The Baltic Edge

REFLECTIONS ON YOUTH, WORK, and INNOVATION IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION

Book available for purchase at: http://goo.gl/YEQFh

About the Author: Nadia EL-Imam is the founder of Edgeryders, a distributed think-tank of citizen experts, combining the intense focus and rigor of consultancy with the scale, openness and democratic legitimacy of citizen consultation. As an engineer and designer she is interested in using digital technologies to address complex societal challenges. She studied Human-Computer Interaction at the Royal Institute of Technology, Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet as well as Interactive Art Direction at Hyper Island in Stockholm. She has lived in France, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, Switzerland, and Kuwait. Nadia blogs at www.edgeryders.eu and tweets as @edgeryders.

Contents:

Social innovation is the new democratic participation Governments are unable to deliver appropriate responses to our most pressing challenges A competing channel for fixing the world Enter the citizen expert Endnotes Edgeryders Mission Baltic Does it make sense to talk about the Baltic Sea region? The bigger picture The role of the state On the value of work The road ahead: An emergent social contract References
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Social innovation is the new democratic participation

Except from THE BALTIC EDGE:REFLECTIONS ON YOUTH, WORK and INNOVATION IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION

Governments are unable to deliver appropriate responses to our most pressing challenges
Participation in democracy (e.g. elections and party membership) is viewed cynically or taken loosely on both the north-western and southeastern coasts of the Baltic Sea. As young people themselves put it, the system is all plugged up or politics is dishonest, monastic Latin; a dirty game of empty promises. 1 We see that young people everywhere tend to reject institutional politics: traditional mobilization in the form of voting or party membership is increasingly unpopular and questions the meaning of representative democracy.2 Eight out of ten Europeans under thirty years of age state to have participated in an election in the last three years.3 We know, however, that as long as voting continues to be well looked upon socially,surveys overestimate participation. Only five percent is active in a political party or organization. By comparison, three times more young people are involved with an organization promoting human rights or local/global community development. The drop of membership and participation in formal political processes could be interpreted in many ways. What is alarming for scholars and democracy advocates is that participation in formal political spaces and processes is no longer a natural result of stepping into adulthood, of taking up responsibilities, paying taxes etc as it once was. This means that if youth are indeed politically inactive today, we will most probably continue to be so when we get older.4 Surveys point to a gloomy future of party politics and conflate this with a growing lack of involvement on youths part. This is at best misleading. The sheer richness and variety of political initiatives and experiences being presented and discussed on the Edgeryders platform alone belies the generalisation that European youth are politically apathetic. Rather, set against the rise of populist movements the drop indicates a growing sense of disempowerment and disenchantment with formal political systems and processes in general. It was this frustration with the situation that prompted NO99, an Estonian theatre group to start a new movement:

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Estonia is a rather transparent country, but in 2010 you could see two things happening. The political campaign costs skyrocketed and trust in politics plummeted. At that time most of the politicians had developed somewhat arrogant positions about involving public in debates and discussions. There was one guy who said that "cultural people should be left to their own devices" meaning that some critics should not talk about things they do not know about. So, it was a time when the feeling was that public opinion does not matter in politics any more parties try to engineer the consent just when elections come. United Estonia was to a large part a protest against this situation where many publics seemed to have no voice..5 Another telling example from Edgeryders is the story of a political movement led by Janusz Palikot, a former high-ranking member of the currently ruling Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) party in Poland: The movement transformed into a party in 2011 and won a surprising 10% of votes in 2011 parliamentary elections. On one hand, the party did "stretch" the political debate in Poland by introducing such issues as legalizing soft drugs, gay and sexual minority rights (and brought into the Parliament the first transgender MP, which was extraordinary in largely conservative Poland), or an anti-church stance. But it also quickly became visible that the party is very populist, lacks a real political program or a expert support. At the height of the ACTA issue, the party came into parliament in Guy Fawkes masks, but failed to have any meaningful impact in the debate otherwise. So it was ultimately a facade of an alternative political movement. Tellingly, the party was unable to chose a different name than "Palikot movement" (after its leader), confirming a "strong leader" model dominant in Polish political scene..6 Some try to use mainstream politics mobilise the large masses to affect change through protest and engagement through the mainstream political channels. United Estonia managed to capture the attention of their compatriots and was successful in drawing a lot of attention to their protest movement. However, their conclusion was politics changes you more than you change it. Others, like the Occupy movement, try to create spaces for alternative ways of connecting struggles with issues. Others still, like the anti-ACTA movement that spread over Europe last year, try to affect change by mobilising mass protests. However recent examples such as the developments around the drafting of the Icelandic wiki-constitution7, the outcome of the 2013 Italian general election8 and accounts such as those of former Swedish parliamentarian AnneMarie Plsson9 indicate there is little guarantee that the outcomes of mainstream political processes will reflect the citizens wishes. The future is already here. Its just not evenly distributed yet. William Gibson

