 alpacas and unicorns, and about appreciation culture. We are doing the translation via Lana and Katie. If you have feedback, you can send this on Twitter using the hashtag C3T. The talk is given by the group of Jugendhekt, which is a project which has been going on for several years. And they're always critically reflecting about what they can do better to improve their project. They are highly reliant on volunteers to, and yeah, the question which this talk will be about is how to appreciate the work your volunteers are doing and how to keep them motivated to be involved in the project. So yeah, this is what this talk is going to be about. There are several people on stage from Mediale Fade and the Knowledge Foundation, which are the two organizations running this project. Hello, everyone. I'm the main organizing alpaca of the herd of Jugendhekt. We want to talk about what appreciation and acknowledgement means to us and why it is an often-neglected aspect of voluntary work. In our project, it is important to us, and we have made experience with that, and we made some things wrong. But we also, well, we did some things right, and also we made some mistakes which we can learn from. And when we are talking about we in the next half an hour for the talk, we mean the four people on stage which are the people whose actual main job it is to work on this project. Who of you knows Jugendhekt? Well, a lot of people raised their hands, like around half of the audience has already been to Jugendhekt. So a quick introduction in a nutshell. We want to work with young people who are interested in technical stuff, basically, who don't have a base to go to right in the direct environment. And we want to provide this place for them. And Jugendhekt wouldn't be possible just as this Congress if there wouldn't be helped by volunteers. And around this project, there is a big community which extends only the participants, but there are a lot of more people. It's a lot of work to organize this kind of event with young people. Everyone who has organized a children's birthday party can, I guess, relate to that. And our talk is about appreciation and acknowledgment, which is mainly done by adults as well. And there are different roles and tasks within this. I want to explain these. Forever we went there are organizing teams, which organize all the stuff which there is to do. On the events themselves, there are mentors who are there for technical questions the young people might have. And help with brainstorming and with working on the project. Around that, there is a big group of helpers who do any other kind of task, which are there to do at the event. Oh, I skipped a slide, but this is the one. Jugendhekt wouldn't be possible without these volunteers who are taking on all of these responsibilities. A big appreciation has been given to this very important work by the Deutsche Engagement Preis, which is a prize for the mainly volunteer work in Germany. And it was in this category of democratic development. Oh, yeah, that went fast. So this kind of prize is a nice kind of appreciation, but a lot more important to us as some other aspects which we want to talk about. Appreciation for us is about respect, respect for the volunteer work and the people behind it. For us, that means respect towards the time and attention of the, I'm sorry, there has been another plaka spotted. Yeah, and for this, there is hugely important to be transparent, transparency is important. So we want the people to know what they are going into when they want to get engaged with the Jugendhekt community. So we want to be transparent about what kind of social interaction we want to have at our events. So we have released a code of conduct, which means also acknowledging the experiences that people have and how they want to be treated. And we also want us to be part of people which is important for the people taking part in the community for them to feel well. So there also needs to be a process, what happens if the code of conduct is violated and we are still working on what these consequences should be. Also an important part is to know what kind of tasks are going to be there, how much time these tasks need to do them. So to have a low level entry be possible for people who are coming, who are thinking about joining our community. And we announce all of these on our website and on every briefing for the mentors taking part before every event. So the separation into mentors and everyone else, this was a very bright moment for us at this event only. So we got the feedback from a lot of people in the last years that people who wanted to join our event and thought it was a great idea and then things they had experienced to be the mentors. But we weren't clear about communicating that there were a lot of other tasks which needed to be done. And we tried to communicate this better for this event and we made the separation. So another point where we have to learn that we can learn a lot of appreciation culture is to take a closer look at the community and a lot of reasons for doing voluntary work. This can be very egoistic, very emotional, very intellectual. I don't want to hurt everyone when I say that doing good work for open daughter structure is not emotional, but on the other way around, we found that adults work for us because youth tact does all the things they wanted to do when they were kids which is a very emotional aspect. So what is the reason that people work with our communities and we have to reflect from this to learn this and to make this a bigger group. To get an even higher motivation and this can be kind of a bad or a good aspect. But because if you work full time and voluntary work, motivation is a very important point. And of course we have to find gaps and gaps and another one solved the bingo and shouted a packer. It was an amazing idea to do this shit bingo. If you do it as a full time job, you think about who is there but who isn't on your agenda. And in some voluntary communities, it can be a problem if only one person has the point of checking the motivation of all the people and checking the motivation level. So it is overview of all people and the whole motivation and the whole situation. And to have this sort of person is really good which do is full time. So you don't forget about the physical contact. I mean that's actually what we do at the moment. Getting a speech is a very good idea and it's working good. And of course we have to learn out of thoughts we do. Jugendakt is growing really fast and is getting bigger and bigger and we have evolved a lot. And suddenly we had a lot of mentors and a lot of helpers and suddenly we were growing and we have to find out what does this to the motivation and what does this. The second point which has a lot to do with acceptance is in this community for example for us it's we found this logo and we have we fight it about what sort of animal is it. And then a group of young people solve this problem by finding the apacca. Because Sunday this Kalina came over for a boy who couldn't participate and suddenly we solved the conflict if this is a beer or something else. So suddenly we all end up in the apacca fever. And our logo is very very asymmetrical which makes a huge problem as well. And some people are really really bad and on the other hand people think oh that's pixel shaming and we have this discussion. We're really sorry about that but to open the discussion but this discussion gets us together. Hold us together. Be open, appreciate also empty spaces and give them a chair and I didn't get the third one. I'm sorry. So we are also looking at how this is working as a social room because social rooms can be well social rooms can't be shaped and we also want to look at this participation the letter of participation which is a main thing to talk about youth participation. They have a couple of steps and it also makes clear where participation isn't happening like instrumentalization which is one of the classical things which happens if you work with youth which is we get a lot of people who approach us as well so for example the mayor of a city wants to take a picture with the young people together which isn't really about participation but just for representation so it's an instrumentalization of the young people. So this isn't the typical style of politics but it happens all the time again and again. So