Subscribe Feed (RSS)UkYouthOnline & Open Source Youth Work
September 27th, 2008 by mas | Filed under Innovation & Technology.
Today I’ve been at UkYouthOnline (I’m now on the train home). It was one of the most pleasant youth work related events I’ve been to and I hope that enough people can persuade (& support) Tim to plan another!
One of the things that stood out for me during the day was how little consideration is given by practitioners to how they can use web technologies to be more productive/effective/efficient. Instead it feels slightly as though many people are so concerned with young peoples use of social networks and social media, that they end up only focussing on those things - there’s a sense of “we need to get on board or catch up with the kids”, but I wonder whether this means people end up taking their eye off the ball and are actually missing out on the most effective way to get to grips with the technology - using it for yourself!
Midway through the day Dave Briggs organised the ‘Social Media Game‘. I joined the group challenged with considering ‘Youth Workers Collaborating’, because I’ve written about this recently. The things that came out of the subsequent discussions for me were:
- People need to meet in real life to want to collaborate
- The approach and attitudes of youth workers needs to change for them to want to collaborate
For point one, of course they don’t really - the web is full of collaborators who have never met in real life. But in youth work at the moment I think that maybe this just seems a bit weird - why would you want to ‘collaborate’ with someone you’ve never even met? (or why would they want to with you?) Well today went some way towards getting this in motion and it will be interesting to see if the discussions over on the UkYouthOnline site pick up, and also whether we see any new blogs in the near future.
For the second point I can never decide between whether many Youth Workers are oppressed and don’t feel they can share ideas openly, or whether they’re too protective and competitive (possibly due to the competitive funding culture we operate in). No doubt some will point to ‘partnership working’ & so on, but this isn’t the same as ‘open collaboration’. Open collaboration means really putting your ideas out into the open and inviting others to take them, use them and improve them.
I had a couple of conversations during the day that led to me talking about the idea of ‘Open Source Youth Work’ - a concept of openly creating the ‘ideal’ youth service by putting ideas online and then allowing anyone (young people included) to input into shaping and developing that service. It would be fascinating to compare this ‘bottom up’ creation to the existing youth service. Unfortunately I don’t think we’re yet at the stage where there would be enough youth work input to make the idea feasible.
Still I think Tims got the ball rolling a little quicker today by organising the event, and kudos too to DIUS (Department Innovation, Universities & Skills) for kindly hosting the event.
Note:
There’s already some stuff up online from todays event….
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