Curating a conference: young people in a digital world
This is a quick blog post to link to the videos and social reporting content from last week’s Young People in a Digital World conferences in Wales which are now available through the newly launched Digital Youth Wales network.
You can find over five hours content, including a fantastic panel discussion with young people from Swansea schools and colleges, insights from e-Moderation and Moshi Monster’s Chief Community & Safety Officer, my interview with Tanya Byron, and some great examples of digital youth work from Swansea. You might even find a clip of me trying to unpack how, through the lens of youth work values, the Internet provides an exciting opportunity space for youth work.
Curating social reporting
As well as the webcast recordings (created by the ever friendly and professional Richard Jolly and Diarmaid Lynch) the event was also comprehensively ’socially reported’ with live-blogging, video interviews and more being co-ordinated by David Wilcox and Chie Elliott.
All of which, thanks to the kind support of Sangeet from WISE KIDS who organised the conference, gave me a chance to try out further exploration of curating content from social reporting. Building on the IGF09 Drupal+FeedAPI framework, I’ve put together a micro-site within the Digital Youth Wales site which links together a record of live-blogging, with the webcast video, and any informal social reporting videos for each session.
Take a look here to explore the individual sessions – and do let me know your ideas for how this sort of social reporting aggregation could be improved or further developed…
A campaign that’s time has come: Robin Hood Tax #rht
I’ve long supported the idea of a Tobin Tax some form of Tobin-like tax (update 11th Feb) – taxing financial market transactions a minute amount to fund development and investment in poverty reduction (and more recently, climate change prevention, adaptation and mitigation). The trouble is, talking about a financial transaction tax isn’t the easiest thing to do.
So it’s fantastic to see the launch today of the Robin Hood Tax campaign. If you support one campaign this year…make it this one.
What would you ask Tanya Byron?
Update 9th Feb: I took some of the questions suggested below, along with a range of others, to an Interview with Dr Byron last week – and the webcast of that interview is now available through the Young People in a Digital World conference website.
On Saturday, on behalf of WISE KIDS, I’m going to be interviewing Tanya Byron, author of the ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ report (known as the Byron review), for a video keynote to be shown at the WISE KIDS – WISP (Wales Internet Safety Partnership) conference in Swansea taking place on the 1st of February.
With the recent launch by the UK Council on Child Internet Safety (created as a result of one of Tanya’s recommendations in the report) of the Click Clever, Click Safe strategy, it should be a good opportunity to find out how far the insights of the Byron Review have been taken into account in policy making, and what more practitioners thinking about the opportunities and risks to young people online should be focussed on.
But as well as capturing some of Tanya’s insights on policy and practice around online safety, all the conference team are keen to make sure we’re also getting Tanya’s insights on the questions that practitioners have.
So – what should I be asking in the interview?
I need to put together question ideas by 4pm Friday (22nd Jan 2010), so all quick thoughts welcome as comments, or tweeted on the #ypdw2010 hash-tag.
I’ll ask as many questions as I can, and responses will be shown at the Swansea conference, and we hope, through a new online Digital Youth Wales ning network to be launched very soon…
Two opportunities to explore social media & work with young people
Filed under: Quick linking, Social Media, Youth Participation, Youth Work 2.0, Youthwork
[Summary: Two day course, and six-month action learning set on social media in youth work and youth participation]
Getting started with digital youth work, or with using digital tools in youth participation, can seem daunting to many. It’s not enough to just talk about how digital skills are essential assets needed in the youth-serving workforce, or to point to tools and approaches that professionals should be using. Training opportunities, capacity building, and ongoing action learning to inform that training are all needed. Which is why I’m really pleased that 2010 will see the return of two key opportunities.
1) Social Media and Youth Participation Action Learning Set
Building on the Action Learning Set I co-facilitated last year, this six-month (one meeting a month) action learning supports participants who are working to increase their own organizations engagement with social media. Through expert inputs, workshops and shared action learning projects with peers – the action learning set aims to develop the skills of individuals, and the capacity of organizations, to engage with social media in youth participation.
Last year’s set resulted in a printed and online guide; and supported a wide range of local projects – ranging from those focussing on social media and youth engagement around commissioning, to projects supporting the use of social networks to engage young people in care in decision making.
You can find out more about this year’s action learning set (first session taking place at the end of January) and details of how to book in this flyer: Social Media and Youth Participation Action Learning Set
2) Two-day training for Youth Work Professionals
After a successful pilot, Katie Bacon will be leading a number of two-day trainings in 2010, on ‘Social Media for Youth Work Professionals’. Katie & I have developed the course together, and initially we’ll be running a number of sessions in partnership with LECP Training.
This two-day training is designed to support youth professionals from a wide range of backgrounds to develop their understanding of social media and how to use it as a tool in their work. Including hands-on activities to learn to use different social media tools – it’s a practical training that grounds the use of social media tools in professional values and practices.
You can read about the pilot training day in this reflective blog post from trainer Katie Bacon, and keep an eye on the LECP Training network for details of when the public course dates are announced (join the network to get training alerts).
