No election – the good and the bad

Ok, so we're not going to have an election this autumn. capture2

That's a good thing. It means the project I've been snowed under with that has kept me away from blogging doesn't have to be scrapped because of political purdah*.

But it also means I've now got to go back into overdrive on the project (after slowing down a little on the threat of an election…) so normal blogging service is yet to be resumed…

*A co-incidental bit of shared learning & reflection: In searching for a link for Purdah I discovered that the use of the term is quite contested (the term having it's origins meaning 'curtain' and being connected to Islamic and Indian cultural practices relating to the segregation of women [Wikipedia]). The best description, however, of it's political context that I could find in the top google results was from the very well designed Chester Blogs and reads:

During the six week period prior to local and general elections there is a ban in place on publicising the views of political parties. Issuing press releases or promoting intiatives with quotes and photos from a particular councillor, for example, could be seen as unfairly promoting one political agenda over another. This period is know as a Purdah.

The basic principle is that any activity which could call into question political impartiality or could give rise to the criticism that public resources are being used for Party political purposes is suspended for this time.

New Youth Participation Blog

Children's Participation BlogJust a quick pointer to the Children's Participation blog recently launched by Henk van Beers as a way of sharing useful links / resources and information around the theory and practice of children and young people's participation.

If you're interested in pointers to organisations and literature relating to children's participation from across the globe then it looks well worth subscribing to. Henk writes:

In this blog I will collect information, resources, materials, and experiences that relate to the theory and practice of children's rights to participation in the widest sense. Over the years, with a limited number of people. I have shared useful information that I came across. Through this blog I want to make relevant information available to a wider audience while at the same time building a site that can be revisited for useful information and links.

And it looks like that's what the blog is set to do.

Two very helpful tools for public transport travellers (Or ‘when good design and useful tools collide…’)

TrainTimesAddressI have a confession. I can't drive. I did try to learn once, but realised:

TrainTimesResultsa) I don't like driving

and

b) I really would rather our world was far less reliant on the car, so I ought to make a start by being less reliant on the car myself.

Which means I spend a lot of time trying to find the best way to get places by public transport. Which isn't always as easy as it should be. However, the are two key tools which I find indispensible, and which I often find myself showing to others. So, I thought I would share them with you too…

#1 TrainTimes.org.uk

The fantastic Mr Mathew Sommerville (behind much MySociety code) has created an accessible Train Times website at www.traintimes.org.uk.

At a glance, you may think its just a slimmed down version of the National Rail website… that is, until you see URLs like:

http://www.traintimes.org.uk/leicester/london/09:00a/tomorrow

which will return all the train arriving in London from Leicester at 9am tomorrow.

Simple. But incredibly effective. No more skipping through form after form to plan a journey. One visit to the address bar of the browser and bingo – all the train times you need.

This slide show explains it a little more, as well as having some good tips on getting cheaper trains by splitting journeys.

Transport Direct#2 TransportDirect.info

Sometimes, just sometimes, I can't get where I want to just by train. In such cases I could spend hours struggling with local bus timetables and inadequate bus company websites.

Or I could use the very good, but very under-promoted Transport Direct website at www.transportdirect.info, which is not only a rather nifty Multi-modal journey planner – but which also will tell me how much CO2 my journey is likely to use depending on how I travel.

So, not only can I get places by public transport when others would quail at the thought, but I can feel smug good about the environmental benefits of the extra hour travelling and the lack of circulation in my legs due to somewhat cramped bus seats.

Anyhow. Hopefully these tools will prove useful to others, and I can just point people to this post in future rather than feeling compelled to spend 1/2 an hour raving about them and demonstrating how just fantastically handy they are… although, come to think of it, I could just do that as well…

What is participation anyway?

"Participation is the informed, autonomous and meaningful involvement of a community in influencing decision making and action."

Family Fortunes Top 5 Participation Words

This blog is at least in part about participation – so I really ought to have a definition. I've got a post on the go that explores what I mean by participation in more depth, but lets start with just getting a sentence sorted out for now. Ok – so the sentence above a bit wordy – but I think it captures quite a lot of what I mean by participation. I scribbled this definition down yesterday when I was asked to come up with my top 5 words to describe participation.

