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…

3 thoughts on “Curating a conference: young people in a digital world”

  1. The reporting aspect seems pretty well covered at events now – very professional both for the live stuff and the recorded films, videos comments etc.

    But I wonder how many people in the audience of an event like this (ie. an audience of non geeks) really get it? I saw they had been talked through twitter, second life and no doubt lots I didn’t see – but maybe audiences would get a better understanding of the potential if there had been some sort of interaction between the audience there and the audience online? ie. moving beyond ‘social *reporting*’ to…. well I don’t know what you’d call it! But perhaps if at events where they are seeking an online audience (and I’m assuming that’s the case rather than just doing it because it can be done), perhaps specific times can be advertised for when there will be interaction between the online and in place audiences.

    This wouldn’t have to be just facilitator led but could include people in the actual audience using that time to talk with their own online networks through twitter/facebook/buzz etc. and feed that back too.

  2. Hey Mas.

    We had a little interaction with the audience from the live-stream and the main room – but admittedly not that much.

    Advertising set times for live-stream audience participation would certainly help I think – as sometimes people watching in can be left just hanging on waiting for a chance to get involved – and feeling only partially engaged.

    I think you would probably call a well online-offline bridged event ‘blended facilitation’ – and that’s certainly something to work on.

    Whilst you say social reporting at events is fairly well covered, what I’ve been trying to explore recently is how to take all the coverage – and make sure there is a legacy of easy-to-use content afterwards, rather than a muddle of Tweets and YouTube clips scattered across the place… and that’s still something that needs more work I think…

  3. Hi Mas – I’m with you and Tim on what I would agree is blended faciliation. There’s some challenge on how to introduce this to a non-geek audience: making it optional so they don’t feel techno-evangelised?
    I agree with Tim we need to do more on curating the coverage – Chie Elliott has done some great summary posts which go a long way to thread the videos and main discussions together.
    I personally did less than usual because we had some very capable young reporters there … it was a pleasure to stand back a bit.
    Still some way to go in designing a co-creation framework for events, but it is fun learning. Sangeet and WISE KIDS gave us a teerrific opportunity to move things forward.

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