You can see some thoughts from a few people in the slides and have a listen to DK’s hopes in the film about how Youth Work will use the web in 2009.

Thanks to Adam Sibley, Adam Fletcher, Carl Haggerty, DK and Tessy Britton for bravely putting forward their predictions/ideas/hopes. I say brave because of course in a years time we’ll be able to look back and see how close to the mark we were!

Overall there’s a sense of hope that Youth Work better embraces the web next year. I’ve slightly countered that with my more cynical prediction that still next year youth work in general will be slow to embrace the web. I started an online network for what was then the Young Movers programme in 2003, at that time internet access was a real issue for many of our young volunteers but even those without home access felt it was the best solution for being able to have a more ongoing relationship with us while back at their homes in various parts of the country. I felt then that what we were doing was maybe a couple of years ahead of the pack and that soon an online element would become normal.

Well 5 years later and things haven’t changed much! Except that young people are using the web prolifically - the social network explosion has integrated the web into young peoples normal social lives, but for all manner of reasons the services working with young people have largely been left behind.

I agree with DK’s thoughts that there needs to be so much more to developing the use of the web than trying to jump on board the social network train. For one thing the use of social networks is likely to change radically very quickly - my own prediction here is that there will be much more of a move towards open networks that allow people to take their data wherever they like and quickly move between networks instead of having all their films, photos etc. tied into facebook. If so this will provide some interesting possibilities for youth services online along with a few more challenges to overcome.

The use of twitter is mentioned a couple of times. This was something we’d considered with plans for OnTheUp - the idea of being able to get an instant evaluation from young people involved in projects is very appealing. I don’t think though that twitter is the solution to this though, at least not until mobile providers provide a free data plan as standard for mobile phones. What I can see happening is that it surely can’t be long before mobile phone services integrate sms, twitter and msn/instant messaging into one universal service - if this happens the instant evaluation idea could quickly become a reality, although there will still be the challenge of getting young people to be willing to do so (which may not be so difficult depending on how you approach it).

Despite my cynical ‘not much will change’ prediction I really hope they do - in fact I’m relying on it! I’m planning to throw myself into developing digital youth programmes in the new year and am very aware that as things stand there won’t be much of a take up. What I’m hoping is that as people like DK and Tim Davies spread the word and continue to inspire youth workers out there to explore the web I’ll be able to build on this and provide some nicely structured ideas for using the web in creative ways towards personal development and community involvement - so I really hope youth work does embrace the web next year!

So thats our thoughts - if you have your own predictions or have thoughts on other peoples please do add them in the comments.

Related posts

• What the F**k is Social Media?! (4)
• UkYouthOnline & Open Source Youth Work (5)
• Digital Youth Work - Appreciating the Environment (7)
• Appropriate Relations Online with Young People (4)
• Youth Work 2.0 - how to do it?….. (10)

Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Films & Social Media, Innovation & Technology, social media, social networks, youth work 2.0

The people over at Social Innovation Camp have selected the ideas to be developed at their camp next month. Ideas include something to sort out junk mail, a way to find out who’s on holiday and where, so you can get them to do useful stuff like finding a plumber to fix the drains at an orphanage (I can’t even begin to explain how unlikely that could be of any use to any of the orphanages I’ve seen), a site to help you navigate your way around places with consideration to ability needs or escorting young children, an idea to get people out jogging to drop in and visit elderly people and run errands for them (seriously!), and an online marketplace for people who grow local produce. Also potentially shortlisted is something to include staff in making their company carbon neutral, a (ridiculous) idea to make setting up a social enterprise a one click process, an online system to help you make preparations for your death, and a scheme to help people join together to share the costs of investing in renewable energy.

Of all of them its the vegetable marketplace idea (called Vegsy) that I can see some real use for although getting enough people signed up to make it useful seems highly ambitious.

For most of the others I’m bemused as to what the perceived social benefit will be or how realistic it is that they can actually be of use. What I took from the last Social Innovation Camp was that to be successful you need a very simple idea. The last winner was Enabled by Design which aims to link the needs of people who use adapted equipment with designers - technically its the sort of thing that could be put together in just a few days, getting it used of course is a harder challenge and I assume that’s what has taken (more…)

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• Youth Work 2.0 - how to do it?….. (10)

Tags: innovation, Innovation & Technology, Society & Issues

I’m turning my attention to developing an online space for easier collaboration for the Digital Youth Work programme. Something I started thinking about earlier though is whether there should be consideration to parental involvement and/or awareness and if so what would that be?

This stemmed from me thinking that aspects of the Digital Youth Work courses could be activities that young people go away and work on, and if so is this similar to sending young people off to physical spaces for youth related projects? ie. if you were to ask young people to conduct a questionnaire in their spare time presumably you would seek parental consent for that and would take measures to ensure parents knew of what the activity involved.

If that line of thinking is correct should it be that guidance is provided for parents as to how to best support young people in using the internet?

