August 2007 – Page 2

What participation workers could learn from the mini-legends…

I want to start this post by welcoming the newest participants in the 31 days to a better blog challenge. All 29 of them.

Screenshot of alupton.edublogs.org/mini-blogs

The miniLegends co-ordinated by Al Upton are all members of a year 3 class in Adelaide, South Australia, using individual blogs as part of their learning environment. Al is also exploring how blogs can be used in connecting classrooms locally and globally through the Connect Edu Blog.

Al has seen how blogs can provide a really empowering platform for individual and connected learning.

Effective youth participation work involves taking learning, building on empowerment, and looking to create positive change. Creating change involves having a voice. And thats what blogging is about.

Yet, we're still short on blogs in the youth participation world.

Looks like we've got the edubloggers to catch up with…

A tool for planning participation activities

Last year I spent an afternoon working with a number of charities who had come together to plan a residential that would involve a few young people linked to each organisation working together planning a shared social change campaign. We were talking about the different things that event organisers need to think about when bringing together a diverse group to make big decisions.

Participative Session Planning Tool

It quickly became clear that to make the residential sessions truly participative so that everyone could have an equal chance to be heard and to influence decision making and to make the sessions truly effective so that they could lead to solid decisions everyone could work with, all within in a tight timescale required a lot of planning and forward thought.

On the train home from that meeting, I tried to capture as many of the different aspects that need to be considered in planning an effective participative session with young people in a simple session planning tool (and, as with all youth-participation tools, I’m sure it has a lot to offer in terms of running sessions with adults as well).

From the tool itself:

This tool is designed to help you think about planning a focused session with young people or community groups. A session may be stand-alone, or may be part of a longer process, day or residential. It encourages you to think about the purpose of the session; the information and understandings of context that participants need in order to make informed decisions; and how you come to a group decision that everyone understands and can move forward from.

I’ve attached a copy of the tool to the bottom of this blog post as a word document and it is made available under a creative commons licence which means you can use and adapt it freely as you desire.

I’m not usually one for creating form-filling exercises, but its crucially important to put thought into effective participation sessions, and sometimes using planning tools can be effective in supporting that. I’ve certainly found it useful as a checklist to remind me to think about the whole picture when I’m planning consultations. I’d love to hear if you do make use of the tool, or if you’ve any suggestions for how it could be improved.

Attachment: Participative Session Planning Tool – 0.2 .doc

Tidying up the side bars (31-day-challenge)

Todays challenge in 31-days-to-a-better-blog is to declutter my blogs side-bar.

Decluttering

I've been concious that whilst I'm seeking to bring weave together Recent posts tabbed block thinking on technology, youth participation and social change – the audiences interested in those elements are often quite distinct. I had thought about a 'posts on participation' and 'posts on technology' block for the side-bar, but felt that would be too cluttered… however, thanks to the tabbed blocks module for drupal, I've been able to put together a nifty widget which allows visitors to see the recent posts they are most interested in. So, if you're a participation worker or a youth worker and you want to skip over all this stuff about blogging and find the content relevant to you – just click 'On Participation' in the 'Recent Blog Posts' list in the right-hand side-bar area.

I've not got the design of the tabs properly tidied up yet… but I'd welcome feedback. Is this a useful addition? Do you find the tabbed recent posts list intuitive.

There wasn't all that much other clutter in the side-bar – so I've just rejigged it a bit to bring recent comments higher up, and re-theming the comments, borrowing from the style on Andy Roberts blog so that the lists displays the name of the post the comment is to instead of a usually uninformative title or mini-extract of the comment. Hopefully that makes it easier for reader to identify if a new comment might be of interest or not.

As the archive block has moved further down the page in the re-shuffle, I've also added a new Archive page which offers a variety of ways of looking back through the history of Tim's Blog posts.

This restructure has got me reflecting a bit on accessiblity and page load times as Laura has also. I do find the MyBlogLog widget slows down the page load time quite a bit, and it delays the page fully rendering until it has loaded – but it's a very handy widget indeed. Perhaps I need to rework the theme so that the page can load before MyBlogLog appears…

In other news

I'm aware that much of the time I want to be spending on writing up blog post ideas and reflections has been eaten up refining the blog. However, with the joy of an impending long train journey coming up, I'll hopefully be posting a lot more non-31-day-challenge content come next week.

31 days – The challenge continues

The 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge is carrying on at a high pace.

Today's challenge from ProBlogger Darren Rowse is all about advertising, and as this blog is about sharing rather than making money, that does give me a bit of time to catch up. However, the challenge has got more serious! Sue and Frances are offering chocolate to both the best improved blog over 31 days, and to the best comment posted by a reader of one of the blogs participating in the challenge.

