 I think we can begin. Thank you very much for your patience. I'm Anne Marie Slaughter. I'm the president and CEO of New America and welcome to a very different kind of Davos event. In the first place it looks like a panel but it's not a panel. It's a conversation and it's a conversation that is a conversation on reshaping politics. What are the forces that are reshaping politics and civic engagement? It's a global conversation that's part of shaping Davos which the Davos global shapers have launched that connects 40 cities discussing 10 topics all around the world and we're going to be talking to our hubs. So this is a conversation and we are all participants. We have our physical participants here on the panel and I'm going to ask everyone to introduce themselves on the panel. Not all of you but please do when you speak. So we're going to be part of the conversation. You're going to be part of the conversation. Then we have four long-distance physical participants right in Manila and Tunis and Ottawa. So we're going to have the Madrid. I'm sorry I didn't mean to leave out Madrid. Madrid is smiling at me. So in Madrid and then we have the virtual world. So Jorge Soto is going to represent the tweets, social media, other questions. So this is a you could say a three-ring circus but I prefer to say a lively physical and virtual conversation. So with that I'm going to actually ask each hub just to introduce themselves and this round we're just going to go around and say who we are. I'm going to ask the panel to introduce themselves and Jorge to stand up and then the the hubs will start talking about what they're doing and we will respond and I will moderate the conversation. So Ottawa please go ahead. Great to be here. Happy to join you. My name is Evan Solomon. I'm the host of a daily political program called Power and Politics on CBC and our hub had to deal with engaging citizens and Canada's role in the future of governance, open government and engaged citizens. We've got a lot of new strategies and new ideas to talk about and I'm looking forward to that. Great. Madrid. Hello, very nice to meet you. Virtually greetings from Madrid. Let me tell you that we have had a passionate and very interesting debate during three days here in Madrid and we are very much looking forward to share with you some of our conclusions. Wonderful. Tunis. Hi, Alia Mahmoud, Global Shaper from the Tunis Hub. I'm the corporate citizenship manager at Microsoft here in Tunis. I'm really excited to be with you guys today. We had a very, very interesting shaping politics panel here in Tunis and we're really looking forward to sharing with you some of our discussions, conclusions, results. Wonderful. Manila. Good evening from Manila. Happy to join this conversation. In Manila, we tried to tackle the issue of transparency and participation, especially when it comes to youth engagement. Wonderful. Thank you and let me turn to my panelists. Hello. I'm Dany Sri Skanderadar. I'm Secretary General of an organization called Civicus, which is a global civil society alliance. We've got members in 145 countries, but I live and work out of our headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa. I'm Joe Nye. I'm now a professor at the Kennedy School in Harvard, formerly dean there and before that at various times we've worked in various parts of the US government defense and state department and so forth. I'm Moises Naim. I'm a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington. Four months ago I was the general director of civic innovation at the President's office in Mexico. Wonderful. All right. So Manila, I'm going to start with you if you will just give us the highlights of your convening and then again we will respond and I would invite you to raise your hands as well. Okay, briefly what we tried to tackle here in Manila is the issue of participation of the youth. We have here what we call the Sangonyang Kabataan, which is actually the youth participating in a local council in local governance. Unfortunately, this youth council mirrored the same problems of corruption that their adult peers in that local council experience. And so it is actually in crisis because of that corruption issue. And what we tried to do is to see how we can set the reset button in order that this really becomes a transformative and solution based youth council. And so what we did was have a hackathon and the solution that was presented to us and is called Tandem, which is a project gamification. And in turn what it does really is provide an engagement platform for young people to be more engaged in the youth council. Through a game. What it does is it's it's a project gamification. So what it does is the young people in a particular community will register through SMS. And then that then becomes a dual communication system for both the youth local council and community members that are part of the youth. And so solutions can be talked about. Problems can be communicated. Solutions can be communicated. And it also gathers data about who participates. And so the policies will then be shaped according to the data that was collected. I can imagine politicians using it to build their lists very, very cleverly. Reactions. Well, corruption is a tremendous problem. And the question of how you deal with it is often transparency. And the question I would have is ask for the vanilla group is did you ask about how information technology can do something about increasing transparency? I mean, you have the name and shame capacity. But also there's there's a I believe in India, there was a plan where if a if a civil servant asks you for a bribe, there's a way in which you can tweet or if not tweet, at least indicate a virtual communication that you've been asked for a bribe. And it can be anonymous. You don't have to I paid a bribe. You know, yeah, you don't Yeah, but you don't have to jeopardize yourself doing it. But it does create some degree of disincentive. So I you know, we ought to be trying to think of ways about how you can increase this transparency, increase the disincentives. I wondered if your group talked about that at all. Definitely, I think that is a very active discussion. And also not just active discussion, but creative solutions coming from young people when it comes to using technology and transparency. I myself work with Transparency International. And the kinds of innovation that we're seeing in terms of monitoring, reporting, using the digital platform has been impressive. And I think what we're seeing is a new kind of active citizenship that is really pushing the boundaries of transparency and accountability amongst young people, and really calling out if should there be any corruption practices that can be exposed in government. I was a bit disappointed to hear that you've experienced this challenge with corruption, because I think, for me, we're at a there's a little bit of uncertainty here about whether the ways that young people are organizing and mobilizing will be less prone to the sorts of corruption that older sorts of institutions. I mean, I think my generation when we organize, we'd form a committee, probably register an organization, elect someone, a chair, get some funding. And we know those sorts of institutions in practice lead to rent seeking or corruption or status grabbing. Whereas I think the sort of more vibrant, spontaneous, less organized institutions that are being created that aren't necessarily about monetary flows, I would hope would be less prone to corruption. But I was a bit worrying, though, that we are hearing that in Manila that even these new formations are susceptible to the age old challenges of human frailty, I suppose I had a very similar reaction. Is there anything from social media? Yeah. So there's one question, a couple of questions, one from Laura Gurgel. She says, well, 1% of the population owns 50% of the world's health. Well, is there a political will and economic mechanism to revert this? Okay, so I'm going to turn back to Manila. So I and this actually ties together with the question of corruption. I mean, there's deep inequality in the Philippines. There's deep inequality in many countries. And that has to be an issue for youth as they engage. I mean, is that in your idea of getting people to be active citizens through a game or bringing them in? Is there do you talk about how you address that question? Well, definitely, because it's important to note that we've had some gains in fighting corruption in the Philippines in the last four years. And the fact that we're trying to reform the youth council, and we're trying to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes as a sign of that. But yes, corruption does get in the way of development. And we are experiencing that in the Philippines. Part of the problem is when you have weak institutions that can be easily captured. So when you just have a change of leadership, and