Related posts

• What Youth Work on the Web will look like in 2009 (2)
• What is Open Source Youth Work? (7)
• How Will Youth Work Use The Web in 2009?… (11)
• Digital Youth Work - Rationale (9)
• Digital Youth Work - Appreciating the Environment (7)

Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

I’m watching (& contributing) to the Digital Mentor debate with interest. Digital Mentors is a Government initiative discussed in the ‘Communities in Control: real people, real power‘ white paper.

Government will pilot a Digital Mentor’ scheme in deprived areas. These mentors will support groups to develop websites and podcasts, to use digital photography and online publishing tools, to develop short films and to improve general media literacy. The Digital Mentors will also create links with community and local broadcasters as part of their capacity building, to enable those who want to develop careers in the media to do so. Depending on the success of these pilots, this scheme could be rolled out to deprived areas across England.

How this will be delivered is yet to be decided but will become clearer soon as potential delivery organisations/consortia get to express their interest later this month. In the meantime Dave Briggs has set up a blog, wiki and mailing list to try and encourage an open discussion about the future programme and hopefully to become a place for continued discussions and ideas as it becomes clear as to what the programme will actually be.

My initial interest in this followed on from a discussion at the UKYouthOnline event in September about digitally excluded young people. I was interested to see whether there was consideration to young people as part of the Digital Mentors programme - either explicitly or as members of the wider communities the programme is seeking to engage.

So far this doesn’t appear to be on peoples radars, but as the discussions pick up I’ve become more interested in the processes of having an online open collaboration. At this stage its not really a collaboration, in fact its unclear whether its a space for people to vent their concerns and self interest, whether its a sounding board for the ‘large’ organisations that intend to bid for delivery, or whether some form of collaboration actually will develop through the discussions.

This lack of focus makes it very difficult to engage - but frustrating as this is I think if you want to have a genuinely open debate its also inevitable at least in the very early stages (which this is). The discussions are starting to build though and there are good conversations happening. Building on this to become an open collaboration however is probably going to be much more difficult. Difficult not least because so far some very fundamental questions are not being discussed - things like:

• Who is digitally excluded?
• Who will be a digital mentor?

Tracey Todhunter provoked discussion about whether the programme will include the right people. I don’t agree that the method for achieving this is to seek to recruit people because they appear to be representative, but the matter of how users can engage and help shape and deliver the programme is critical. But this isn’t a consideration that can be seriously discussed without first identifying who those users will be.

As for who will be a Digital Mentor this is perhaps the most interesting aspect. So far the thinking from most people seems to be that they will either be geeks able to work in community settings, or that they will be people working in community settings able to understand geek! Personally I don’t think they should be either, instead I think the programme should aim to support people from within the target communities, or from very similar communities to become Digital Mentors. I find it very hard to believe for example, that for each of the groups that (hopefully will) be identified as digitally excluded there aren’t people within those groups somewhere in the country already using digital media. To me it would make the best sense to support these people to become involved so that they can inspire others with very real examples of how they actually use digital media.

The other obstacle for collaboration will be how open those involved actually will be. Some organisations have indicated they intend to bid, but they haven’t yet indicated what they want from the open discussions which will of course make some people wary of putting forward their ideas.

On the one hand I’m a bit disappointed that an open collaboration approach couldn’t have been braver. Dave pointed out that its “[not likely that a tender could] realistically be won by a bunch of people on a wiki”, which is indeed realistic, but also I think a shame because £900,000 isn’t actually that large a sum to manage over 2 years and it would have been fascinating to have been able to develop a truly open bid where everyone could genuinely shape the programme.

On the other hand we have an open discussion that could potentially still allow people to shape how the programme may develop - this does though depend on how open those organisations tending for the bid will be and whether they involve themselves in the debate or whether they cherry pick the ideas they want but don’t share their own ideas and methods for development.

Whatever happens I think there will be a great deal to learn from how things progress, and maybe in time we’ll begin to see some truly open developments for programmes like this and maybe then one day we can see services developed that genuinely provide best value.

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• What the F**k is Social Media?! (4)

Tags: Innovation & Technology

I’ve had a go at designing the framework for the first of the Open Source Youth Programme courses - titled ‘Appreciating the Environment’.

In the film I’ve gone over how the course would actually work. What its lacking at the moment is the meaty bit in the middle - the practical activities that use digital technology & online resources to help young people appreciate their local environment. Take a look at the film and the rest will make sense….
(Note that if you can’t view the text on the slides too well you can download them in pdf format from slideshare here)

So now is an open appeal for suggestions of practical activities that could be used to help young people ‘Explore’, ‘Enjoy’ and ‘Experiment’ with their local environment.

In the film I’ve already suggested using digital photography to take photos of local points of interest and uploading these to Flickr.

The next steps for me are to explore how to set up a site that allows everyone to properly collaborate & contribute to further ideas for the programme and getting this done has actually been very helpful for me to think about what kind of functionality will be needed (it will take a bit longer to actually get something up & running though!).

In the meantime it would be brilliant to get some ideas in from people for activities to fit in the boxes above and then when the time comes I’ll move these over to the new space and then move on to developing the rest of the programme.

