Introduction

In the two previous chapters, we showed first what young people drafted to physically participate in participatory programmes think of participation and politics (Chapter 2), and then focused on the outliers, the people who consciously chose to run for local office (Chapter 3). The young people in these two chapters chose a sustained, at least semi- public participation, and literally showed up when asked.

In this chapter, following the research design of the whole book, we broaden the perspective to young people with a much more fleeting, almost minimal, but crucially still existing interaction with official participatory systems and channels. Nuortenideat.fi, translated from now on as ‘Youthideas. fi’, was an e- democracy service aimed at young people (it was discontinued in 2022). The service tried to provide proactive possibilities for participation: it literally asked young people for their ideas in an open- ended way, instead of a more reactive feedback on already planned projects quite commonly used in e- democracy projects. In their typology of e- participation, Aichholzer and Rose (2020) call this kind of service agenda setting (see also Juusola and Varsaluoma [2023] for a broader look on youth e- participation in Finland). In this chapter, we also zoom out in terms of analytical distance (see the Appendix) to capture a broader view of the cultural tools used by young people to do society in participatory settings.

The following two examples of ideas presented in the service show their close connection to everyday experiences of young people, as well as the controlled nature of their lives. For context, in most Finnish schools, it is mandatory to go outside during recess, regardless of the weather.