Tim's Blog

Thanks to tweets from Dave Briggs and a blog post from Simon over at Puffbox I've just been exploring Steph Gray's quite fantastic innovations over the Science and Society consultation website.

Not only does the site work hard to make a complex consultation more accessible through the use of video introductions and a blog format - but it sets the consultation free, and let's any visitor select questions from the Consultation to make available on their own websites via a custom widget - which feeds information right back into the core consultation.

The Participation Works blogging platform platform may still be a noticeable omission from the Participation Works Network for England offering - but it's good to see a few more comment articles coming through from PW, particularly when they are sharing some great insights.
In this report from the North West Participation Workers conference, PWNE co-ordinator Natalie Jeal shares her reflections from the event, including a pointer to a new research website from Mencap and the OU - and including tips about how to engage young people with learning disabilities in participation work. The tips include:

• Writing minutes and agendas with BIG text and no long words

I've never been entirely convinced that Second Life has a big role to play in campaigning, participation and public sector activity (it seems to fail both on counts of being intuitive and accessible to new users, and in being somewhere with a large existing constituency of people to work with...) although seeing Wheelies on the short list of the UK Catalyst Awards, and with Google's launch of Lively perhaps virtual worlds will have more of a role to play in the future.

My work in youth participation really got started when the fantastic Bill Badham (Who incidentally is right his moment is somewhere cycling three times up a mountain in France to raise funds for a youth centre in Birmingham. Go sponsor him.) created four part-time jobs in The National Youth Agency Participation Team for 16 - 24 year olds to become co-trainers in equipping local and national government to include young people. Being one of the young members of that training team was a great experience for me - so I'm always delighted to see the model spreading.

Today's discussions at 2gether08 brought me back again to a realisation that youth work, and wider informal education, is not on very many people’s radar.

When we talk young people and education, conversations very quickly turn into conversations about schools and colleges - capturing only a small part of young peoples education. Only 9 minutes, in fact, of every hour in young people’s waking day is spent in school (and that’s just for the young people who are actually in school...).

Not all of the remaining 51 minutes of each hour will be spent in informal education, and for many young people, access to supported informal education is really limited (statutory youth services are only resourced to support on average 30% of their local 13 - 19 year old populations) - but, supported and unsupported informal education really mustn’t be forgotten and is something that, in a web 2.0 social media world, we should be paying a lot more attention to.

Thanks to Nick Booth for a pointer to this website where you can see which of the 198 National Indicators that central government sets for Local Authorities your council has chosen to focus on. Local Authorities have each had to choose 35 priority indicators that their performance will be measured against.

As Nick points out, the site isn't anywhere near as user friendly as it could be, but it does let me link to specific indicators. So, take a look at see:

• Is your Council focusing on providing positive activities for young people? (77 are)

I've explored the role of games in consultation before, but never bringing together the mix of playful real-world games, person-to-person interaction, and digital consultation and dialogue in quite the way that the process Kevin Harris describes in this recent blog post on 'Community engagement by treasure hunt'.

Kevin combined a quiz-book based treasure hunt around the site of the library due to be redeveloped with opportunities to speak to architects, chances to text-in ideas and an invitation to record reflections in the quiz-book. Kevin writes:

[Summary: you are invited to join in a free informal conference to talk about young people, the internet, opportunities, challenges, and change]

I've been struck again this week by how many people are thinking about young people's use of the internet, and the opportunities for engaging with young people online - but also by how disparate much of the action to move forward on those thoughts is.

More than ever we bring together the different threads of work to see if:

There have been murmurs about a 'Youth Participation Resources Kite mark for a while now.

Whilst concerns about the quality of resources on Children and Young People's participation might be founded (I've seen quite a few participation resources recently which have made me somewhat concerned due to their lack of clarity or any clear understanding of participation...) - the idea of one group certifying those resources which are 'quality' or not simply doesn't work*.

Instead - we need a space where potential users of a resource can discuss it. In part that might be the People&Participation Library with comments switched on - but what I really have in mind is a version of Social Source Commons for participation.

I came across Andreas' work at nonformality.org when he added to the reasons why youth workers should be blogging. And now Andreas and the team at the National Youth Agency of Estonia are taking the initative to kick start even more dialogue about how the informal learning sector across Europe can get far more engaged with the web by pulling together a Networking Seminar in Tallin, May 30 - 31, 2008.

From the Seminar flyer:

The context - why?