I haven’t read the magazine itself yet as our local post isn’t the most efficient service, but I see an opinion piece I wrote for Children & Young People Now has been published this week - you can read it online here.

The basic points I was making are:

• Online technology isn’t just about doing cool stuff with young people - its something youth workers should be looking to use as part of their own productivity
• There’s massive potential for collaboration within the sector - however this requires more people to make better use of online tools and of course to seek to interact

A few months back DK at Mediasnackers, Tim Davies and myself started planning a campaign to find the first statutory youth work blogger. As it turned out the campaign wouldn’t be needed as DK had already done enough on his travels to inspire Hilary Mason to give blogging a go - something she continues to do very well.

Theres been a few more pop up since, and assuming this continues to grow, there should soon be a youth work blogging wilderness, albeit a sparce one. This is great to see and very interesting to read about peoples experiences and opinions, but I think we also need people to start looking to go a stage further.

I’m not sure if ‘Open Source‘ is a term yet understood by the average person - assuming its not, a basic description for ‘Open Source Software’ would be that (often very skilled) people decide to create a piece of software, and rather than sell it in the conventional sense, they put it online for free. They don’t just make the software free, they make the code available too. This means that other people around the world can play with the code themselves and adapt it for their own needs. What often happens is that people who make improvements to the code share their additions and then begin to collaborate with others doing the same. This then expands further with people then developing ‘add-ons’ or new versions and so on.

People do this for free - or in terms more familiar to youth work - they volunteer their time to contribute towards an online community.

So what would it take to get a version of ‘Open Source Youth Work’? Quite a lot I expect Continue Reading »

There are all sorts of discussions recently about the role of Youth Work and the web. Tim has produced his interim report ‘Youth Work & Social Networking‘, back in February a YoungScot report concluded that “Youth groups risk losing out to social networking sites like MySpace unless they rethink how best to attract teenagers” (a pretty dumb perspective in my opinion), and a discussion on the CYP Forums asks if social networking is a threat or an opportunity for Youth Work?

Add to that the ongoing discussions (and events) about how best to support young peoples ‘online safety’ and more positively how to effectively take advantage of the opportunities presented by using social media technologies.

Well all this earlier got me thinking about whether we’ll ever see a ‘virtual youth service’?!

Continue Reading »