If you want to view/use the slides without having to watch the film all over again you can get them via slideshare here

Related posts

• How Will Youth Work Use The Web in 2009?… (11)
• Digital Youth Work - Rationale (9)
• What Youth Work on the Web will look like in 2009 (2)
• What is Open Source Youth Work? (7)
• Online Youth Work - Parental Involvement & Awareness? (2)

Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Films & Social Media, Innovation & Technology, Resources, youth work 2.0

If you’re reading this what I’d really like you to do is to think of 3 - 5 things that are your predictions for how Youth Work will use the web in 2009.

Maybe you think more youth orgs will use particular social networks. Maybe more practitioners will blog or maybe blogging will die a youth work death? Maybe there will be more events like the UKYouthOnline gathering in September - maybe these events will replace mainstream conferences?

Perhaps we’ll see our first online ‘virtual youth work conference’? Maybe young people will campaign against youth services and educationalists using SNS to impose on their personal web space?

You get the idea!

What I’m hoping to do is put together various peoples thoughts into a nice fancy slideshow which I’ll then stick up on slideshare and you can share and embed it as you see fit and we can all look back in a years time and see what progress is being made along the youth work online journey!

Please DON’T write your predictions in the comments (and spoil the surprise!) - instead please email them to me at info@yomo.co.uk

in the subject write ‘PREDICTIONS”

list your 3 - 5 predictions

please also send over a photo (either of you or your logo etc.) and your name/job/organisation and also if you want a link back to your own site or blog.

As soon as I have enough predictions in I’ll draw something up - so no closing date but the sooner you send in your ideas the more likely they’ll be included in the main slides.

Finally a reminder……

what are your 3 - 5 predictions for how youth work will use the web in 2009?

(& feel free to use a bit of license as to what you think youth work is)

Related posts

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• Digital Youth Work - Rationale (9)
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• What the F**k is Social Media?! (4)

Tags: digital youth work, dyw, Education & Skills, innovation, Innovation & Technology, youth work 2.0

….to find  better way! That’s what I’m thinking having looked at the ShowUsaBetterWay site.

“Ever been frustrated that you can’t find out something that ought to be easy to find?  Ever been baffled by league tables or ‘performance indicators’?  Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?

The UK Government wants to hear your ideas for new products that could improve the way public information is communicated. The Power of Information Taskforce is running a competition on the Government’s behalf, and we have a £20,000 prize fund to develop the best ideas to the next level.”

I submitted an idea on there called ratemypark - a personal idea I’ve had for quite a while which is to help parents locate local parks & recreational spaces they can take young children to. Since submitting I’d pretty much forgotten about it, I did check the site a couple of times after, but quickly lost track of all the ideas being submitted - and that seems to be the problem - just how do you expect people to read through 384 ideas and then vote on them?!

Well of course they don’t and instead you end up with a system whereby either those with the biggest online networks get to rally all their online friends to vote on their idea, or as has been suggested in this submission there are more devious ways of getting votes!

Of the ideas receiving most votes you can choose between:

• A site to give you local information in your area
• Crime Mapping
• A mapping site to show you how to get home
• A jobs site
• A site showing cycle routes

Now without bothering to do any digging I’m pretty certain that sites for all of those things already exist.

You can take a look at the full list here, although not very usefully the voting submissions don’t actually include links back to the original idea descriptions which you can read here. All in all a pretty messy site, a very messy process and I’m starting to think that there’s been a lot of effort this year put into initiatives for generating ideas to use the web for social benefit for very little tangible gain.

As for my idea, well despite having just read it mentioned in the Guardian online article, it’s so far managed a grand total of 0 votes! Ordinarily I’d ask you to go over & vote for the ideas you think best - this time though I think you’re best not to waste your time!

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• What the F**k is Social Media?! (4)

Tags: Innovation & Technology

I think one of the main barriers to people setting up blogs is the feeling that nobody will be interested in what you have to say - that feeling of “whats the point?”. I’ve always made a point of saying not to get hung up on whether people do comment - just give it a go anyway. The truth though, is that once you start writing posts, you are interested in whether anyone is actually reading what you write, and when you get a comment it feels like an endorsement.

I’m pleased to get more comments on here recently and especially when its new people joining in. However I’m hardly qualified to claim expertise in provoking mass commenting - what I’m probably better qualified at is being a commenter. With both in mind heres my thoughts on why people don’t comment on blogs…

• They don’t realise they can
• You haven’t invited comments
• They can’t understand what you’re saying
• It takes too long
• You don’t engage in dialogue
• You made them feel stupid

They don’t realise they can

I’m guilty of this - its one of those things I think about fleetingly and then do nothing about. Think from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t understand blogging - just because theres (more…)

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• What the F**k is Social Media?! (4)
• UkYouthOnline & Open Source Youth Work (5)
• Stats & Figures - Young People & The Web (0)
• How Will Youth Work Use The Web in 2009?… (11)

Tags: Innovation & Technology, social media