Tim's Blog

Welcome.

Thank you for visiting. You’re joining this blog in exciting early days.

As with all good things – it’s on an evolutionary journey of first ideas, experiments, reflection and continual redesign and development.

However, my hope is that it can act as a space for sharing ideas, resources, insights and conversations that bring together threads from the worlds of:

• Young people’s participation – that is, the empowerment of young people, and the changing of organisations and communities, so that ‘the last great minority’ can have a powerful role in co-creating and shaping our shared present and future.
  If that sounded a bit abstract or hippy then just think of it as improving democracy so that young people are always included and empowered. In fact, I’ll probably be focusing on democracy and civic participation in general quite a bit.

• Not for profit technology – finding out what the effective use of technology can do for us, and seeking to apply the principles of ‘technology stewardship’ to explore appropriate use of ICTs.

• Social change – we need young people to be empowered, and technologies to help us collaborate – in order to tackle big social issues and to bring about real, positive social change. Because that’s what creative, connected and empowered people do.

I’m also a freelance consultant in my work-life, so I might end up writing a bit about that too...

Keeping track and keeping in touch...

Blogs are regularly updated websites where list their content with the newest stuff at the top, and everything else below in descending date order. However, that’s not all – they’re also interactive spaces for sharing information and creating conversation. You can:

Subscribe to receive updates every time I post something new on this blog
You can sign up for e-mail updates by following this link – and you’ll get an e-mail everytime I add something new (maybe once or twice a week at the current rate...)
or
You can subscribe to the RSS feed using a ‘feed reader’. RSS can help you keep track of many blogs and websites, without cluttering up your inbox. If you've not come across RSS before, then this video is a good start...

You can browse through posts by date or topic
The menu on the right lets you browse through posts on this site by month.

I also ‘tag’ posts with key words. This page will show you a list of the tags I’ve been using. The bigger the word, the more I’ve used it. Click any word to see all the posts on that topic.

You can add your own comments to posts
Just look for the ‘comment’ link, click it, and then fill in the form at the bottom of the page. There’s a simple question to answer there to put of spam generating computers. Once you’ve added your comment, it should appear straight away on the site. If it doesn’t, something may have gone wrong. You can give it another shot or just drop me an e-mail (tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk) so the opportunity is not lost...

You can drop me an e-mail
You are most welcome to drop me an e-mail (tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk) If you want to talk more about something; to suggest a possible topic for a blog post; to let me know about something you’re up to; to agree or disagree; or just to say hi. I’ll always try and reply if I can.

You can point me to other spaces for discussion
If you’re blogging and think you might be discussing some of the threads I’m interesting in – or you think I’m missing some other threads that need to be woven into participation, technology and social change – let me know!

Want to know more?
Any more questions. Feel free to just drop me a line.