we have a change of leadership, and there is no talk of good governance, then those weak institutions become prone again. So the idea, the idea is we need to have innovative solutions in order to make sure that corruption is curbed. And in one way that we're seeing there could be a lot of room for growth and improvement is with young people participating in anti-corruption work through something very something that they're very, very familiar with, since they're mostly native to the digital technology. Moises. Thank you. Sorry. In many countries, the main tool to fight corruption is the short-lived, highly visible and short-lived scandal. I'm sorry. When I speak about corruption, I call. In what you typically see is that there is a there is some corruption accident or some corruption event that is detected or is denounced by the media. It becomes a big issue and it stays as a big issue for a short period of time. And then it more or less dissipates and one never knows what happens. So my suggestion is that as important as denouncing the corruption, I didn't identify in the code. Stay on it and make sure that impunity does not become the rule because one of the biggest feeders of corruption is impunity is the risk reward relationship of being corrupt. If you feel that you can get away with it and there's impunity, then you're creating an atmosphere of incentives. So be careful everywhere from fighting corruption with the short-lived, highly visible scandals. So one advantage of I paid a bribe is that you can map the corruption. It's anonymous, I paid a bribe, but then you put that on a map and you can see clusters at this board or clusters at this office. So you can't deny the reality of corruption, even if you're not pointing fingers at precisely at individual people. So do you want to do you have a response and then I'm going to move on to Ottawa. Yes, I agree. And this this this project that we did in fact fosters collaboration between young people who are members of the community and those sitting in government. And so I think that the thing of having this long-term engagement can be addressed because it does foster a healthy collaboration and really holding those in public office accountable in the long in the long run. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ottawa, you're on. All right. We had a great session last night. I'll do a quick report and part of it had to do with open government and what that is that was defined as government that doesn't intimidate its citizens through complexity or through compliance that can act as a collaborative, engaging, transparent force. And on the other side, the problem of voter disengagement, especially for young people, the millennial generation in the last election, only 38.8 percent of young people actually ended up voting. So what is the problem? So there's quickly three stages. There is that kind of diagnostic phase. Why don't people, especially young people, get involved in government institutions? There's a good side and a bad side on the good side. Activism is very high amongst young people, but they're not active necessarily in government. They're active in NGOs and other institutions, but they don't seem to want to vote for various reasons. The panel discussed some of them actually say, despite the privileged position Canadians have in terms of access to information, income disparities compared to many other countries, young people here actually say they don't have enough information. But that may mask a more profound issue, which is government relevance. Let me just focus quickly on what they talked about on disengagement. There was a tactical discussion as to how we can engage young people. But before those tactics work, the problem has been one, we don't teach civics in our classrooms, so there's an educational problem. Two, this downward trend has been going on for 40 years, and it parallels the fact that there's been a downward or a trend politically to say government doesn't work, a kind of neoconservative philosophy that has been in ascendance in Canada and in other places like the U.S., which has said smaller government is better and government is not the solution to your problem. So there's a generation that's grown up. That's Canada, I thought that was the United States. It's not the new government as a solution. Yeah, it is the United States. So it's part of it. So we talked about using digital technologies, open data, big data to try to re-engage citizens and young people in it. Now the question is how do you do it? And this is the Canadian problem. It turns out that Canadians, through our government, we have about what they call 210,000 open data sets. In other words, 40 departments have given people access to government information. But in typical Canadian problem, it's like a natural resource that we give people access, but we don't know what to do with it. We rip it and strip it and ship it. But we haven't formulated it and used it in a way where people can actually know how to use it to turn it into something which is voter engagement. So we talked a lot about that and the potential problems on how to do it. I'll throw it back to you. So I love that idea of 210 open data sets. It's like the issue with the EU when they would talk about transparency. Everything was in theory open, but if you had no idea what questions to ask, it didn't help you very much. Reactions from the panel? The disengagement of the youth, actually, the fact that they don't go to vote is a problem. But there is another that I think is an even more troubling problem. And it is there disdain for political parties. If you ask any youth around the world would you rather join an NGO that is fighting for a remote problem? They will probably be willing to do and do good and get involved and engage. Then you ask them, why don't you join a political party in your country? They run for their exits and they would not touch it. So political parties are discredited and very often for very good reasons. They are perceived to be oligarchic, exclusionary and corrupt and old. And you know, it's much more fun to join an NGO and a movement and a vibrant community of people trying to achieve. But you know, in order to govern, you need political parties. In order to democracy, you cannot have democracies based on movements. You cannot have democracies based on NGOs. Democracies need political parties. I'm not suggesting that they join the corrupt, old, boring political parties that exist. But either get to them and rejuvenate them, reenergize them, reinvent them or invent new ones. And so in general, and I, by the way, this is not just a problem for the youth or of people in Canada. This is a global problem in which political parties have lost their appeal to be the national habitat for idealists. So, Alia, I'm going to call on you in a second, because I can see that you're nodding in response with a smile. So this is an intergenerational challenge here, right? We're talking about the new forces that are shaping global politics. And Moistus is saying, do whatever you want. All this new technology, all these NGOs, but bottom line is democracy needs parties. Now that's an old force. And I, I certainly know lots of people who disagree. I'll hold my own view. But Alia, do you want to jump in and then I'll come back to Evan. I was nodding because I think it's really interesting talking about how democracy is also sort of represents older and old force and older institutions. But here in Tunis, it's a completely new experience. As you know, since the Arab Spring in 2011, we've been very carefully navigating a political transition towards a democratic system. And I think while we have, yes, successfully had two rounds of peaceful democratic elections and that we are starting to see assemblance of democratic parties, I don't think that the culture or the society has caught up yet. I think it takes a lot more time to change mentalities than it does to change or institute political parties. We held a very interesting panel the other night with two very prominent representatives of civil society as well as two members of our constituent assembly or parliament. And both of them are women from different generations. One of them from the Nahda Democratic Islamist Party, who is one of the youngest deputies. Another woman from the Nidit Tunis Party, the one who, the party who won the presidential elections, from the, who's from an older generation, and two very active civil society members. And one of the things we were talking about, how in this culture of we are now in a democracy and how do we engage youth considering we had a very low turnout of youth, despite the fact that we went through a revolution, despite the fact that it was spearheaded by the young generation, when the elections came around they weren't anywhere to be found. So it's a conundrum for Tunisia, you know, the the first country of the Arab