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Both United Estonia and Platforma Obywatelska managed to capture the national imagination and in doing so they illustrated two things. The first is that populist parties have fertile breeding ground when voters grow cynical about politicians and institutions failure to live up to promises. That in their disappointment, the electorate may turn towards whatever forces seem to be outsiders. It also illustrates why the smartest and most creative citizens are deserting the political debate and exploring alternative, more promising routes to shaping our collective futures. The disintermediation made available by the Internet has revealed a new channel for having an impact. This channel is competing with traditional political channels for the time, resources and engagement of Europes young citizens. Some of the smartest, most creative, and idealistic young people are investing their time in it.

A competing channel for fixing the world

All over the Baltic Sea region and beyond we are seeing young, and not so young, people attempting innovative ways to address challenges in their lives and those of others. Many of the initiatives displayed on Edgeryders are about creating new social infrastructures. They are based on sharing and rely on use of the commons as key enablers of creative responses to the trio of ecological, economic and political crisis. They are trying anything and everything all at the same time, engaging in radical innovation and groundbreaking work often outside any formal spaces. In fact, social innovation and direct improvements are the category of political participation that is most hard to distinguish from other ways of simply improving living conditions together with others. Through direct improvements of living conditions, they enable new forms of participation and political relations to emerge. Characteristically, these initiatives: start in single but radical issue or demand present an achievable solution which poses a challenge to existing structures involve multiple stakeholders, tend to go viral, and are based on building a community practice design in use: they adapt, improvise and expand issues as more stakeholders become involved Some examples of the kinds of initiatives driven bottom up outside formal spaces of political participation are: Lets Do it World: a movement where masses of individuals get together to clean up waste in response to government's failure to do so.
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Re-discovering and sharing traditional knowledge through dusting off old institutions like national crafts and farming associations and making them relevant again. The Kaulio Movement and Restaurant Day, two "social innovations" at grassroots in Finland in the past two years that have caught people's imagination on an impressive scale.

Refurbishing public spaces and building homes for the homeless in Sweden by upgrading existing disused spaces and making them cosier or more artistic under what seems to be a guerrilla architecture, with no legal permits to do so.10

Using excess capacity to build bottom up social infrastructures like urban gardens in Germany or appropriating disused buildings to provide community services in Naples. Building intentional communities like the Freelab in rural Poland11 that serves the local community by offering social and technical support and education. Systems like Pendo which facilitate monetary democracy by enabling use and interoperability of complementary currency systems such as the DoraLand economy in Lithuania.

Prior to the advent of the Internet, citizens had essentially one possible channel for democratic participation when they perceived that governments were demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to them. They could attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change. In a democracy, this requires mobilising many people to have an impact. And even then, as demonstrated above, it is not clear they would result in desired changes. The big change is that aided by ICTs a small group of people can have a big impact. A well known example is that of the small group of copyleft activists behind the Pirate Bay making copyright practically unenforceable by building a website providing torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing on a massive scale.12 If you dont do politics. Politics does you Daniel Vaarik

