Emily Boyd
Emily’s passion for giving young people access to information through technology wasrecognisedin 2003 when she was named New South Wales’ Young Australian of the Year. When Emily was just sixteen years old, she created the internationally recognised MatMice web project with her two sisters. MatMice.com is an Australian website that allows young people to create their own homepages. Over 1.4 million young people from 200 different countries have used MatMice, giving them the opportunity to be active participants on the Internet.
Emily wants to see her MatMice project to be extended to include an online discussion forum where children can have a voice in issues important to them. Eventually she hopes to present the children’s comments and ideas to decision makers around the world. Emily wants to see adults listen more to the concerns of young people.
Emily wants to extend her website project to encourage cross cultural communication between young people. She addresses the lack of tolerance/understanding between people from different backgrounds and/or cultures, the lack of communication between children around the world, the limited capacity for people from different areas to communicate and the prejudice being promoted which all together can lead to discrimination.
She wants to monitor her outcomes by evaluating how many people are communicating from different countries/backgrounds, how many children are communicating on common issues in the global dialogue and how involved they are. Obstacles might be translation and language barriers. She wants to use student volunteers or bilingual users to help translate the site into other languages. It might be difficult to manage time. Emily wants to overcome this by a set of key dates to aim for and make use of priorities.
Implementation:
She needs funding and logistics in getting children from around the world to present to decision makers. Her resources include contacts with companies, non-profit organisations, volunteers, and computer equipment. The project has previously been supported by web hosting provided by Cable & Wireless and sponsorship from Scholastic Australia.
About 1.4 million kids are using MatMice. Emily has been working on some interesting features to facilitate the meeting of kids from different countries on the website. The kids can look at different homepages created by children from different nationalities and also learn about their countries. The interaction between children from different parts of the world is increasing.
The biggest success for her was to see that she can actually give children the opportunity to have their say. When she started MatMice 5 years ago it was much more difficult and it was mainly adults using the Internet. It is easier now for kids to make use of the web and MatMice has a lot more kid-created content.
The users of MatMice are between 8 and 14 years old. The average age is 12 or 13. Emily doesn’t have that much experience in working with elder generations. She believes it is a great advantage of the Internet that it provides more equity in the sense that age and gender don’t matter that much. Everyone is more equal and it is sometimes much easier to work online. She hasn’t been working formally with other organisations or institutions, but she has important (informal) feedback from teachers using MatMice with their students.
Future Impacts & Plans:
The AP contributes to equity and representation. The goal is to reduce discrimination and bring together children/participants from all over the world. Emily addresses the right to an identity by regarding the users as children who have something valuable to contribute.
Emily said that she wants to continuefocussingon intercultural exchange and communication in the future. She wants to get more kids involved and increase and facilitate the communication between them.