Spring. Where are our youth? Where are the ones who are out in the streets protesting for this right? And it's a fascinating challenge because why aren't we able to engage them yet? I don't think political parties have figured out the best way to engage them. It's funny that I heard a panelist mention that politics are boring. I think that that is quite a long-held belief here in Tunis where I don't think youth feel excited about politics. We talk about, we specifically spoke about how the growth in youth activity in civil society has been much more significant than their interest in political parties, and how we're even locally seeing that being a springboard from civil society into politics. So I think we definitely need to come up with more interesting and exciting ways to engage youth. The youth deputy on the panel, she mentioned that she doesn't consider herself a young parliamentarian. She or a female parliamentarian. She just considers herself a representative of her population except that she has a Twitter account and probably a lot of the other deputies don't. So she feels like that gets to keep her a little bit closer to her constituents. So I'm going to come back to you a brief overview. Okay, thank you. I'm going to come back to you. Evan, I want to come back to you on the party's question in terms of way with so it's interesting to hear, you know, from Tunis to Ottawa. You've got a very well-established, mature democracy and you got a brand new one and both of you are reporting very low levels of youth engagement. So Evan, I wanted to come back to you on in terms of how you think will parties help? Is that part of what you all discussed? Well, we did and this is the fascinating thing. It's very easy to cite examples of apps and technologies and there's some really good tactical elements where you can engage groups of young people. But again, you know, there's no sense, you know, if you have a patient with diabetes, you've got to talk about lifestyle genetics. You've got to do a little, you know, again, let's just look at the context young people have grown up in. Again, government doesn't help. There are various institutions, churches, mosques, synagogues, they've atomized, their families have atomized. They are the rise of the individual generation. Our panel spoke about something called slacterism where they think being active is, you know, tweeting out a hashtag or something, but how do you cross the threshold from joining Facebook pages and tweeting about things to actually getting involved in institutions and that has been a real challenge and I think on two fronts, on the party front, it wasn't technology that the leader from Apathy Is Boring said, one, do you know what young people really makes them vote when they meet a politician face to face? Good old fashion FaceTime. Here we are on a virtual panel and the second thing is we have organizations, a young guy called Taylor Gunn has run an institution called Civics and Student Vote where throughout every election they get people who are not yet at voting age to, they have almost half a million people involved to get part in educations and classrooms in virtual participation because statistics show if you don't participate in your first two opportunities to vote, you might never vote at all and that has huge democratic consequences so the responsibility is first on our education system but secondly on political parties who need to survive to literally get in front of people face to face and engage them and become relevant. So here we go we've got a new force shaping politics and it's called knocking on doors, going to town halls and meeting voters where they are. Danny I'm going to let you jump into it, obviously you run a civic organization like this. Yeah well I wanted to come back to Evan's point earlier about openness because it actually reminded me of I had lunch with a Canadian minister recently and it was a fabulous lunch in London and when it came to who was paying the bill the minister sort of shifted in a seat and then looked to the junior official who pulled out his credit card turns out there's so much open data coming out of the Canadian government that every time a minister eats lunch with someone he or she has to declare it and the bill gets published somewhere in one of those data sources that Evan was talking about. Which minister I want to know? Yeah I know it was a fabulous meal in London but it reminds me that you know we've had a quiet revolution when it comes to the amount of public information that governments and public officials have had to release and it's not just in Canada it's across the world we've had freedom of information acts being introduced in Kenya which has been sort of an African leader vast volumes of public information have been published but the problem which I think Evan and his group have hinted at is that the demand and the understanding and that is not there the supply side is getting much better and governments you know especially through the open government partnership which now involves 72 countries around the world who've committed to becoming ever more open that's great but we now urgently need to build a demand side and that's about trying to understand and navigate this vast amount of information but it's also about about building the capacity within all generations to use and understand this data because without it we can't have the accountability you need the demand and supply. So we have a we actually have a German Staatsminister in the office and I'll give you a little time but I'd love to hear your reactions to that you don't have if you you're free not to if you want to take a second but I would be interested I want to ask sort of your reactions to the open government movement and I want to put on the table whether we shouldn't move toward the idea that some information really shouldn't be public in other words if what that means is it's stopping ministers from having lunch with people where they need to have lunch that's not a good thing. He didn't have to order champagne though. Okay but ministers are humans too. Please. I was laughing a lot of times during this discussion because first of all it's I like to engage more young people and I'm leader of a party in my in my region that's North from Westphalia in Germany it's 18 million inhabitants and I'm leader of the Social Democrats and Prime Minister so I'd like to engage them but it's not all fun it's hard work to be honest and sometimes I've got the impression they know they look at into information and they think information is everything no it's value of information it's working through information and that's hard hard work and I don't know if it is a dinosaur parties but I know it's nothing better to be honest. I'm not in a party because I ever wanted to be in a party I came quite late so in 1994 I ended party and then in 2000 I became parliamentarian but that was quite late I was engaged in several other areas and I became mother that was quite more important but then in the party I had to learn a lot I had to learn that information is not everything and that it is really hard work there was a new party which came up few years ago in Germany the pirates they call themselves the pirates they wanted to do everything in another way you know they're in the parliament and they're somewhat like in CEO they're sitting there making just like it's pro or cons that's not a thing I mean they have to create ideas they have to work on on parliamentarian papers and so that's really hard where some of them do but not all of them and some of them are really disappointed because they always ask for open government I mean we are on the way to open government that's what we should do but that's not the solution it's okay and I'm honest I need transparency but I also need a lot of intransparency if not I will not reach the goal I try to reach for example we had on our regional level we are responsible for education so one of the crucial point when I became prime minister was I have to to find a solution not to fight another decade over the structure of schools in my region so we said we have to talk to each other even though it's difficult and we talked cross the parties and we did it without letting nobody know that we talk if someone should have known that we talk this would never have been a result but we finalized the what we call the freedom of school structure for 20 years so that was important to do so and it's not to be transparent 100 percent then politics is somewhat yeah it's not able to work like it should so that it's it's hard to define but my decision what I do in transparency and what is intransparent is always my mirror at my home so yes please thank you here that we think that young people are getting less and less interest in politics let me point out that in the 2008 election in the United States there was an increase in young people participating why because they got excited about Obama and about the idea of an african-american president now they did become disillusioned and one of the problems was it was easier to use social media and information technology for this young generation to get elected as it was easier for Obama it's harder to use it for governing and to keep them involved and engaged I think is the problem it's not that they're all apathetic I mean look at conie 2012 you had what is 80 100 million people all worrying about an african warlord in northern Uganda I mean it's not but but it didn't it didn't have follow-through and and that's that to me is the problem is not can you use the new media to engage young people you can it's how do you get them to realize if they want to accomplish something they've got to stay engaged that's the problem I think we have to look at so again this all does come back to it's hard work I've got another person from the audience but it occurs to me that maybe what parties should do is reinvent themselves as NGOs created to get things done and that way people will come together and they'll have a mission please yes please and and I promise Yolanda I'm coming to you very shortly we talk about um citizen engagement youth engagement worker engagement let me offer a theory about why people are disengaged just introduce yourself I'm sorry and I'm Jerry Mikulski we've been treating them as consumers in our last election cycle we were presented do you want the Romney or the Obama using exactly the same technology as what you like the Cheerios or the Cocoa Puffs this is not democracy it doesn't resemble democracy and everybody knows it if we treated them as citizens who are who might in fact be able to help us solve problems and offered them tools and brought them behind the curtain so that they could actually be our trusted allies in this process they might actually all show up and vote but they might do much more than vote and we need them to do more than vote once every four years for one of two parties that are very close to each other pretending to be different that are not changing the agenda so the problem here is that we've consumerized not just politics not just consumer goods not just entertainment but everything okay um just looking yes for another response there and I think one of the issues that Eduardo Cruz from the Dominican Republic one of the issues that we see in the Dominican Republic is the a lot of cynicism that is around politics so it's like everybody on facebook or on a dinner table or in twitter or in their universities or at work talks politics but whenever somebody says i want to get involved then even their closest friends say oh why do you want to get into politics what's your interest what do you want to get out of it so there's a there's a perception that if you go into politics you become a traditional politicians like the ones we don't like so it's like a fence that is a fence of corruption that forbids people to get into politics and I think it's a big challenge so Cleo I'm gonna actually come back to you to you can I just add one sentence because my experience is they always say the politicians and it's negative but whenever they get to know one of them they say oh he's different she's different but they are all different that's always true in congress congress has under 10 approval ratings but people like their member which is I want to make sure we get all a chance for all the hubs to talk about what they've done and then we'll continue this conversation and Cleo I was saying later I'm gonna come back to you on this question of cynicism because that's that's certainly true I think in the Philippines but let's hear Yolanda let's hear what what what you all did in Madrid Good evening let me tell you that most of the issues of discussion that you are bringing up in the debate have been covered here also in Spain we had an in-depth debate on on the future of democracy and we came up with a diagnosis that I think is is shared in is being shared in the debate and this is that there is a growing level of of social unrest not only based on the on the economic or the consequences of the economic crisis but but in relation to the political system that that can be a threat to the to the survival of democracy the the significant the terror the deterioration of the of the prestige of political institutions and and and here I include not only parliament political parties politicians themselves but also multilateral organizations or or even corporations or the bank this the lack of legitimacy that we that we feel most of the population in Spain but I'm I'm I'm sure that is is a shared feeling in in most of the developed democracies this unrest I was saying need urgent measures and there is an element that you haven't mentioned so far and it's the need in in in for for reforms to break the cycle of inequality inequality has been probably the most repeated word in our debates on democracy here in in Madrid and and we've been discussing for three days from different perspectives on on the issue of of rethinking politics so I would say that the conclusion or the or the most shared idea that has been put on forward here in Madrid is that there is a need for economic and political reforms to envisage this the breaking of the cycle of inequality and also there is a need for institutional reform in order to assure three major elements or three major things and those would be more transparency as you have already pointed out more accountability and more participation not not only from young people which is also is indeed very important but from all levels and groups and new actors in in society that that would be my my headlines from the moment thank you so you note and this goes back to your point that transparency is not the same as accountability right you may have all the information but if you can't use it properly you can't hold people accountable so those two things they're often mistaken right that if government's completely open well then it must be accountable but it's not so it's interesting that you put all three of those Alia let me come back to you because I want to make sure we got all the points you wanted to make from your session and then I'm gonna and then I'm gonna ask you all the hubs to raise their hands as well as people here and I will direct us according to themes go ahead thanks I think it's really interesting what the panel was saying about how difficult it is to engage youth it's not as simple as you know having a great social media communication campaign it's it's a lot of work however it's also a lot of work on behalf of the youth one of the things that came up in our panel from the president of a an associate an NGO here called Albausla which is a watchdog organization set up after the Tunisian revolution by youth all of the the people who work at this organization are under the age of 30 they sit in on every parliamentary meeting and report attendance and they publish online who was there who voted on what which is a huge huge difference for the way that we do politics in Tunisia she was saying the the president who's also a shaper Amira Yahyaoui was saying we have to stop victimizing youth we've gotten this this discourse of we have to involve youth more and we have to reach out to them more and we have to get out on their level yes this is all true however youth can't just sit back and expect for the political parties to do all of the work by setting quotas by you know forcing people to get youth involved these are important measures especially for a new democracy but youth also have to learn what it means to be an active citizen if they want to see changes they need to be active and they need to fight for them and another really interesting point that came up as well is we shouldn't be talking about a binary situation here this isn't old versus young we keep following falling into this discourse now in the new kind of Tunisian political context of old versus young as you as many people may know our newly elected president is over the age of 85 this is a very hot topic of can somebody of this age represent the youth who rose up during the revolution but it's less about this binary old verse young and more about representation youth under the age of 30 make up over 50 of the global population we should be represented as part of our rights to representation but we also need to stand up and grab it and merit it and engage and the last thing the last point I want to make is that we are also I think it's going to take a lot of time here to learn that political engagement is not just about voting it's not just a coming out and slipping a piece of paper into a box every time there's an election and us navigating how can we politically be engaged as youth outside of election period because right now our democratic process has been a bit relegated to okay we have elections coming up and mobilizing and getting