Even when the political establishment showcases them as ground-breaking projects, these bottom-up initiatives with alternative and experimental responses to our most pressing challenges are often precarious and lack long term perspectives. Most of the time they don't have access to political decision-making influencing their fate or even to a contact person in the political system. One example that clearly highlights the issue is that of Prinzessinengarten, an urban ecological garden in Berlin and successful social enterprise often held forward as a model
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for sustainable urban development including by the Berlin Senate.13 So why did the very same senate without warning try to sell the plot of land on which the Garden stood? On one hand, you have a bottom up initiative with experimental and alternative answers to the question of how we want to live in the cities in the future while facing enormous challenges (climate change, lack of resources, new form of mobility, gentrification, unequal chances in the educational system etc. On the other hand, the city of Berlin is under tremendous pressure of debt, seemingly forced without an alternative to sell and privatize public property or to organize public services in the form of independent market oriented companies. Residents, however, risk the danger of losing the capacity to design urban life with equal chances for everybody to participate in the long run when housing, energy, transportation, real estate etc are sold. We are seeing this situation all over Europe in which different levels or areas of government set policies that fail to join up. The result being that both citizens and people working for institutions are trapped between policies that make competing, and often contradictory, demands. Until the Internet, the only way you could harness creative intelligence towards solving problems was by voting for others to address them. Social innovation and direct improvements of living conditions enable new forms of democratic participation and political relations to emerge14. It is therefor hardly surprising that this rise in social innovation seems to coincide with both a drop of membership and participation in structured political processes and organisations as well as a rise in protest movements. They are the citizenrys response to deep structural and ideological ruptures between how political institutions and new generations envision change. The more institutions are receptive to this, the better for everyone. Because it builds in activists a story of we can do this together. And government can channel intellectual support in solving hard problems. If, however, institutions fail to read these changes or resist them, is is unlikely young people will simply go back to using traditional participation channels. It is much more likely that they will defect to hacking society directly15 or just exit.

We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.

Enter the citizen expert

Policy makers find it increasingly difficult to manage an ever more complex society and its economy. Since the smartest people always work for someone else, government hires consultants to get help. But consultants are profit-motivated, and they may be tempted to tell the client what the client wants to hear, to keep business buoyant. Meanwhile, the most highly
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educated citizenry in history sits on the sidelines, its vast reserves of knowledge, skill, vision and generosity untapped. As they witness one flawed policy roll in after the other, they become disenchanted and cynical. Egderyders has developed a methodology to tap into those reserves of skill and expertise and aggregate them into a novel knowledge service, a hybrid of consultancy and consultation. Like consultancy, it is as technical and narrow-scoped as required: there are citizen experts on everything out there, and the Internet (and our own community-building skills) makes it cheap to reach out to them). Like consultation, it is open to everyone and scales quite well. Unlike traditional consultancy, our method: is self-correcting. Radical openness guarantees that, if a particular group of citizen experts takes a wrong turn, its mistake is likely to be spotted and corrected early on by others just like what happens with open source software. is truthful. For almost all participants being a citizen expert is not a job although it can occasionally lead to paid work and there are too many of us to buy us all off. This takes away the incentive to keep the client away from inconvenient truths. This methodology was developed and tested in the course of a project called Edgeryders, launched by the Council of Europe and the European Commission in 2011-12. Its initial goal was to generate novel insight into the problem of the increasingly difficult transition of European youth from education to work, autonomy and full civic participation. Instead of procuring academic research, the Edgeryders team decided to cast European young people themselves especially those that look for new paths off an ever-narrowing beaten track as citizen experts, holders of valuable first-hand knowledge of the problem. Many of the more competent and innovative are to be found at the fringes of society (hackers, migrants, activists...); many are underprivileged, and unlikely to find a voice in corporate politics: we call them, and ourselves, edgeryders. This reverses the knee-jerk reflex of public policy: to consider citizens as target or beneficiaries of a policy. We: crafted research questions, designed to extract experiential data rather than rants or complaining, and open to make room for surprises. put them on an online platform we created based on free and open source software. This puts in place a peer-to-peer validation mechanism, whereby participants can engage with each others stories. This makes it easy to identify patterns and elements that resonate in the personal stories of many people.
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After six months of this exercise, we had collected 1,700 pages of high-quality ethnographic data (500 posts and 4,500 comments by 1,200 registered users in more than 30 countries). We then employed young ethnographers to code the material and run its final results by a panel of academics. We also wrote software to map interaction patterns in the Edgeryders platform, and run network analysis to detect and enhance emergent social dynamics that could be helpful to the task at hand (details upon request). The result was a space for participation that we felt was much needed. It is inclusive (participation is individual and disintermediated); diverse (the incentive is there to engage with the widest possible range of communities and individuals to tap their expertise); open (anyone can join without permission Wikipedia style); rigorous (it follows rigorously the scientific method); effective (we did, indeed, deliver novel results).

Additionally, it addresses one of the key problems of contemporary social science, how to effectively harvest the mass of data the digital economy is creating. This encouraged some of the most committed members of the community (including the original project directors, who left the Council of Europe) to create a social enterprise to continue the experience and direct it to a broader range of issues. The new Edgeryders was spun off its Council of Europe cradle as a social enterprise at the end of 2012 with a new, community-funded platform at www.edgeryders.eu.

