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)

It’s not about you

If you have documents, websites or presentations about your youth participation project, and they spend more time talking about your organisation, or the consortia and collection or organisations involved in the project – than they spend talking about the project itself – something is probably wrong.

If your consultations are designed around your internal organisational structure, rather than being based on the issues and themes that matter most to the people you are consulting – something is probably wrong.

If to access your services young people need to provide all sorts of management information that is just for your funders, and which provides not added value to the young person – something is probably wrong.

Good participation isn’t just something you bolt on to your organisation – it shifts the focus. It’s not about you. It’s about change for young people.

Post your policy: e-safety, online youth work, e-participation

[Summary: Towards a pack of practical guidance for youth workers and participation workers using Social Network Sites]

I’ve just shared a copy of my latest attempt at putting together guidance notes for youth sector professionals exploring safe and effective engagement with social network sites, created as part of a series of training for youth services and other youth sector organisations that I’m currently preparing to pilot*.

You can grab a copy of the five-page document over on the Youth Work Online website. But, rather than just read the notes I’ve put together – I would love it if you could share any existing e-safety and e-participation policies or guidance you’ve put together in your organisation. There has a been a lot of discussion in the ‘Policies, guidelines and boundaries for interacting online‘ thread on Youth Work Online about what a good policy or guidance note might look like – but as yet we’ve had no draft policies or notes shared in full. It’s time we changed that.

*If your organisation might be interested in piloting a one-day workshop on ‘Safe & Effective use of Social Network Sites in Youth Work/Participation Settings’ then do drop me a line.

(Update: It seems some Local Authorites have trouble accessing the Youth Work Online website (and some even have trouble accessing this blog…). If that is preventing you accesing the document mentioned in the post above, or preventing you sharing a policy or document you would like to share, drop me a line…)

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 Works 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)

One page guides on scribd

[Summary: all the one page guides now available on scribd]

After trying out Scribd to share my recent One Page Guide to Twitter I thought it might be handy to upload all the past guides. So – over here you will find all (currently 21) of the one page guides – including a new Blogging with WordPress introduction and a guide to registering a domain name created as part of a series I’m working on for local campaigning organisations.

Perhaps now it’s time to work on a one page guide to Scribd…

Do you want to be part of creating a new SNS application for youth participation?

Be part of building the future of consultation. (Photo credit Balakov http://www.flickr.com/photos/balakov/253528147/sizes/s/)

[Summary: Looking for local authorities to be part of joint-commissioning new Facebook/Bebo/MySpace tool for youth participation]

One of the action projects emerging from the Action Learning Set I’m currently involved in around Youth Participation & Social Network Sites is all about creating a new online tool to transform consultation with young people – and to go from dull form-filling to engaging ongoing dialogue between young people and those in local authorities who want to hear from them.

The action project team, sprearheaded by Tom Gaskin from Norfolk Blurb and with support from others including Jess Linacre have already got a series of great design ideas together working with SNS application developers Neontribe and now they are looking for other local authorities who want to pool resources to help build the best possible application.

So – if you are from a local authority, or similar organisation, and you could be interested in being part of the pilot and contributing towards the budget – then drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with the action project team.

(Photo credit Balakov)

Explaining Twitter in one page…

I’ve been trying to create a general purpose one page guide to Twitter for a while. I’ve made two attempts in the past for particular situations – although with the end of SMS based access to Twitter in the UK those guides are both out of date.

But – I think I’ve finally created a guide I’m happy with – with this guide created for an Action Learning Set on Youth Participation and Social Network Sites I’m currently co-facilitating – but written to work as an introduction in just about any circumstance.

You can get the PDF of this one page guide to Twitter from Scribd.com (look for the download link) or, as this guide, like all the other one page guides, is provided you can download an Open Office copy (ODT) to edit and re-purpose as you wish (just make sure you let me know about any updated versions).

(Thanks to Harry @ Neontribe for photos and feedback used in this guide)

Guide preview:

Five-to-nine Volunteers

It’s always good when I discover one of the long term ToExplore items sitting at the top-right corner of my white board in the offices is actually already being done by someone else.

One of the items that’s been there for a while is trying to explore the idea of ‘Five-to-Nine Volunteering‘ in more depth – exploring how micro-volunteering tasks could be completed by commuters on the train or tube, or people sitting around with little to do.

Well, thanks to a post from Tessy I’ve just discovered The Extraordinaries – working on exactly that sort of mobile micro-volunteering concept – and getting close to launch.

Best of all, as the SlideShare below shows, The Extraordinaries is not just a project about crowd-sourcing small tasks, but the team involved see it as a hook to engage people in longer term volunteering.

The Extraordinaries

How can Facebook fight AIDS?

[Summary: help us explore the role of social networks in the fight against AIDS]

The world has been managing the global AIDS epidemic for more than 25 years. 2031 will mark 50 years since the first report of AIDS. While great strides have been made, there are persisting as well as emerging challenges that must be addressed.

aids2031 is not about what we should do in 2031, but what we can do differently now, to change the face of the pandemic by 2031.

aids2031 is a consortium of partners who have come together to look at what we have learned about the AIDS response as well as consider the implications of the changing world around AIDS.
AIDS2031 Consortium

The world is changing. The way people communicate is changing. And AIDS communicators are thinking about how they need to respond.

    How are Social Network Sites changing the way people communicate?

    How are Social Network Sites developing in different ways in different countries and communities?

    What are the implications for AIDS communication and AIDS communicators?

Those are some of he questions I’m exploring on a research project led by Pete Cranston, and commissioned by the Communications Sub-Group of the AIDS2031 Consortium. And we could do with your help.

We know that Social Network Sites means many different things to different people – and that they are adopted and used in different ways in different communities. Only some of that it written up in literature, and our on-the-ground research partners can only cover four of five different countries and contexts. So – whether you work with local government in a UK inner city, you’re using social networks to connect with friends and family in countries across the world, of you’re not using social networks at all – we would really value your insights.

Take a look at the four questions on our project blog and please do take a few minutes to offer a comment or two.

(This is a short-term research project, so the blog is only open until the end of Feb – and we hope to share some of the initial research findings from the blog soon after.)