Practical Ideas for Participation - a brief review

October 27th, 2007 by mas | Filed under Courses & Events.

Having had a reasonable nights sleep I thought I’d get down my own thoughts following this weeks Practical Ideas for Participation event in Chester, based on peoples comments, surveys returned, talking to our own staff & volunteers and my own observations. I want to get this up early too to give other people a chance to comment which will be helpful for us putting together a future similar event.

Concept:
I think the concept was good and there was clearly interest and support for the idea of an event where practitioners come together and exchange ideas and knowledge in a non traditional conference type format. For future events it would be helpful for us to make the ‘topic’ more specific (Participation is a broad term) - so perhaps things more like ‘Practical ideas for helping young people and adults work together effectively’, although possibly there should be a couple of these ’specific topics’ still under the broader youth participation theme?

Target Audience:
Our target audience was practitioners and these did make up the bulk of those that attended. There were some criticisms that there should have been more young people attending but I just don’t buy into this. It seems a current trend that anything related to work with young people must have young people in attendance regardless of whether its relevant or the young people there are actually interested and contribute. We did make it clear to everyone that enquired on behalf of young people attending that the event would only be suitable for young people in a leading or practitioner role. In the event the young people that attended were in two categories - young people that were in a ‘practitioner type role’ and young people who were not and appeared to have been misled by the adults accompanying them about what the event was.

For the adults that attended just about all seemed to have been relevant, although we did pick up a couple of interesting comments from older delegates that appear to have been directed at the younger practitioners questioning their ‘youth worker status’. Personally I think this is a petty snobbery and for the record to anyone that has that attitude - I too am not a qualified youth worker and I never will be - I don’t and never have called myself a youth worker. This in no way disqualifies me or other people from working with young people.

There were minor concerns raised about whether a couple of the workshops were suitable within this event. I think this does raise a fair point that in the future with a longer lead in time we probably should ‘vet’ workshop proposals in a little more detail (although it was ridiculously hard to pin some people down for info!)

Logistics:
We knew before the event that the venue was going to be too small and that there would an issue with the lack of training rooms provided. This was by far the biggest (and fairest) criticism and I think that actually people were very tolerant given how difficult it was at times to hear people. This was all the more frustrating to find that during the event it turned out there were additional training rooms available to us but nobody had informed us (which they had promised to do).

Surprisingly nobody complained about the location although its hard to judge how many people didn’t attend because of it. Only one person suggested the event was held at the same venue again. My personal thought was always that a future event would be in a more Southern location but this will need careful consideration if we want to keep reasonable access for people from Ireland, Scotland and Wales (maybe the West Midlands?)

The ’round robin’ sessions on day 1 needed to be a bit shorter (10 mins max), and with a greater amount of ‘networking games’ built in on this day to really encourage people to mix. An interesting thing about this though is that we also need to make efforts in recruitment to avoid becoming an event that the ’same old crowd’ attends and where most people already know each other so well these activities are pointless.

The ‘fixed workshop’ sessions on day 2 generated a nice ‘buzz’. The only criticism here was that some of the people presenting at the same time wanted to see each other (maybe we need an even more complex rotation system )

The evening presentation went very well although of course in the future these will need to be a lot ‘less YoMo’ and a more diverse range of ‘inspiring stories’ from different organisations. I think the theme was good though with stories from a programme, from practitioners and from young people and so perhaps this should be replicated if possible.

Technology:
The use of ‘Twitter’ was much better than we anticipated and presumably this would only improve in the future now that its been tried out in this way.

Filming proved difficult because of the noise issues but also for other reasons such as the slow internet connection available and the time taken to transfer films into an editable format. We’ll find out once these are uploaded how useful or not the ongoing network aspect to the event was but I don’t think role of ’social media’ is in question - its just a case of finding the most efficient methods for using it (something thats crucial to us in our training too).

Summary:

More focussed ‘key message/s’ for people to base their workshops on
Clearer guidance on who the event is for (spell it out P R A C T I T I O N E R S (old & young!))
A stronger ‘application requirement’ for workshop proposers (more detail about what they intend to do)
Bigger venue with either a very large room (ie. huge) with good sound or lots of small breakout rooms
Don’t know yet about the best location
Day 1 - short intro sessions and lots of networking, inspiring stories & examples in the evening, Day 2 (we’ll work on this!)
Definitely use Twitter again

+ of course Participation Works have already indicated they’re willing to be involved to do a repeat event so heres looking forward to the next one!

Now just in case it doesn’t come across from all this - we were really pleased with event. In fact given how hard the volunteers worked and how stressful it was at times I was surprised by how strongly everybody said they definitely wanted to do it again! We also met some brilliant people and there was a really nice atmosphere for just about all of the time. If we can repeat all of this + get the event just a little bit more focussed I think we’ll be able to create a really valuable event.

For a more light hearted reflection on the event see this entry…..