Endnotes
1. Kari Paakkunainen. 2001. The Rhetoric of Youth Living by Baltic Sea: Mutant and Mobile Political Spaces of Citizens. Available at http://www.nuorisotutkimusseura.fi/en/publications/ electronic-publications 2. Martin P. Wattenberg. 2008. Is Voting for Young People? With a Postscript on Citizen Engagement. New York: Pearson. 3. European Commission. 2011. Flash Eurobarometer http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/ flash/fl_319a_en.pdf 4. Eric Plutzer. 2002. Becoming a Habitual Voter: Inertia, Resources, and Growth in Young Adulthood. American Political Science Review, 1:41-56.

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5. Daniel Vaarik. United Estonia and Political Change in Estonia, http://edgeryders.eu/theedgeryders-guide-to-the-baltic/united-estonia-and-political-change-in-estonia 6. Alek Tarkowski. To me the United Estonia, http://edgeryders.eu/comment/ 470#comment-470 7. . In 2009, the new post crash Icelandic government invited the people of Iceland and its directly elected representatives to draft a new post-crash wiki constitution designed to reduce the likelihood of another economic crash. In spite 67% of the electorate having expressed their support for the bill as well as for its main individual provisions during a national referendum in 2012, as well as public declarations by 32 out of 63 members of parliament that they supported the bill and wanted to adopt it now the bill was not brought to a vote in the parliament. Source: http://www.verfassungsblog.de/en/putsch-icelands-crowdsourced-constitution-killed-by-parliament/#.UWL2IXNp4Zy 8. The Economist. Italys election: Ungovernability wins. 2 March 2013 http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21572783-result-has-come-bombshell-italy-andacross-euro-zone-ungovernability-wins?zid=295&ah=0bca374e65f2354d553956ea65f756e0 9. Anne-Marie Plsson, En bok, en frfattare http://www.ur.se/Produkter/169044-En-bok-enforfattare-Anne-Marie-Palsson 10. Kristian Borg, Olydigt byggprojekt blir Mejan-skandal. 13 May, 2009 http:// www.stockholmsfria.nu/artikel/79607 11. Freelab, https://freelab.org.pl/ 12. Jamie Condliffe. The Pirate Bay Is Now The Worlds Number One File-Sharing Site. 2 April 2013 http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/04/the-pirate-bay-is-now-the-worlds-number-onefile-sharing-site/ 13. Caroline Paulick-Thiel, Elizabeth Calderon Lning, Marco Clausen. Growing Together: http://edgeryders.eu/comment/433#comment-433 14. Magnus Eriksson. 2012. Political participation amongst youth in the Edgeryders project. http://www.scribd.com/doc/113483488/Political-participation-among-youth-in-theEdgeryders-project 15. Philip Caulfield. New York Daily News. Group claiming to be Anonymous threatens to unmask boys accused of raping Canadian girl who died after suicide attempt: http:// www.nydailynews.com/news/world/anonymous-threatens-unmask-boys-accused-rapingcanadian-girl-article-1.1313547#ixzz2RIlgD900

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Edgeryders Mission Baltic

Except from THE BALTIC EDGE:REFLECTIONS ON YOUTH, WORK and INNOVATION IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION European youth is disempowered and disenfranchised. That needs to change. Youth needs to be empowered on its own terms, which are different from those of the old world of mass society and hierarchical organizations. Edgeryders is a distributed policy think-tank of citizen experts, combining the intense focus and rigor of consultancy with the scale, openness and democratic legitimacy of citizen consultation. We provide European governments with a tool for policy making to enable and sustain Europes young in the transition towards a new, active life of their own design. Our methodology: focuses on the innovative strategies already being deployed by European youth in pursuit of a fuller, more rewarding life; points towards enabling policies, that broaden and straighten the paths already being opened by trailblazers is produced collaboratively through an open process. In January 2013, Edgeryders was approached by Global Challenge, to contribute to this anthology. Together we launched an ongoing conversation on how young, and not so young people in the Baltic Sea region are coping with the challenges of making a living and making sense of their working lives. Much of it against the backdrop of the unfolding global crises. Several of the contributions to this book were selected from the many high quality insights contributed by members of the Edgeryders community. What follows is a summary of the insights generated so far and suggestions for where to go from here.

Does it make sense to talk about the Baltic Sea region?