people out there but we need to go above and beyond that and I think that's going to be the adventure to come for Tunisian youth wow okay we've got lots of things on the table let me see if I can just cover some of the themes that we've heard and then allow us to continue to discuss some and again I'm going to ask each of the hubs just to raise your hand if you want to make a comment and I because I can see you the way I can see I can see you actually better than I can see the audience but but so so we've heard a number of sort of paradoxes I mean that the first is the idea that what's come through very clearly is politics is hard work that's what parties do that is it traditionally parties are the way you get organized there's a lot of horse trading within parties and then there's a lot of horse trading between parties that's that's been traditionally how the hard work gets done and that for a generation that has been mobilized much more in terms of movements uh and you know you either participate virtually or you get out there in march but you don't want to do the hard work of actually governing so we've heard the sort of that the young people don't want to put in the work on the other hand this is the generation that at least of the united states has a different balance between money and meaning right there the generation that are focused more on meaning they're the generation that are founding NGOs that are going out and and committing themselves to making a difference in the world so one one theme here is what's going on there I mean is it just that they want to make a difference but politics is dirty I mean or politics I mean actually Jerry said they feel like they're consumer they can't participate I mean how surely there's a way to communicate you want to make a difference you can make a difference not just by voting but by doing something specific what's this you want to say something that I'll just just briefly underlying this conversation there's a heroic assumption and that is that age unifies and homogenizes and so that that we're talking about our category of discussion here has been the youth and assuming that just because you are between the ages of 18 and 35 you will have a homogen you know that you are belong to the same you have the same views the same preferences the same ideology the same values and that's not true the youth are a highly diverse group of people that own many of them only have in common their age and so we need to be very careful not to classify them as a unified homogenous entity and political player okay I'm gonna call on Danny who represents youth also the the hubs but after Danny I'm gonna call on Mark Penn who also actually knows a few things about public attitudes thank you very much being called a youth has made my day oh god don't tell me you're not a youth if you're not a youth I'm a grandmother I just wanted to come back and say I mean every year it's because we do a state of civil society review we look at what's going on in civil society and something peculiar seemed to happen in the last few months or few in the year or so which is that if you take countries like Turkey, Brazil, Venezuela on paper functioning democracies with regular you know elections and all of that sort of stuff on paper and doing reasonably well economically but what did we see in each of those countries we saw you know fairly dramatic mobilizations led by young people who were using social media and other traditional forms of mobilizing to to take up you know deeply political issues and challenge governments with varying degrees of success and so I'm not a political scientist but I do wonder whether there's something going on at least in those countries because of the ways in which these young people are choosing to mobilize so perhaps their life experience their frustration with party politics or whatever else is going on is actually you know leading to a new form or a new way of mobilizing. Thank you, Mark. I thought I'd just give you a couple of observations over the years I've worked in about probably 35 developing democracies and so they tended to have a certain you know there are certain events that typically happened and then I just want to make one quick comment about about the youth thing. You know first of all democracy doesn't exist without real free will and so when they used to take polls in the Soviet Union when there was no free will and said everybody supports everything they were phony and the first thing is where they're shooting people or where your life or you could be jailed there's no real democracy yet and then I think there's a second level which is is it corrupt or is it fair or is it fair enough I mean they they hold off the the what is it the state senate leader of New York just yesterday so corruption happens everywhere even in the most established democracies but it but is it fair enough is corruption such a block that you don't know who's going to win or not you don't have democracy then when you clear those two hurdles you begin to have democracy and that first democracy is usually party oriented and the parties kind of get their members and the parties get their people to to the polls and the second stage and this is where I came in through the years was when elections became communications based and when the communications based they're usually more leadership based who's going to be the best leader for our country and you know I I think transparency is important but I think a leadership is 10 times more important getting an honest leader who can shape and mold the system and finding one you know in politics is a tough profession you know you in any country where you have to stand up state your views do a chapter say you know and so and then you move into that and then after the politics of leadership usually either it succeeds as a democracy or the politics of leadership the people in office just wow they don't want to give it up okay and then what they do is they get rid of the no reelection clauses like in many of the countries I worked in in Latin America then they take over the institutions and then you're back where you started from and I've seen that pattern and so if you get to the politics of good leaders and you get to the politics of improvement boy that's the time you really have to watch out right so that it doesn't it doesn't fold over and that suggests that social media etc makes that worse because it's all about maybe communication maybe and then you know my comment about about youth is let's just remember the United States that when John F. Kennedy was elected young voters out out numbered over 65 voters two to one right today we are crossing the threshold where over 65 will out number right out number under 29 and so the biggest vote in America America it's in fact it's all the same people who voted for Kennedy who are now the over 65 if you think about it and we still think we're young but don't forget that there are countries and most of the developed democracies that have that you know this because America has never been older than it is now and is going to get a lot older where you're gonna have a lot of people I mean the reason why young people were so great in politics is they had time on their hands you have a lot of older people who now will have civic time on their hands for the first time in history and they can transform politics as as much as anyone else the rest of people were always too busy with their career and with their families and their kids and so their political time got limited and then I just finally I don't worry you know I'm not a cynical about youth you typically took time to get involved they I don't think they're voting much of anything other than I don't have kids family or religion yet and so therefore I'm not sure politics then becomes much more important to people when they get that and in the US and other places now they've kicked all that back in other five years so people don't get married until 32 and so all those things may actually be a little bit more delayed and we may be seeing the effects of that that we're gonna have to motivate them a bit more so so I I agree gotta worry about all the voters now in Tunisia Tunisia is a young society the mid-east is young under 21 that's all the people so I agree that there are areas where mobilizing youth and getting them involved is so much more important than in areas where in fact youth is is a small and declining group and in in those areas if you don't get youth then then your whole society is is completely out of touch okay so we've got a number of people still in the hall and I realize of course you poor people back here I've got it I'm turning but I want to make sure anybody from the hubs want to respond you youth who are differentiated okay let's see Yolanda you first and then Evan yeah I would like to point out that to convert mobilization into political engagement whether of