I was speaking with a Kosovar colleague about the Innovations Lab By Youth For Youth projects, and he presented an interesting challenge for us to think about.

Whenever you get "youth" together in a context of projects, proposals, social change, or speaking to possible donors, there is a danger that they lose their youthful vigor.

The colleague pointed out that if he were (still) a young Kosovar trying to design an innovative project, he would organize a text-bombing campaign where a politician's phone would constantly ring with text messages coming from all sorts of different young people. He thought this would let youth vent innovatively, but also point out the incredible communications costs a politician's phone is associated with (especially compared to average Kosovo salary etc.)

And at the same time, he told me that he would be extremely surprised if youth in the Innovations Lab came up with an idea like this. It reeks of youthful vigor, and a fondness for pranks. But whenever you get youth in a room and have them think about projects, even innovative projects, they tend to think more straightforwardly, by the books so to speak. They forget their needs sometimes, their creativity at other times.

This is highly related to the problem in participatory design where "participants absorb the values of the design team to such an extent that they lose touch with the requirements of users not involved in the design process.¹" It is one of many in participatory design. But since my colleague (who has worked with plenty of projects with Kosovar youth) explicitly pointed to this one, we will thinking about how to avoid it in the Innovations Lab. Any hints from projects before, or thoughts in general, are welcome in the comments.

[1] - Designing for social justice - people, technology, learning; page 23, under "Doing participatory design."

To help youth develop projects for the UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo, we have been holding active brainstorms where youth express problems and possible "projects" to help with those problems. Many fascinating issues have come up in these brainstorms, but I wanted to share one in particular.

During a round of "name, place of origin, and 'one thing i'd like to fix in the world,'" two Kosovars said (re-phrased):

I would like to make it possible to select Kosovo as my country when I sign up to online services (like Facebook).

I don't know why it struck me so, but I really felt the need to share this need that youth  here feel. Perhaps I like it because it just screams out the political nature of tools and technologies, which we often think of as separated from politics. And perhaps I like it because it brings me back to the most interesting question I came away from the Global Voices Summit with: what happens when public spaces and conversations are hosted on private infrastructure¹?

Whichever it is, it is an important identity issue for Kosovar youth. It is hard to picture the Kosovo government devoting many resources to this; it is more likely busy advocating nations and institutions to recognize its independence. But what matters for youth is recognition by the "institutions" that they interact with.

I am really interested in discussing this with youth members of the Innovations Lab in the future. For now, I will leave with another youth's desire expressed during the same go-around (again, re-phrased):

I would like for Kosovo to have its own soccer and sports teams².

[1] - I suppose I should explain this question a little more. Basically, today's public conversations (like someone saying, I think our community really should have X happen in it) happen on sites like Facebook and YouTube, which are private companies. The rules saying what kinds of things we are aloud to say and not say on these sites is totally their own decision--while the public may choose to say something about the conversations about their community, these sites can choose to ignore them. Basically, we are having "public" discussions, but private companies make the decision or whether or not we should be having those discussions. If you are as fascinated by me about this issues, I would recommend delving further with Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York's explorations.

[2] - Kosovo has no team of its own, and many Kosovars I'm told play in the Albanian football team. Recent spurts of unrest regarding national/ethnic tensions arising from Kosovo have also happened during and around sports games.