Unfortunately that definition gave me at least 7 words:

  • Informed
  • Autonomous
  • Meaningful
  • Community
  • Influence
  • Decision-making
  • Action

But cut down to the 5 I was asked for I ended up with:

  1. Informed
  2. Meaningful
  3. Influence
  4. Decision-making
  5. Action

Perhaps with a little more work I can really get a clear sentence to put across what I mean by participation. But that's a few weeks off – so I'd love to hear from you:

What is your definition of participation? If you had to choose five words to describe participation what would they be?

 

(In case you'd noticed I've been slightly slower on blogging since the end of August, fear not, Tim's Blog is not dead… just time-constrained and with many posts-in-the-pipeline-held-up-by-philosophising (a common affliction) which should make it here sometime soon…)

31 days – the final 11

The end of August 2007I'm back from my annual pilgrimage to the Greenbelt Festival (official website) and I've got six hours left till the end of August and the 'deadline' for the 31 days to a better blog challenge.

So, it seems like a good time reflect on the month of blogging, what I've learned, and to see if I can tick off any of the remaining tasks on Daren's task list.

The learning journey so far

I started blogging in May this year, after many years considering starting and one or two aborted attempts. Over August this blog has evolved from a fairly assorted collection of posts, to have a stronger focus on youth participation. It provides a space for me to share content, engage in discussion, and invest time in critical thinking.

The 31 day challenge has encouraged me to look carefully at the blog from a visitors point of view (which made me realise early on that I needed to tweak blog settings to get comments working, and that I needed a lot more explanation about this blog) – and I've benefited a lot from the advice and shared learning of other 31 day challengers, not least with respect to improving this page giving a background to Tim's Blog. As that page says, this is still the early stage of my journey with blogging, and the exact focus of the blog is still evolving – but with these draft principles to guide me I'm on a far stronger blogging footing that I was at the start of August. As with any intense process of learning, the full results will take a while to be seen… so for now, lets look at the last 11 challenges and I'll pledge to post a wider reflection on my blogging in a couple of months time…

The tasks and some reflections:

Day 21 – Make a Reader Famous

Overlinking blog postsI try to link across to other blogs as much as possible in posts where the work of other bloggers adds to the topic or post in question. I realise, however, that I've often done that just by talking about, for example, Mike's blog, with an inline link, flooding the top of posts with lots of links, and not being selective enough or purposeful enough with my linking to other blogger. Perhaps less can be more in terms of links pointing blog readers to the blogging of other readers.

Daren also suggests increasing the profile of readers on a blog by using comments as the basis for posts. This seems a great idea, not only in that it highlights the comments of a particular reader, but it shows that comments contribute to a debate in the blogosphere.

Roger Schmidt (whose group blog with the Lutheran World Federation has made it into my reguarl reading list and is already providing a lot of food for thought) provided me this week with an opportunity to build a post around a readers comments. I was challenged to think about the concept of the 'voice of youth' by Roger's comments, and found I couldn't fit my reflections into a short reply, so this post emerged and can hopefully provide space for more discussion.

Day 22 – Catch New Readers Up on the Basics of your Blog

During the 31 day challenge I've made a lot of changes to my about this blog pages – but readers keeping up with Tim's Blog through the RSS feed or e-mail updates and regular readers won't see changes to that page. These 31-day pages have done a lot to keep readers up to date on the evolution of this blog, but as Daren suggests, periodic updates to put blog posts into context can be an important part of effective blogging, so do look out for these context-setting posts in the future.


Day 23 – Go on a Dead Link HunBlog link checkingt

I've already mentioned that I can be 'link happy' with my blogging. More links now, however, means more chance of broken links in the future.

A quick check using Xenu's Link Sleuth didn't show up any permenant problems right now (although it did show a few links to other blogs that timed out…) – however, I will need to keep an eye on links in the future.