young people or not young people you need to provide them or there is a need for to to provide for actual and effective tools of participation to to to make participation real and for that I think there is a need to to revisit the way the political agenda is set or the decision making processes that are in place in in in our institutions and are also within the traditional political parties we want people to engage we want people to to participate then we need to give them that possibility but not the way we think they should participate but the way they are asking us to be allowed to participate in politics thanks Evan two quick points on either side the government side and the and the student side first on the student side someone raised this question that we've been transformed into consumers from citizens which has been a big part of a dialogue here in Canada but what's been fascinating where we saw young people really active in in Canada has been in the province of Quebec Quebec youth march in the streets over tuition for post-secondary it already has the lowest post-secondary tuition fees in the country but they have a vision that in Quebec it should be free there's a lot of resentment in English Canada about that but in Quebec young people had a collective citizens vision of what kind of society they want to live in and that was interesting to juxtapose the crisis in a lot of democracies and this is where from Tunisia to Canada we all connect who can articulate whether it's through a leader or a political party a collective vision where citizens have an idea of the society they want whether that's from the Arab spring or in the Canadian elections and then you work backwards how to get there through a political process we saw that in Quebec and it activated youth and seniors secondly on the end and then where you made a great point about accountability and transparency Canada has as I said a lot of we talked about big open data as if data itself is a solution it's not in fact our information commissioner says that it has never been more difficult for citizens to access information that they want through our access to information laws long delays so well we have the patina of access and there's a lot of information out there actually getting the information you want and getting the information you need and getting the information the government may not want you to have is actually becoming increasingly difficult and more controlling so we have to be very careful as one of our panelists said we have seen the fruition of the McLuhan world at the same time as the fruition of the Orwellian world so open data cuts both ways it can be used for the citizen it can be used against the citizen for in all sorts of ways so we've got to be very careful about using big terms without talking about how they're used how the data is understood how it's accessed how it's used for and against the citizens and how it's used to articulate and get at the vision of a society that citizens not consumers want thank you yes there's that and Hora you'll flag me if there's something Aaron Kramer from BSR I think we are implicitly referring to the nation state and in fact people identify and affiliate with different entities now hyper local global civil society virtual communities and I think part of this is because the nation state is being squeezed between issues that get handled locally and issues that have to be handled globally and I don't think national politicians have done a particularly good job of of surmounting that structural change that I think really affects a lot of this I know what they're laughing about they're laughing about the fact this was a big issue in the 70s I just noted that Jonah I wrote that in 1973 that's it doesn't make it not true it just means I know the piece okay there were two here in the front row and then I'm Jonah Störel leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and I just wanted to make one reflection on methodology I in my experience the more we do social media the more inclined we are to say that that is our communication but my experience is that the more we do that the more we have to do the traditional campaigning so at every election in Norway we have you know celebration of the champion of social media but my view have always been that that championship doesn't really matter unless we have really been able to knock on those doors and have the town hall meetings and the second observation is that I believe people are still very ready for that kind of meeting so you know the more you make yourself as a politician accessible to schools universities young people or to the workplace people show up they take issues seriously but the challenge back to us is that in this knowledge society and experienced driven society through the knowledge you gain through educational work or hardship we as politicians have to significantly renew the way we shape the policies now here is the old way and that is to go down the hall and find the guy in the party who knows about railroads so we make our railroad policy the new method is that we have to go out much more largely and listen beyond the party beyond the union and into where the knowledge and experiences and really give people the true experience of being involved and then we are pretty good at making budgets and plans and all the rest of it but Martin Luther King never said I have a plan he said I have a dream so I think you know this leadership thing and and being able to translate this you need representative democracy and the parties to do it but they have to be much more open and much more inclusive and much more knocking on doors and here social media can can fool us because it can give the give the impression as we have as citizens that we are so connected but we are really not thank you I'm going to ask you to pass the microphone the person next to you but let me just point out you said two things that that are two other themes that I want us to come to come back to one raised is the importance of leadership and this ability to articulate a collective vision that actually is not top down but but bottom up but the other and this was raised before are there ways we can actively engage constituents in collaborative problem solving right this is what's coming not just voting yes but but exactly if it's not just walking down the halls of the expert and getting it how do you do that and technology can help but that's hard work too I mean it's still consensus building and actually to your point some of it's better done out of sight so please hi good afternoon I'm Oath from the Kathmandu hub the global shapers ah thank you and it's a pleasure being here mainly corruption was mentioned but I think corruption is a cultural issue it's a problem of culture so it happens to affect politics it happens to affect the private sector also which wasn't clearly mentioned so we as as youth we really need to change that culture so that we see that change happening in politics and in business and social life as well so it's a cultural shift that we need thank you thank you Cleo do you want to come in back in on that and also we've lost Madrid I don't know if if we're trying to get Madrid back okay Cleo just to address some of the the points that have been raised the structural issues the disjoint the disjoint between local structural realities and global commitments that our leaders have made and also the new forms of mobilization that we're seeing it actually links to your earlier question about the cynicism and and for us in the Philippines just to contextualize there's still a lot of traditional politics and that means patronage politics and in fact this this the the theme for the session which is rethinking politics for us it's really about rethinking solutions because just to contextualize we might have political parties but they're not programmatic political parties we may be a founding member of the OGP but we're not yet at that point when too much information is a problem for us we might have good voter turnout but what is the quality of the elections that we're seeing it's very expensive for anyone to engage in politics because of very serious campaign finance issues that we have and so young people have this need to rethink solutions and find ways to be engaged and for sure it's hard work because there is an online presence that we need to have in order to engage the youth but there's a lot of offline activities that we need to be engaged in as well so yes there is the need for active citizenship on the part of young people but it's precisely because of very traditional structural issues that we've had to go around in order to be more relevant thank you so in Mark's typology that we left out party patronage politics which certainly American democracy has gone through so there in the back and then there was a social media question okay thanks so much my name is Blaig Lenkhorz