
Worked Example

We can see how the 7 Cs help by imagining a youth club that makes use of online video. This is a fictional example that tries to show a wide range of multimedia methods in use.

The youth club has bought three digital video cameras and is running video making sessions during regular club nights. Most of the young people are using the sessions to make up their own 3-minute weekly soap opera dramas about their lives and they are sharing them on a MySpace web page.

On its own this might be multimedia used as part of a positive activity, but it is not participation in decision making or in influencing change.

Now imagine that the group decides to make one of the episodes of their drama about the lack of places to go for young people in their local area. They send a link to the video online to their local councillors and put a copy on DVD for council officers who can’t access MySpace.

This is a use of multimedia for creative expression.

The group then decide to find out what other young people in their school think of the availability of places to go locally so they set up a blog and write blog posts with questions about local places to go. They invite their friends to share their comments. They also create an interactive online map of the places they already know about for young people and they ‘embed’ this on their blog. They invite blog visitors to suggest other places that they know about.

This is a use of multimedia tools for consultation and youth-led research.

The results of their consultation show that many young people can’t afford to go to the leisure centre, and that if a bus service could be provided on a Friday night lots more people could get to the cinema. The group decide to hold a meeting at their youth centre to discuss possible changes they could ask the council for. The group’s worker finds a number of video case studies online about other areas that have introduced special bus services and finds a PodCast audio interview with the manager of a leisure centre that started offering low cost Saturday swimming. These are played at the meeting to help start discussions.

This is a use of multimedia for context setting.

Young people at the meeting break into groups and come up with 5 proposals for how to improve access to places to go locally, and groups create posters about their proposals. They decide to choose two proposals to put forward to the council. Photos of the posters are uploaded to a photo sharing website and everyone is invited to use the discussion space under the photos to share their views on them.

This is a use of social media for conversation.

The group realize that they can’t narrow the 5 proposals down to 2, but rather that they need to combine some of the proposals. They create a collaborative online document using a Wiki. After two weeks and lots of encouraging people to contribute by e-mail and text message they finally have two clear proposals.

This is a use of social media for collaboration.

The group record a video of themselves explaining the proposals and send this, along with the proposals to their local councillors. The councillors do not respond at first, so the group set up a Facebook group and an online petition and invite everyone they know to join the group or sign the petition. They quickly gather a list of 200 people who support their proposals.

This is a use of social media for campaigning.

Seeing this demonstration of support, the council decide that they will take the proposals on board. They put together a plan on how they will make the changes. The leader of the council puts togeher a short slide show with three slides: ‘What you asked for’, ‘What the council has done’, ‘What should change’. These slides are uploaded to a slide sharing website and everyone who has taken part in the campaign is sent a link to view them.

This is multimedia and social media leading to change – and what’s changed is being fed back to young people.
 Multimedia Participation

This page is a companion to the Participation Works How To Guide on Multimedia Participation.

 

You can find the How To guide to download from the Participation Works resources page.
 Blog Posts