Chocolate

I've joined the challenge, so that, dear reader, means that if you post a great, insightful and fantastic comment on this blog, I might just nominate you to be in the running to win… (Hmm, is this blog bribery?)

Sharing learning
I've been learning an awful lot over today from visiting many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge. There's an awful lot going on at the blogs of Alex Miller – Brent MacKinnon – Cammy Bean – Christine Martell – Frances McLean – Kate Foy – Kate Quinn – Laura Whitehead – Nancy Riffer – SmokeFree Wisconsin – Sue Waters and The Indian Blogger

Hopefully you will already identify I'm picking up on lessons from Michele Martin about making use of visuals – and I'm going to try and explore some nifty visualisation tools later this week as well.

The tasks

Day 7: Plan your Next Week's Posting Schedule

As with many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge, I see blogging as driven by content, not content driven by blogging. However, I do often leave unfinished posts languishing for far too long in BlogDesk before they make it onto the site, usually aided by delayed train journeys that give me the time to get them sorted out.

Snippet from The Bamboo Project Blog One I've been particularly struggling with is a 1/2 finished post on visualisations. Particularly on ways of taking RSS feeds and managing the information in more visual ways (perhaps in mind-mapped ways like the bubble-blog idea suggested by Micheles 'test-reader' on Day 2). So – I'm resolving now to take a good look at that again tomorrow and see if I can get it online.

I've also got some writings on Youth Development and the recent 10 Year Youth Strategy in the pipeline, so I'm targetting next week to get those out. Whether or not those posts really make it does, alas, depend on whether or not the train gets delayed when I head to visit my wife fascilitating at peace school later this week

Day 8: Comment on a blog you've never commented on before

The challenge has been great for encouraging me to be more willing to comment, so I've been dropping in input, questions and comments where I can across todays blog reading. Making the time to engage in conversations online does seem to move towards greater abundancy thinking and I'm really enjoying the opportunities it is presenting. I'm a little worried that my current level of participation is only enabled by the flexibility of the projects I'm working on at the moment… and that it will be trickier to keep engaged when work pressure bite.

That tells me though that I need to think about the value there is in engaging in online conversations across the blogosphere… and if there is real value there (as I'm feeling there most certainly is), I need to explore how I can restructure my work plans to make the most of it.

A question

This 31 day challenge is intensive. And the recent knowledge jam on collaborative technology I took part in was also an intensive 48 hour online interaction.

Thanks to: http://flickr.com/photos/titanium-white/ I'm interested in whether the 31-day-challenge approach could be adopted for organisational learning and change programmes (I'm going to be supporting a number of organisations on learning journeys to engage with social media this autumn) – but I'm worried that this current challenge eats up too much time to fit easily into the work day of busy teams.

Is the intensity of the challenge a key to it working? Or could you turn the 31-day-challenge into a 3-month challenge and still have the same effect?

I get the feeling the intensity is an important part of this challenge working so well to bring people together – but I'd be really interested to hear what others think….

Promoting the Youth Opportunity Fund

12,226. Thats the number of youth-led projects that were supported in the first year and a half of the Youth Opportunity Fund and Youth Capital Fund. And the decisions on how to spend the Â£115m that made those projects happen were almost universally led by panels of young people.

In fact, government have been so impressed with the success of the Youth Opportunity and Capital Funds that the recent 10 Year Youth Strategy announced the cash is being extended till 2011. They've even 'YouTubed' the special Youth Cabinet meeting that made the decision here (although its perhaps a shame comments have been disabled on the video…)

I was recently involved in the national Actions Speak Louder Awards (lots of photos on flickr here), supporting a judging panel of young people to select 15 of the best examples of youth-led projects funded through the Youth Opportunity Fund from across the UK. The group (the Youth Empowerment Panel) were deciding on how to spend over Â£500,000 in extra grants to the best projects. For me the experience demonstrated that when you give young people responsibility, they rise to the challenge and take it on with maturity and great attention to fairness, quality and detail.

Far too often we hear it said that young people are not responsible enough to handle serious decisions. But the evidence doesn't bear that out. More often than not, we're keeping serious decisions from young people, not offering them to chance to start exploring and develop the skills they need to demonstrate responsibility. Giving young people control of cash, in structures where they are accountable to their peers, gives young people real power, and gives them the opportunities to excercise it responsibly.

The 10 Year Youth Strategy also called for up to steps to be made towards putting 25% of local youth activity budgets directly in young peoples hands by 2018 – so we're going to be seeing a lot more youth led control of budgets and funding in the future.

Are your organisations delivering any work that impacts upon young people? Perhaps its time to think about whether they should have a share in controlling some of the cash…

Useful links and resources

YouthBank – part of the inspiration for the Youth Opportunity Fund, and leaders in UK youth led grantmaking

Youth Opportunity Funds on DirectGov. One of the strengths of the Youth Opportunity Fund is that local areas have been able to choose how to brand and promote it locally. However, that does mean if you're a young person in England trying to find your local Youth Opportunity Fund panel you may find that it's called something different (e.g. The Big Stash, Cash for Action, YouthBank etc.). To find your local fund, you can either use the search feature on DirectGov, or you can contact your local council or youth workers who should be able to tell you who to get in touch with.

Promoting the funds

Young people from Headliners recently created this video to help promote the Youth Capital using case studies from Actions Speak Louder. If you would like a copy on DVD to help you promote the Youth Opportunity Fund to a group you work with, drop me a line and I'll see what I can arrange.

There is also this celebratory booklet showcasing all 15 award winning Actions Speak Louder projects.

Other notes

I'd be really interested in working with one or more local Youth Opportunity Funds to explore how social media can help in promoting the funds to hard-to-reach groups. If you're involved in a YOF/YCF and would like to chat about that more… do drop me a line.

31 days to a better way of working as well

I joined the 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge rather late, but it's already proving amazingly beneficial, not only to this blog – but to my work.

(The 31 Day challenge is a journey in shared learning, drawing upon tasks set by Pro-Logger Darren Rowse – with bloggers brought together by Michele Martin)

I became a freelancer back in April, and since then, I've found myself spending a lot of time working alone on writing and technology projects – not quite managing to make the most of the social aspects of social media. However, after taking the time to e-mail a new reader of the blog, and getting really useful feedback and conversation starters… I realised I need to be more active in involving others in my influencing my work.

So today I've been making more liberal use of quick e-mails to colleagues and conversations in person to get feedback on the new Hear by Right website that's in the pipeline – and its been fantastic to make work feel a lot more social and connected. Plus, I've been able to sneakily ask people to take a look a the blog too in the process to get some extra feedback here… (hello and thanks if this is what's happened to you…!)

Onto catching up with the challenges:

Day 2: Run a first time reader audit

Darren suggests just watching how a new visitor interacts with your blog, before asking them a few questions.

I'll often test out how user friendly my web development work is by watching over the shoulder of a website visitor, or asking others to test out design updates. But I've never tried for a site that is a dedicated blog.

When I visit a new blog, I tend to check if the first few posts interest me, and then if so, I'll hit the RSS feed and subscribe to it. I don't often browse back through the archives, but I do add the blog to a Google Custom Search so that I'll be able to draw upon it at a later date. As I mentioned yesterday I don't often look at that blog again directly, but pick up all I need through google reader.

So it was fascinating to see how my invited visitors, not familiar with website syndication and ways to keep updated with the blog posts, experienced the site.

Liberal use of links across the posts was popular, as was the topics tag cloud. However, I'm aware that for an audience interested in participation or social change (likely to less techie than those interested in the technology sides of my blogging), posts like these about the 31 day challenge can sometimes cause what they would be interested in to slip to far down the page ad get lost. I've shuffled the order of the blocks on the right-hand-side to bring recent blog posts higher up – but I'm wondering whether I should provide options for seeing the most recent blog posts under certain key topics like 'participation', 'technology' and 'social change'. I'm guess fellow 31-day challenger Laura might be right in forseeing categorising blog posts as a future day's task… so I think I'll leave this till then.

One of my new reader auditors (thanks Jake) also pointed out that the Biography Builder I used to put together an extra bio on my about page isn't quite as linguistically adept as it perhaps should be. Jake was left wondering what exactly an interest in "the philosophy of language and cooking" amounts to. Well, I'm just off to cook dinner… so perhaps if I approach it in a suitably reflective way… Erm, anyway, that should have been an interest in "philosophy of language, and cooking".

Other challenges: (up to day 7)

I've joined quite a few new mailing lists lately. I've had to switch to digest mode for most of them, so I just get a daily summary of the conversations as I couldn't keep up – but that often means it's trickier to reply and jump into discussions. So I'll be exploring how I can manage participation in e-mail lists and forums in a more sustainable way (suggestions welcome…)

I'll also sit down tomorrow and see if I can dig out some posts-in-the-pipeline for next week, and work out posting for the rest of August. I'm not looking to have a posting schedule as such – I see this blog as a space to share ideas and information as it arises – not as a daily destination that has to be updated even when there is nothing to say. However, to make sure things do stay current, I'm going to explore whether a linked bit of micro-blogging could help, learning from Laura's Side Notes section.

31 Days – E-mailing a new reader

Ah – I might just catch up on the 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge yet.

Late yesterday evening I dropped a note to Mike from Yomo who had managed to get around my very-nearly-not-working comment system (now fixed) to add some reflections to this post (funny how so far only the shortest post I've written has illicited any feedback…). Mike has recently started making good use of blogging and Twitter over here on the Late Breakfast Society blog – bringing together members of his team from across the country.

I'd asked Mike in my post if he knew of any other youth work / participation work / youth empowerment bloggers out there. We've not managed to locate many yet… but already from a week of interacting with comments over on Mike's blog , and with the impending arrival of blogging on ParticipationWorks* I'm hopeful and excited about the possibility of being able to develop more of a participation bloggers network.

Hopefully now that comments are working properly on the blog – I can really make effective use of it starting conversations…

*Disclosure: I've been working as a consultant supporting the Participation Works website during its re-launch

31 days to a better blog

I feel I should subtitle this post 'Picking mange-tout by moonlight' as I was about to go out and do the watering at 7 O'Clock this evening when I decided to sit down and look at Michele Martin's challenge to her reader to join in a 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Four hours and a lot of learning about this blog later, I finally made it out onto the balcony, where I also learned that harvesting the day's crop of salad and beans by night is none-too-easy.

Anyway – onto the challenge. Every day over August, Darren Rowse is posting a suggestion for building a better blog. Michele has challenged reader of the Bamboo Project Blog to join her in taking on the suggestions and documenting their learning. I'm rather late in coming to the challenge, and I'll probably be address it in fits-and-starts rather than as a daily regimine (August is turning into one of those months…) – but I'm hoping to work through as many of the tasks as I can to build this into a better blog by the end of the summer.

So far I've started with Day 4 and 5, interlinking archived posts and conducting an 'about page' audit. In the process, I've discovered that quite a few areas of this blog were a bit broken. Commenting hasn't been working as it should (I spotted some problems last week, but the fix seemed to have started torrential spam, so I've added in a CAPTCHA to blog comment spam…), and quite a few stray menus were roaming around the place. The design also needed quite a lot of work to get things looking properly personalised and more blog-like.

I've realised rarely look at my blog as a reader would. I'm either logged in as an administrator user in the Drupal installation that runs it, so I have permission to do anything and see everything – even if things are hidden for straight blog visitors or I'm writing content on the train offline with BlogDesk and posting it direct without ever visiting the site. I also rarely look at other blogs directly – always reading content through Google Reader. So, I've resolved that I need to be checking the front page of this blog a bit more (hopefully as comments start working, I'll have more reason to in order to keep track of them), and I've subscribed to the RSS feeds from the blog in all possible different ways to check that they are actually working and displaying as they should…

I've rewritten the about page (with many thanks to Michele for a good template to learn from), and have updated the menu's to link to it more directly. And, after much searching through photo archives and settling on some shots from our recent trip to Iona, I've spruced the whole place up to be a bit more graphical. Feedback is most welcome.

For interlinking archived posts, I've take advantage of the very handy Similar Entries module for Drupal which uses text-search to try and match three similar posts on every archived item on the blog. I'll review how well its doing in a couple of days – but so far it seems to be making good suggestions. I've not got all that much archived content yet – but I'll be keeping an eye on old posts that could do with manual links to newer ones.

So – tomorrow I'm going to tackle the trickier stuff – finding out what a new reader really thinks of 'Tim's Blog'…

Replacing local democracy with an bug tracker…

Making sure those who have consulted by government (local and national) can know what has happened in response to what they said is important. Far too often groups are disaffected by the lack of feedback after participation processes.

The catch is, change does take a long time. And identifying the impact of this particular consultation on a decision that finally gets made a year later – and then telling everyone who inputted into the consultation about how their views have influenced an outcome (or not) – seems a near impossibility!

A software issue tracking system

But as a contributor to an open source software project I've got access to an online system where: I can track how a call for proposals led to an idea being raised; I can see the initial discussion of that idea; I can see how a dialogue in the developer community decided not to priotise it right away, but to put the issue on hold till after other things were dealt with; I can track how it was then picked up again – combined with another outstanding issue – and assigned to an individual or group to work on more; and then, I can see when the issue is 'closed' – either having led to change, or because it's been decided it can't be pursued any further. I can even get automated e-mail updates on every stage of the process. (If you've not seen a good issue tracking system in action, follow this link through to see one example in action…)

It seems to me that an awful lot of local democracy is about raising issues and 'fixing bugs'. Which leaves me wondering where the local democracy issue trackers is…