We’re also exploring how this training might be offered as in-service training in individual local authorities, or offered on a regional basis – so if you might be interested in having Katie and/or I come to train with your service/region, then do get in touch.
I’m also hopeful that 2010 will bring the completion of a couple more digital youth work resources I’ve been working on. More on that some other time…
Social Reporting the Internet Governance Forum
Tomorrow morning I’m heading out to Egypt to join the Diplo/IKM team to help facilitate youth-led social reporting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
We’ll be tweeting on the #igf09 tag, blogging on the Diplo Internet Governance Ning, and hopefully bringing it all together with some live-blogging, video interviews and webcasting on this NetVibes page.
To support our team of Social Reporters I put together this quick handbook, and I’ve tried to make the first few pages more ‘general purpose’ that just for IGF. It’s uploaded under Creative Commons of course, and I’ll put together a revised version based on how it goes down in the next few days.
I’ll try and post with a bit more background and more links to interesting goings on at IGF in the next few days – but for now – back to packing.
Networked Participation: opening up
Networked Participation - funded by LGIU
Just a quick (and slightly late) note to let readers interested in Youth Participation & Social Media that we’ve opened up the Ning network for the Youth Participation and Social Network Sites action learning set to anyone to join.
You can access Networked Participation here.
You need to request a membership to access all the content – but as long as you provide just a few details I’ll get any requests to join approved quickly.
Inside the network you will find shared resources and slides from our expert speakers and all sorts of other bits and pieces from the last four months of explorations of what social network sites and online social network has to offer to effective youth participation.
Overcoming the challenges to open government – the wiki way
The Wiki
My recent post on 50 Small Hurdles to Open Government generated some great comments and conversation. And so, with the encouragement of a number of those who commented, I took the 50 hurdles from the blog post, and turned them into a Wiki where anyone can share insights and ideas for overcoming them.
Take a look and see if you can offer some tips for dealing with the technical, organisation, policy and skill-set hurdles that hold back so much digital engagement potential in local and national government.
And in true Wiki style it can be built up and developed. Paul Evans has already pointed out one ommission which now has it’s own page: the lack of clarity about what the law says about engagement. However, thanks to Paul’s pointer to ICELE guidance, and contributions from the DC10PlusNetwork today, we now have a pretty good list of where laws and policies support and enable online engagement rather than prevent it.
Visit the Overcoming the Hurdles Wiki here.
Web skills for Guyana
[Summary: exciting international ICT training project recruitment open until end of April 2009]
Do you know someone who:
- Is aged 18 – 35?
- Has skills in web development, graphics & animation, web hosting or e-commerce?
- Would be interested in spending six-weeks this summer working as part of a team sharing their skills with young people in Guyana?
Perhaps it’s even you?
If either is the case – take a look at this call for participants over the Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council website where you will find more details. Or take a look at the video below:
Web Skills Guyana Project from Tim Davies on Vimeo.
(Oh, and while you’re there – do feel free to explore the rest of the CYEC site. It’s in no small part due to getting that new site up and running that blogging over here has been a little quiet of late.)
Getting the ball rolling for a 2009 youth work online unconference
Last year around 50 of us got together one Saturday in September at the offices of DIUS and had a great day exploring all aspect of digital media and youth engagement through the UK Youth Online unconference.
It’s about time we started planning to do it again – so if you head over to the Youth Work Online network* you will find an opportunity to get in quick to make sure we hold it on a day that works for you – and to find out how you can get involved in the organising.
More details & information coming after Easter.
(*The network was renamed Youth Work Online from from UK Youth Online when we realised that it was getting confused with charity UK Youth with whom we have no links)
Quick links: Participation Works & OpenGov
OpenGov Event – 22nd April
On the 22nd April I’m going to be speaking and taking part in a panel at OpenGov which describes itself as:
A practical one-day conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities of social technologies to enable engagement, collaboration, and transparency in government.
I’ll be drawing on learning from our work with new technologies and youth engagement what engagement, collaboration and transparency look like when you include young people in the picture.
Registration is now open – and if you sneakily use one of the links below you can get yourself a specially discounted ticket (just say Tim’s Blog sent you…)
For Government employees £115 (normal price £150)
For Start-ups, Sole traders & Independents – £55 (normal price £75)
New Participation Works Website
Participation Works have just launched their new website – with a much clearer layout – and new features for members of the Participation W
orks Network for England (PWNE). In particular, if you’re a PWNE member (it’s free to join…), make sure you log-in to take a look at the new Participation Works blog, currently running as a trial project just for PWNE members – but, if all goes well, to be opened to the wider world soon…
Plus – if you’ve struggled to find information in the Participation Works resource library in the past – the new resource library makes it a lot easier to dig into a great knowledge base around participation – including lots of new video content.
(And, I have to say, having interim managed the launch of the last Participation Works site which I inherited running the horrible DotNetNuke CMS, it’s great to see the new version is made up of Drupal goodness)
Tim’s Blog
This is the personal blog of Tim Davies, an independent consultant and researcher from the UK, writing about young people's participation, social media and social change.(And also now MSc Student at the Oxford Internet Institute)