I run an organization called the Accountability Lab we empower young people to build creative tools for accountability around the world and we talked a lot about how ineffective government has alienated youth I wonder if we need to flip that a bit and talk about naming and faming rather than naming and shaming engage youth creatively by showing them where government does work and the champions that are doing good things as it relates to transparency and accountability just to give you one very quick example we just organized a national TV show and movement in Nepal called Integrity Idol where we asked people to nominate honest civil servants from all over the country got hundreds of nominations filmed them doing their jobs talking about why it's important to have integrity and serve the public good and then showed it on national TV and thousands and thousands of young people voted by SMS and Facebook for their integrity idol so it can be done I think maybe it's just a question of reframing the way that we think about it so let me just ask you what you said tools for accountability so we've been talking about you know tools for onward engagement but just give us a sense of what other tools you're talking about sure I mean by that I mean I think we need to meet youth where they are rather than where we want them to be so that means engaging them through media through culture through art through games yeah through games exactly so we've set up film schools accountability film schools in different countries in Nepal again on this this issue of information we created a wiki tool that students have used to crowdsource information on public services making that information free and transparent for everyone it's been accessed hundreds of thousands of times so there are different ways of doing this but the tools have to be bottom up they have to be owned of course by the people who are going to use them and then we build communities around those to make them sustainable huh great Cory or there are several questions here on the so I summarized in three one is whether you know concrete examples of this open data movement tackling corruption the second one is where do you prefer youth at the at the parties or in the streets and the last one is isn't this this engagement of the youth speak about the failure of politics to align with citizens concerns and communication great all right I've been unless anybody wants Joe one help is a little historical perspective if you go back 50 years or 100 years and ask how many youths were heavily involved in politics this suspect is lower than it is now so we don't want to have an idealized point I think Moises made a very important point lumping all youth together is a mistake I mean a lot of young people myself at that age didn't care that much about politics I was interested in girls and thank God I married one and it was been very good but I you had more women in politics that could be I could have combined to know but the point is let's not let's not romanticize the past the interesting question is whether young people see paths go forward and what strikes me and I don't see a representative sample of something called youth because there is no such thing but I'm struck by the number of young people that I come across today who want to give back who either are willing to run for politics but more than politics who want to start a non-profit who want to work in a for teach for America for example in in the U.S. after they graduate from college in terms of urban schools I'm I think in fact the generation of students I see today which is an elite sample but nonetheless is much more public spirited than my generation was Danny I just wanted to just reflect on what I think is slightly different though in most countries around the world today because I think we're seeing a confluence of at least three things that are that are unprecedented in historical terms in the vast majority of the developing world we have a youth bulge so to Nazir is a great example so we do have very young populations we've had the ICT revolution which has put the power of communication instant spontaneous anonymous if it needs to be communication into the power of citizens and third we've got the data or openness revolution as well and I think that's the confluence of things that means that we at least in the developing world context we have to be rethinking the nature of politics that said some of the you know some of what we've known for thousands of years about what goes on in politics will still be there and that's you know corruption emerges or or party politics have to you know some form of political formation needs to happen to formalize or institutionalize those movements but there is something special going on out there so we've only got 10 more minutes I'm gonna add I'm just gonna add one more thing to that I think that the divide between digital natives who are today's youth and digital immigrants who are my generation probably anybody over 40 I don't know where you draw the line that divide is as great as the 1968 divide between the establishment and and the youth movements then it's less visible I mean in the United States you're not walking around you know with long hair and flowers and of everything else but in terms of how you think in my experiences it's just as great and they they don't dislike us as much but so in our remaining time I'm gonna turn back to the hubs at the end and ask them to ask ask a question but I would love to hear more examples of anyone has them of this collaborative problem solving of this sense that it's one thing it's it may be hard even to get youth to vote but they but they're that's interconnected because they're not gonna vote if they don't see how that's gonna actually make a difference in their lives and accepting that many young people aren't thinking about you know child care policies or housing policies etc but are there examples of how it's beyond the election and you know because one of the propositions Moises just said that's parties you're not gonna get away from that and I want to hear if anyone has any alternative to that a deafening silence Jerry so there's a group called NCDD the National Dialog National Coalition for Dialogue into Deliberation ncdd.org they have a couple 800-900 experts on group process who've done civic dialogue in three four dozen different formats from world cafe to leadership circles to wisdom councils to what have you many of which are face-to-face some of which are online all of which are quite useful and I think it's a matter of picking and choosing and remixing to make them appropriate but our tools are so blunt and stupid the ones we use even here at the forum we don't use very good group process so I think a lot would be aided if we did great other examples or comments can I answer yes can I just quickly mention one of the questions that was social media was the effectiveness of the street marches the street activities I think the question was where do you want the youth and the streets and I have been following all of these street movements and it's quite striking how ineffective they have been if you look at you go beyond the Arab Spring and look at all of the marches you mentioned a few of them it turns out that in this time and age it's quite easy to put 100,000 people in the streets and then nothing happens and people feel that victory needs to just have 100,000 people or more feeling a big street in a big city and they have the same grievances they have the social media that helps them coordinate and mobilize and energize but then nothing happens is this huge political energy that turns at high speeds but is not connected to the wheels and therefore there is no traction and I would pose it again that the traction has to be provided by political parties so in the United States she had occupied Wall Street which was in the street and yet the Tea Party and who's had a greater political effect yes please hi hello my name is Bruno I'm from from Spain I want to point out to follow this comment that in Spain right now that is happening there is a new political party that is coming after all this movement that is happening and it's based a lot in social media and also in the South but I want to point out that until the party arrived the indignados the movement of the people that were indignant in the streets it was a cathartic movement they just protested they were furious about the situation and nothing happened until they organized and once they organized and became a political party they're now the first force they're leading the polls in Spain and there's an interesting point there though it's easier to do that in a parliamentary system right in the United States you know people try to create third parties but the wisdom is that's not going to work so don't bother and you get even more frustrated because you have all this energy in Occupy or Ferguson