It was pointed out the Baltic Sea Region does not actually exist in peoples minds. What is the Baltic Sea region? What do we have in common and where do the situations diverge? The situation in Poland is quite specific: Poland has experienced growth and youth unemployment is lower than in the south of Europe, for example. The big youth protests last year were about ACTA, not employment. In public debate employment is not that significant. Large education boom in the 90s with a greater emphasis on quantity rather than quality. This was a tipping point after which a brain drain from the country. At the moment, current challenges includes brain drain and high regional differences: the South-east of Poland one of the poorest
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region in Europe while Warsaw is going better. In Latvia, on the other hand, it seems the main problems are due to polarisation between people from well-resourced backgrounds and those who do not have access to higher education. For the latter access to paid work is difficult. Retirement is another. While the Swedish and Finnish education systems followed similar trajectories until the nineties, the Finnish system is widely regarded as an international success story. While but it seems the schooling system is less relevant for accessing the labour market nowadays. People dont start university immediately, and there is a lack of bridges between the schooling system and work. People dont feel that they belong in the system, and there is a sense that people born in the seventies had an easier time. It seems there are clear cultural differences between the technorati in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. In Poland and Germany the tech crowd are much more engaged in trying to affect societal change. They are much more active in the anti ACTA movement, experiment with social development innovations such as alternative currencies and how to make democracy work better. When it comes to civil society activism, it seems the Scandinavians are much less active than their southern counterparts. Why would this matter? Culture shapes expectations around labour market participation. For example, the notion that access to qualifications entitles you to a job is a cultural construct that is not universal. It might be interesting to explore to which extent of cultural expectations around active participation in society outside the labour market shape youths ability to successfully navigate the transition to adult lives.

The bigger picture

It was also pointed out that a necessary condition for successful transitions to active, meaningful adult lives is a realistic assessment of our collective situation in a global context. Are the current crises temporal stages, or are they indicative of deeper structural changes? What is a useful framework of enquiry for investigating this further? One suggestion was to think of this in terms of where we are with respect to technological cycles in which successful adaptation to technology would lead to a golden age.1 Seen from this perspective it could be said that we are in a disoriented period. Others argued that a comparison of GDPs and demand for labour between different parts of the world and during different booms indicate that the current slump is not about business cycles.2 The conclusion being that we are moving towards a future with less demand for employment in which young people grow up in societies where they are worse off than their parents. One of the risks mentioned of this development is that of an ever-deepening

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disconnect between insiders and outsiders, people that live according to the job paradigm and people that do not. An important implication would be the need to rethink promoting a certain status on the labour market as the primary means of satisfying citizens material and immaterial needs. The three kinds of needs, which those who find it difficult to access the labour market are likely to struggle with, are3: 1 Economic/Practical: How do I pay the rent or secure food? 2 Social/Psychological: Who am I in the eyes of others? 3 Directional: What do I get out of bed for in the morning and where do I see myself in the future? The conventional and institutional solution to all three questions is the chain: you need an education, in order to get a job, and then be able to feed yourself, house yourself, and have value in the eyes of others. However the participants in the online conversation are detecting social changes invalidating standardized thoughts about education a diploma is not a guarantee for a good job anymore. In some parts of the region like Lithuania, a higher degree is still likely to land you a job. However in a dire scenario of high and rising youth unemployment, qualifications inflation, personal insecurity and loss of trust in traditional politics, people are pushed to search for or create alternatives. Some people are growing food in abandoned lots such as Prinzessinnengarten in Germany4 and sharing resources like information reappropriating public libraries as an infrastructure for sharing labour advice in Poland5, experimenting with alternative currencies (e.g. time banking) etc. Such initiatives are increasing our ability to provide for ourselves, acting as social security surrogates and effectively offering alternative responses to the first question. The other two questions deal with the relationship between work and the human need for meaning to make sense of our lives. How are people who lose, or cannot access, employment filling the gap with meaning in their lives? How to sustain the meaning when you are unemployed? The discussion quickly turned towards Identity. More specifically the extent to which we look at towards jobs for our sense of identity. The state through unemployment benefits can provide you with money, but it cannot substitute for the sense of meaning tied to work a platform from which you reintegrate meaning. The issue is especially pressing for Graduates without future in which education is not connected to jobs. How can you create a meaning? It was agreed that much of the future work opportunities will lie in the third sector. The Caring sector the future labour market need manual as well as white collar jobs. Participants also predicted that manual jobs would be more highly valued in the future6.

