Junket ‘unconference’

An ‘unconference’ is a way to describe an invite-only audience combined with a delegate-led program. One could be forgiven for thinking it is stereotypically Gen Y.

I confess to having misgivings about the format, but the 200 best and brightest young minds who made up this Junket — organised by Junkee Media— did not disappoint. There was a real diversity across almost all spectra; with artists, policy wonks, scientists and students coming together to present pitches for sessions on a range of topics.

Being a wonk, the sessions I selected were the most salient to pressing policy questions, like education, Indigenous health, domestic violence, crime and — as an outlier — financial literacy among young people.

These issues are massive. Many topics had more than one session dedicated to them, but even then, finding pathways to making change could be difficult. Domestic violence is one such problem, where a session served as an impetus to change the debate around shelters and refuges, and how they serve the needs of some DV victims but not others. Action is great, but so often it can help to put a finer point on the discussions that need to be had before problems can be accurately defined — let alone tackled.

Nevertheless, a mere talkfest it wasn’t. The diversity of delegates and experiences was designed to throw up opportunities for collaboration that could propel people’s projects and ideas. But it also served to shed light on where there were gaps in people’s skillsets that could be filled with collaboration.

Junket’s delegates could be roughly divided into three groups: advocates, analysts and entrepreneurs. What became clear fairly early on to those whose skillset involves analysis, research and evaluation of public policy problems and efforts to address them, is the dearth of understanding among the ‘doers’ (advocates and entrepreneurs) of the status quo in the area in which they want to effect change.

If analysts could share their skills and their knowledge about how to scale the mountains inherent in policy analysis – where to find basic statistics and data, identifying the voices in the non-government space who have valuable contributions, how to tell whether a piece of research or data is useful or informative – then those who want to improve the status quo would be much better equipped to do so.

Despite being sceptical that I would find ways to collaborate with others, I found a gap I could work with others to help fill. No doubt others have found the same.

Trisha Jha is a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies