Tim's Blog

[Summary: Extract from a draft literature review on Youth Work and Social Networking - looking at different responses to risk - and the role of Positive Youth Development responses in particular]

I'm in the middle of putting together a literature review on young people's Online Social Networking, and the possible roles and responses for Youth Workers to take to this emergent phenomena. In the literature review I'm seeking to tread a balanced path between talk of opportunities of Online Social Networking, and talk of risks - so this afternoon I've been looking to construct for a good model to use in pursuing a balanced exploration of responses to online risk.

I'm sharing the draft of that model here for two reasons:

[Summary: Could the Innovation Exchange be about a festival of small ideas that scale...]

One of the bits of blogging I struggle with most is getting the opening paragraph right. So let me instead quote David Wilcox (and borrow his photo of the event in question):

Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work.... The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".

[Summary: shared learning/pointers from explorations of facebook groups as a platform for dialogue]

In response to a number of questions I've had recently about how Social Networking sites could be used for youth participation and engaging young people in local democratic dialogue, I've been exploring a range of different options. To capture my learning, I though I would try and write up my explorations in the form of a number of strategic 'recipes'.

Right now I'm working on series of strategy options for engaging young people in local democracy activities through Facebook. The two key platforms for engagement that support some level of dilogue appear to be Facebook pages, and Facebook groups. So I though I'd try and get a sense of when you would choose one over the other.

If you were looking to host a discussion between young people and local councillors on Facebook - which would you use?

Below are the notes I've drafted on the topic so far...

Groups or Pages?

There are a lot of people working on supporting young people through the internet, or supporting young people to engage with the internet.

games make things more interesting

response rates are always lower than expected

we should build in incentives

Last week I met up with Alice Casey from Involve for a short chat about all things participation, and we quickly got onto talking about the role of social media in connecting the many participation people working in different areas of the country, the world and the web. In the conversation Alice mentioned that she'd been thinking of starting a blog... and would give it more thought again.

Well - true to her word, she has - and a it's great to welcome a new blog to the participation scene. Here's what Alice say's in her opening post on 'Cased'

Tomorrow the Buzz Off campaign will be launched. The youth led Buzz Off campaign is calling for a ban on mosquito devices, and you can hear the campaign team talking about the mosquito devices in this video.

What has this got to do with Google Alerts? Well - if you're launching a new campaign you probably want to keep track of the sort of coverage it's getting. And it's not just converage in the mainstream press that matters, but converage right across the web. And that's where Google Alerts come in.

Google Alerts lets you set up certain keywords that Google will track for you. As soon as it finds new webpages, blog posts, news stories or documents containing those key words, you get an e-mail to let you know.

One of the 7 reasons I gave for getting youth workers blogging was to foster reflective practice. Michelle Martin offered her reflections in the comments about the role of blogging for professional development:

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'nptech' stands for 'Not-for-Profit TECHnology'. In the last year, these six characters have probably led me to discover more extermely interesting stuff, and more extermely interesting people than I've discovered through all my wider reading, web-surfing and (albeit limited) conference going put together.

Why? Because nptech is used as a shared 'tag' across social bookmarking and blogging websites by an active community of people interested in not-for-profit technology in the UK. And it's possible, using an RSS reader, to follow all the blog posts, links and other interesting things they are sharing as they are shared - making a daily dose of the latest new ideas, insightful reflections and helpful resources easily available.

Over on the BarCampUKGovWeb discussion list Ian Dunmore shared a question posted today on the Public Sector Forums:

"I've been asked by a couple of people in my council if they can use the
likes of Bebo and Facebook to add a group to, to encourage young people to engage with the council. Firstly, it's Libraries and secondly our youth
people who want to promote a youth portal that is being developed."

In my reading for the Youth Work and Social Networking research I'm currently involved in, and in trying to prepare a series of briefing papers on Social Networking Sites I've been struck by how complicated an issue this turns out to be.

The answer depends on (at the very least):