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In the face of very poor deals that the unemployed or the precariat are given (deeply flawed mental categories we use), all the participants in the online discussion on Edgeryders look at islands of change, as examples of substituting for employment to both meet practical needs as well as derive a sense of social identity. In post-Soviet and post-communist countries, a hacker ethic and do-it-yourself culture is already in place or easily reactivated.7 This seems to be at least partly thanks to a living cultural memory of having had to manage on ones own and be inventive in coping with everyday hardships.

The role of the state

If we really want to understand how to address youth unemployment, we should be asking how to better support our young in their future-building exercise beyond pressuring them to adapt to the ever changing demands of a shrinking labour market. Why? Because as we have seen from the research carried out in Edgeryders, occupation is not what the older generation thinks it is. Adventurous, innovative young (and not so young) people, are inventing new ways to work ways that are not necessarily within the job-in-corporate-hierarchy paradigm. This sounds like good news until the vested interests, which they disrupt in their quest for a fairer and more just world, fight back. And they do fight back. A recent article about the recent death of Aaron Swartz points to America having grown less tolerant of its genius eccentrics who push the envelope on issues.8 In Sweden, there is a comparable example in the persecution of Peter Sunde,9 a free information activist and dissident, for doing essentially what Google does. The Pirate Bay project was and is deeply political: making information freely available out of a deeply embedded sense of social justice in the Internet age. And lets not even get into the Julian Assange issue, which is still the subject of a much heated national and international debate. The list of examples is long: the establishment pushes young people towards dreaming up new ways of working, thinking, living. However, when they do find them, it strikes them down in anger and fear. Some of the participants in the discussion believe that when economic, social and cultural institutions fail, the necessity is to build parallel institutions in the form of alternative social systems (see Vaclav Bendas Parallel Polis), with new ways of acting and being. A point that has been made is that this sort of innovation needs more leverage to go past an intellectual alternative; what we need is to leverage the state, that these alternative systems cant really replace the minimum security provided by European states, and its large machinery that regulates exchanges or redistributes wealth. Also, what happens if none of the radical solutions are large scale response that can touch that 50% youth unemployment?

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Another big question mark remains as to what would happen when two parallel, fundamentally different, systems are in place, and their interest groups may need to cooperate, or confront each other, for the use of resources.10 For others, the solution is somewhere in between these two alternatives. They argue that we are, in fact, experiencing a major cultural shift fostered by intermediaries and decisive technology.11 The question is how to better support this futurebuilding exercise, as opposed to growing less tolerant of our radical innovators?

On the value of work

With highly progressive unemployment rates and little chance of the trend being reversible, there was broad consensus that full occupation remains a myth. In the ongoing discussion about how people in the Baltic Sea region are navigating the current socioeconomic climate, we have come across many experimental alternatives for fulfilling the practical, social, and psychological needs that society currently relies onto employment to cover. Two tactical approaches surfaced as game changers: one is to ignore the status quo by selforganizing into parallel social systems that have no relation with the institutional arrangements and the other is to plunge straight into the status quo and change it with its own weapons as with the case of the United Estonia anti-establishment party. Either way, sooner or later protagonists of innovative solutions are bound to run into the state. The strategies of decentralising production and generation of knowledge and the cultural propensity to collaborate and share is under heavy attack from IP protectionists. Institutions are insisting on youth participating in formalised political processes and spaces. Instead, they should be participating in new ones developed bottom up by the citizenry. Failure to do so is rendering their approaches towards developing responses to widespread youth unemployment out of date and out of touch.12 Already there is a striking difference in perspective on work and value between innovative young citizens and the institutional actors tasked with supporting their efforts. It is not just the content and context in which we work that has changed, but also cultural understandings of what we deem as valuable work.Commercial companies are profit driven and can only afford to invest in activities that will generate revenue fast and predictably. Young innovators are committed to solving problems, either their own or those of their communities. Their decision investments are also guided by intrinsic motivations such as curiosity, a wish to contribute to the community and personal satisfaction. Many live under highly precarious conditions with little or no economic rewards for their contributions. By insisting on young people getting jobs, you are pushing them away from investing time in trying to solve more difficult problems. The reason being that if the people you work for have no money, you will never make money. So innovating to improve the situation for poor communities is not the work of commercial companies in a capitalist system.