you should definitely step away from this and there are different pre-stages to participation one of them is information. A lot of us are working on open data so this is a basic of information and well the basic thing for participation is information which is a low level of participation which is important but it's not going that far. The second step of low level participation is if you can say what you want to say about the topic so you get listened to and also to get involved. So this is where we would be seeing us. When we are talking about participation we don't have a structural thing where we are saying this is the part where you can actively participate. We are not there yet. We don't think it would work like this right now because the discussions aren't going on at this level. We are talking about if we want to mentors to be participating in the early stages of the event before the event which we are not yet clear about because it makes the process a lot slower if all the mentors are participating before the discussions and how things will be running but it's also more participatory obviously. We are not sure about this ourselves and we can't say this for your community if you want to have this and there are steps even above this level of participation which is self-organising. So we kind of have this in some point especially at our event. They are self-organising because the young people are working there themselves and the mentors are only there to be in the background and help if needed. It's about self-organisation which is the highest form of participation. This doesn't always make sense for every community at all the time but as a perspective as maybe a look into the future I think this can be something which should be worked towards too. We as a full-time employees have the time to think about these kind of things and time is an important factor in this and if you talk about hierarchies and power you should be looking at this and power is, you gain power by doing and what is done is often determined by who has the time to do it. Sometimes it is hard to say because also a factor is some people might have the time to do stuff but don't have the experience to do it and also the other way around. Sometimes people have the experience but don't have a lot of time so I would encourage you to think about this and reflect how this is. So this is not always the best form of organizing in general so this is not always the best because it encourages certain kind of people and in some cases well men. Another important point is to look at your own plan and if this is the same as the plan the community has. So to look at these two and relate them to each other because sometimes they are the same but sometimes they are not so it's important to also talk to the community we talked a lot to the mentors and see what their interests are or what they think about certain things and the community of communities is very important. Just a few people in our tech community are only in one community so communities we like to each other and have experience within other sub-communities of such big community and also sometimes you have bad experiences within communities or with only a couple of people like only individuals in one community and also to think about this and how this impacts like how you act in the current communities you are in so thanks a lot to all the communities who have been existing a lot longer and who have obviously shaped our community so a lot of mentors out of this community one is I didn't get the name but it's by the community by the Open Knowledge Foundation where a lot of mentors have been active and many thanks to this and many thanks to all the other communities who have been doing great work so also communities inside youth work we are not the only ones doing youth work so it's very valuable to have this exchange here also with other tech communities and youth workers another point in this part is of course there are different types of knowledge and we have to step by and help them on their way by mentoring Alpaca has been found you are supposed to listen to the talk well yes so for most of our mentoring people it's totally new to work with young people and they want to learn and they want to learn how to exchange knowledge so you have to so you have to help them really helps our feedback rounds and we have a very good team around which helps us with these sort of questions and of course we will offer programs which are pedagogic programs which will help them which we want to have of course for free so there you learn how to play games like example questions or problems we always have how to deal with groups and how to deal with different sort of groups what we need as well is an exchange and a feedback before the event we make a meet up in advance and after after the event we do a feed up round and also a meet again and in the middle of the event we meet as well and talking about everything that's important for all the we ask the people for the feedback and we take the series we show them how they can participate and of course we need to find out where do they need what need the experience and where do they get the experience from this year we have a totally new thing the open batches we want to what we want to do is we want to what we want to do is we actually want to honor a positive positive work so we want to have positive actions which needs to be rewarded and so we need this type of batches and everything else which can be like to tell people that they have done something pretty good or to so we actually build something which is similar to achievements in video games you can get them very easily and these batches is actually the physical form of acknowledgement so what happens now if only a special type of people which is visible get these batches and the other ones don't and so everyone has to think about what was the reason that one of them got this sort of achievement and what was my reason to give it to them we have two basic example we have a tax skill batch it and we have a social skill batch it and if you want to know more about this just look up the link below now we talk about fails of course we have to deal with fail culture and of course we have to reflect on this because we have a lot of blind sports we tried to do this in a video and at the end of our Berlin event we showed it and we was really nervous and the Hologa team was nervous but hey we work with 12 and 18 years old young people so this is actually a really big exercise and we don't know them and then we have to present everything on this big stage so what we said okay let's put all our fails on stage and then we reflect what's happened the last years and make it more easier by presenting the shit and we want to love at the beginning and now we show a short video but it takes longer than planned the jury needs more time they need plans and cyber we really need a jury where are they oh come on all these young people they don't smell very nice they wear weird clothes and they have beards so what can we do now is to do well I expect youth to encourage the European Spaces program I have no idea what this person is talking about it can't be that complicated to do a good Wi-Fi one minute I can only give out the prices before you enter the stage you breathe through your body and just say fuck it so this was the idea to make it more easy for the young people because well as you see there are few inside it and of course insiders are just fun for the people who know them so inside is can be really really funny for one group but of course are not the main thing well thank you to all the volunteers to all the very smart people who gave input to this talk some names I'm sorry thank you all very much for listening we are very happy about feedback for us so where do you think our blind spots are maybe you have experience from UX communities which you think is very valuable so have a look at our code of conduct see what is good about it or what you don't like about it and if you're interested in anything you saw here here are sources and links where you can get more information another Alpaca has been found I'm very thankful for your time thank you very much and thank you for listening we are the translation team and if you have anything about us just tweet it with the hashtag c3t or at our twitter account c3lingo thank you very much