Youth Engagement Summit 2009: Saying “no” to actual engagement

The biggest news that came out of the recently wrapped-up Youth Engagement Summit (YES) 2009 was Biz Stone's apparent thumbs-up to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak for using social media.

"If he's really on Twitter, I'd give him a 10," the Twitter co-founder was quoted as saying.

KLue was at YES 2009, at the press conference during which Biz was posed that question. We don't know what the rest of the press was thinking, but from his laughing manner we took his statement as a half-joke, in the vein of: "If Najib uses my social-media tool, of course I'd give him top marks."

And, if politicians using social media was the larger issue of the question, instead of just a way to inflate the 1Prime Minister's profile, wouldn't earlier adopters like Khairy Jamaluddin and Lim Kit Siang also have gotten a mention?

Anyway, YES 2009. With its list of speakers - Biz, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg, World Bank former managing director Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Garry mother-effing Kasparov, Sir Bob Geldof - it looked like a big wonderful deal, on paper.

What unfolded, however, was less engaging than it could have been, and not particularly youthful.

Let's qualify that, starting with the latter:

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1. YES wasn't that youthful

While organisers Sledgehammer Communications gave out 500 free passes to young people from Southeast Asia, most of the delegates were corporate types: the only people who could conceivably afford YES 2009's hefty USD2,500 (or thereabouts) price of admission.

The "Who Should Attend" paragraph on the YES 2009 website offers a clue to a majority of the summit's attendees: "business leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs, youth marketers, FMCG clients". Not really the wide-eyed idealists that YES 2009 said it wanted to engage with.

2. YES wasn't that engaging

YES 2009 was a "honest discourse on the inspiration that is Obama," according to Sledgehammer Communication's Harmandar Singh; running in conjunction with the summit was the SEACHANGE Movement, which urges young people to "Say 'yes' to change".

But Obama and the change he represented was, over everything else, political change. It's quite clear that change of that sort, here in Southeast Asia, is pressing: you need only look at Burma and its military junta - or, for that matter, ourselves.

When Youth Asia's Ng Khai Lee delivered his speech at the summit's opening, the word "politics" was conspicuously missing. Harmandar himself said that the "movement is apolitical". So YES 2009's jumping on the catchphrase bandwagon was disingenuous, at best. No wonder Obama gave it a miss.

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At her press conference, Mamphela - who's from South Africa - talked about the nepotistic post-Apartheid ANC government; its loss of a parliamentary two-thirds majority in 2009; and the need for citizens to hold politicians to their promises.

Her sentiments were absent from press reports of YES 2009.

Garry Kasparov talked about his chess playing, and touched only very briefly on his entry into Russian politics, and trying to form a viable opposition voice against the Putin hegemony - probably the more riveting story, and certainly the more relevant.

Bob Geldof was the most direct, urging Malaysian youngsters to get interested in the palm oil and timber industries' destruction of ancient rainforests. In answering a question from the floor about what to do in the face of monolithic governments and the threat of prison, Bob answered: "Go to jail!"

But he was also pragmatic. "Never threaten. Always keep your voice soft. Be well informed," Bob said. "Come up with very reasonable propositions that hopefully would benefit the politicians themselves."

Bob, in discussing strategy, said that the civil society movements that youths might spearhead should appeal to a mass audience, to present a strong political lobby. "Numbers is what politicians understand," he said - sensible advice.

In that vein, Bob underlined the importance of young Southeast Asians banding together, across national borders. "Use this opportunity to talk to each other!"

Unfortunately, there was little time for the 500-odd kids to do so. There were no cross-cultural forums in the two-day programme; no formal allotment to discuss issues particular to the region.

They may have interacted with their counterparts at mealtimes, or in the lobby of the Putrajaya International Convention Centre, or at their hotels. But it's difficult to imagine, say, Indonesian and Malaysian youth settling down to iron out the cultural rivalries between their two nations - there just wasn't time for it in the schedule!

(Marketers would, of course, have greatly benefited from learning more about their market - but it didn't seem as if there was much interaction between the businesspeople and the youths, either.)

Perhaps the best illustration of YES 2009's commitment to engagement was in the Q&A session with Bob Geldof. A Youtube question from the Philippines began playing, and after the young man in the video had introduced himself, he began to ask Sir Bob for his opinion on an issue affecting the LGBT community -

But we never got to hear what this was, exactly. The clip was quickly halted, and host Lorraine Hahn, explaining this away as a technical glitch, quickly began taking questions from the floor.

YES 2009 was a parade of excellent invitees, largely reduced to the role of motivational speakers, urging young people that they were able to make a change for the still-amorphous "better". These young people were inspired, no doubt; just check out the Tweets on #yes2009.

But inspiration without tangible socio-political groundwork goes only so far, and it is tough not to think of YES 2009 as a missed opportunity. We hope - though we are doubtful - that contacts these youth made at the summit will be more than just Twitter-following and fleeting.