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A more promising approach such as the one being pioneered by the unMonastery13 is to share the risks involved in innovation, and lower the cost of failure. Why? because lowering the cost of failure leads to more attempts and increases likelihood of more successes occurring. Another obstacle to young peoples ability to innovate their way out of the crises, as we learned from the case with Prinzessinnengarten,14 is contradicting priorities and policies set by different levels of government. These initiatives are often precarious and lack long term perspectives. Most of the time they don't have access to political decision-making influencing their fate or even to a contact person in the political system. In fact, we are seeing this situation all over Europe with different levels or areas of government setting policies that fail to join up. The result being that citizens and people working for institutions are trapped between policies that make competing, often contradictory, demands. Which is why, if we want to be able to ensure that citizens and institutions have the means to be able to affect change and implement much needed creative solutions, we need to be sure that the processes and policy instruments that enable this are there. Innovation should be nurtured not just as a means for generating substitutes for employment, but in transforming those into sustainable, institutionalized and large scale accepted responses to the ecological, social and political crises.

The road ahead: An emergent social contract

An active life in the sense of the Mission Baltic discussion takes place mainly in three dimensions. existential/societal professional democratic/political Youth from the Baltic Sea area is innovating along all three. In a dire scenario of high and rising youth unemployment, qualifications inflation, personal insecurity and loss of trust in traditional politics, huge resources of creativity are being deployed by young people in search of a way out. They are experimenting with patterns for sharing resources (like housing, vehicles, and workplaces); inventing new jobs, often in an expanding social and care sector; and deploying Internet-based tools to augment and rejuvenate democracy by enabling a more active and constructive citizen participation. Subcultures are beginning to coalesce in all three areas of what we think constitutes an active life: the collaborative lifestyles and DIY spaces where young people rethink their personal lives, relational and consumption pattern; social innovation and social business spaces where they invent new and meaningful professions; participatory
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democracy and we-government spaces, where they engage with politics and government with an orientation to open democracy spaces. We believe these attempts are blazing the trail towards a new, more fair and sustainable social contract for the Baltic Sea Region; and that they, having been thought and enacted by Europes young, have the cultural legitimacy of a deal proposed by the younger generations for themselves. We propose to connect them, and the young trailblazers themselves, into a holistic vision of what the future Baltic Sea Region is transitioning towards. In other words, we propose to portray a new social contract as it is already emerging from what young people are actually doing, rather than crafting one at the drawing table. As a result of this strategy, the process should be centered on young Europeans; they should be asked to take center stage, share their knowledge of how to survive and thrive in a crisis-ridden Europe, and they are listened to with respect. The policy experts ought to take on, rather, a role of scouting for them, enabling them to engage with the national and local governance bodies (through the tool), and facilitating their interaction. the process results the policies suggested are almost certainly going to be in terms of enabling. Good policy in the context of a transition that is already happening from the bottom up translates into removing roadblocks and broadening the way in so that every young person (as opposed to only the most gifted) gets a chance to be included. The total of the various transitions being experimented by young people everywhere is not likely to look much like a happy and active life for a young person in the 70s. Todays young are trying to make their own world, not to get into their parents.

ENDNOTES
1. Carlot Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. ( her theory on technological cycles) 2. Need data supporting this. Comparing increase in GDP and demand for labour during different booms. 3. The Regeneration of Meaning: http://edgeryders.eu/blog/the-regeneration-of-meaning 4. Growing Together http://edgeryders.eu/comment/433#comment-433 5. A Free Culture for Jobs and Employment http://edgeryders.eu/blog/a-free-culture-for-jobsand-employment

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6. Its worth looking at McKnight (80s) service provision for self-production, risk that there is a mismatch provide the needed thing within the normative framework. 7. A Free Culture for Jobs and Employment http://edgeryders.eu/blog/a-free-culture-for-jobsand-employment 8. How the Legal System Failed Aaron SwartzAnd Us http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/01/everyone-interesting-is-afelon.html#ixzz2Hzwpzs8L 9. Piratkrigets frlorare http://www.svd.se/kultur/piratkrigets-forlorare_7897468.svd 10. http://edgeryders.eu/comment/397#comment-397 11. http://edgeryders.eu/comment/401#comment-401 12. Magnus Eriksson, Political participation among youth in the Edgeryders project http:// www.scribd.com/doc/113483488/Political-participation-among-youth-in-the-Edgeryders-project 13. unMonastery http://edgeryders.eu/unmonastery 14. See Caroline, Elizabeth and Marco article on page [add here]

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