and the choice when you have your next election is between son of Coco Pops and wife of Cheerios and you would think as much as that yeah and you would think because they're called parties that they would be attractive to youth all right couple last comments and I'm going to turn back to the hubs anybody if anyone else wants to just one point Anne-Marie which is politics isn't the only way in which one can have a public life as a citizen if you provide opportunities for people to do social service in poor areas or to go to inner city schools and use their education for poor people who aren't getting opportunities to me that's a much more important aspect of public citizenship than just voting or then joining a political party and I think if you ask what are the other things we can do we can make sure that those opportunities exist so public service opportunities that actually you find a lot of young people are taking advantage of them and we shouldn't just focus on the youth wings of political parties or virtual youth wings what else how can you let young people actually go out and give back do good and we do have some ways to do that great thank you yes please I'd like to comment on that point because you're right I came into politics because I was working in public areas like you described and there were a lot of things I was angry about and that's why I went into politics to change things and I still want to change the world and I always waited for that when I go in there something severe will happen everything I did know about parties was oh that's a dinosaurs you have no chance to change things and that was not what happened I never took a decision I didn't want to take never and I'm 15 years in parliament so I was fighting for my ideas and for my point of view but you could change a lot of things if you are in there and that's my message also to those who are with us because it is possible to go into a party and to change things and to change also the party and so in the end you ended as a leader of the party but and that makes even more work but it's worth going in there and trying to get the ideas of young people into the party I mean we are rolling out the red carpet for them and I need young people everywhere especially in the council of the small cities and towns we need them and come in and work and you could decide on a lot of important things so that was the message from here to you I'm going to go back to the hubs and ask each of you very briefly to give a message back to the audience here you can ask a question as what would you ask in general or you can just have a final reflection so let me start and let me do it in reverse order I'm going to start actually Ali I'll start with you and go back and end up with Cleo thank you yeah I appreciate the panel's reflection especially the gentleman from Civicus about can we talk about our political system in the same way everywhere when we're talking about youth bulge especially in the case of Tunisia and the ICT revolution and this kind of confluence of our generation whether you call it digital natives or something else I think my final reflection is something that came up in our panel that really kind of I think links to this discussion of is the only way to make influence through the political parties that are offered to us what other options do we have on the table especially as a country that is coming into the democratic system for the first time it's like we have this once in a light once in history opportunity to do democracy differently but if that's what we want as the youth generation we need to know what that looks like so not only how to shape politics in the confines that it's presented to us but how do we actually go beyond and redefine politics great thank you Yolanda I would go for a final reflection and share with you the thought of one of our panelists here in Madrid she said that the sustainability of democracy depends on the credibility of the political institutions and the political system and to strengthen that and to make it credible and sustainable I think the key elements or the key pillars for progress and reforms are as I mentioned before accountability and these depend mostly of the institutions themselves and participation and again as I said before participation is about what the groups the political groups and NGOs and the civil society want to do and to say not what the institutions expect them to say great thank you Evan a great panel first of all look there's a lot of new tools that we've got and we can talk about that to engage a fundamental problem there's cynicism there's disengagement there's corruption there's disparities between the rich and poor demographic issues where politicians are serving those who vote and there are these negative cycles in North America serving the baby boom generation because they vote I would say of all the solutions that we've seen here and that I've seen there's a new world set of problems but there's an old world solution and that is education it turns out that it's what they call the trim tab theory of change if you it's the old rudder at the front of the boat doesn't turn the ship in the middle a lot of effort doesn't turn but if you put it at the back you can touch it and it turns the ship and when you educate citizens and you give them active roles to understand and the tools to understand their connection to their democracy to their government if there's transparency and if there's those fundamental factors of a democracy that we spoke about it turns out in my view that education is the is the connection between the old and the young and it crosses and that's where people engage and active to make the change and and I I think the crisis is are we investing enough in education for the young people so they know that they can participate and turn government from a force on the outside to a collaborative institution that they feel they can participate in so we instead of global shapers we need global kids we need to go down one in terms of the the engagement so Cleo last word thank you very much for this great conversation I was able to learn a lot from the conversation from the insights of the contributors and if we are to rethink politics I think one of the things we have to do is really to give young people an enabling environment they can be agents of change and if that means carving out that enabling environment using the digital technology or social media that is what young people will do when you talk of corruption you don't talk about innovation everyone's just asking what is the gain for them but young people are open to innovation and they're open in fostering collaboration as well so I'm very hopeful with regard to the gains that we will be making in the future thank you so let me end with I'm sorry what was it can I just say we didn't say lower voting age people have thought about that we saw that in the Scottish referendum and maybe changing our political system in our case from first pass the post to proportional representation those are bigger questions but they're certainly part of the dialogue absolutely thank you so three quick final reflections I've heard two two expressions that I'd never heard before one in this session and one a little earlier but one thing I take away from this is that the more we use new tools the more we also have to rely on old tools and this is sort of once you have e-books you still have a growth in regular books but this feed on the street which I heard for the first time yesterday the idea that politics actually should be about feed on the street that's the oldest form of politics but the more virtual engagement we have the more face to face engagement we need at the same time that to me is an important lesson the second is I've never heard name and fame I love it we've name and shame is part of our lexicon but the idea that you could actually celebrate public servants of many different kinds in the very same way that we celebrate many singers and actors I think is tremendously important and a way of meeting people where they live but also you know recognizing that a lot of people who work in government don't get paid well and do actually devote their lives to doing doing something important and the last thing I will say is just this point about how can we have ongoing participation in collaborative problem solving Obama mobilized the youth and everybody else but then he let that machine go and when it came to healthcare there was no he there was no way to mobilize people and obviously you can't mobilize people on very technocratic details but there are ways and we've heard some of them for let it for continual input and a sense that you're still part of the conversation I want to thank everybody who participated this was a complicated exercise I want to thank the global shapers for coming up with shaping Davos and shaping politics and thanks to all of you bye