Day 24 – Do a Search Engine Optimization Audit

There is an interesting challenge for those blogging in the youth participation and youth work niche. I primarily work on, and reflect on, work with young people in secular contexts. However, if you search for youth work online, you'll find predominantly faith based youth work blog posts, which can be a very different niche. I'm not quite sure how to resolve that yet, but I'm hoping that an upcoming seminar at Leicester De Montfort University by Thomas Vander Wal (intentor of the term folksonomy and recently blogging on the state of tagging) might provide some space for an exploration of keywords online.


Day 25 – Go Shopping and Improve Your blog

 

For day 25, Daren suggests visiting a local shopping centre and watching people's behaviours to find lessons transferable to blogging.

I wish I had picked up this challenge on the 25th of August, rather than when I returned from Greenbelt festival. As a phenomenal example of a temporary community – packed full of creativity and celebration, chance interactions and deep conversations, serious commentary and off-topic commedy it seems a far better mirror of the blogosphere that I want to engage with than does the commercial world.

Greenbelt 2007

(Greenbelt is an annual christian arts festival held on Cheltenham Race Course in the UK, attracting a diverse group of around 20,000 people, often from the 'liberal fringes' of the church or from beyond the conventional boundaries of christian / non-christian. It has developed a strong committment as a festival to social justice, and has a vibrant community atmosphere – with a quite undescribeable diversity of festival events, from headline music acts to seminars on nationalism and scottish independence. I can't do it justice in a quick paragraph – but you can see a bit of the festival here, or read more on the official site here)

The youth work seminar series at Greenbelt has certainly given me a lot to think and hopefully blog about.

And from observing shoppers in the Greenbelt marketplace I've learnt that it might seem like a good idea to buy a multi-coloured stripy cardigan with tassles when everyone around you is buying them… but you're not going to want to walk off site into Cheltenham wearing that now are you…


Day 26 – Link Up to a Competitor

I've already confessed to my propensity for linking to other sources (although this post seems notably link free). Often those links will be to other bloggers in the niche I write for – although as mentioned before, I'm not working in a collaborative, rather than a competitive mindset. I'm really keen to see the development of a stronger youth participation and youth work blogosphere in England and the wider UK, so linking to newcomers and conversations taking place on other blogs in the sector is key to building that. (If you're a new youth participation / youth work blogger – drop me a line and I'll point people in your direction…)


Day 27 – Find a Sponsor for Your Blog

Much of the content for this blog emerges as a result of my full time work, and so that does, in a sense, act as sponsorship for my blogging. Although I've not, as yet, looked carefully enough at building time to reflectively blog into my costings and work plans. As blogging does act as a powerful reflective learning tool, that is something I'll be exploring.


Day 28 – What is Your Blog’s Mission Statement

I'm still evolving a mission statment for this blog. My principles are a first part of that evolutionary journey, but this task will have to wait till I've got a long train journey to spend some time reflecting.


Day 29 – Email a Blogger that Linked to You to Say Thanks

The 31 day challenge has encouraged me to become a lot more interactive in blogging – and that pays real dividends. It also take a lot of time. The challenge is in finding equilibrium – knowing when interaction is valuable, and when the fact that someone links to something I've written (either here or elsewhere on the web) can lead to more than platitude. A bit more reflection on how I move forward with a sustainable level of online interaction is also scheduled in for the upcoming train journey (hmm, and I find myself hoping for delays again!).


Day 30 – Explore a Social Media Site & Day 31 – Run a SWOT Analysis on Your Blog

Flog Blog in FacebookOnly four hours left now (there were six when I started writing this post!) till the end of August, and I think, for the sake of being able to get some rest this evening, and for your sake (my attempt at a SWOT is likely to run on a bit…) I think my write up on these two task shall have to slip.

I'm already to be found in many social media spaces. And I've been exploring integrating my blog better with facebook using FlogBlog this month, as well as enjoying the interaction offered by MyBlogLog – but I'll leave more commentary on my experience with social networks and blogging for a later date.

The end?

The 31 day challenge has been a valuable learning experiment for me in blogging, and I'm not yet done with all my learning from it. I hope that these posts have provided some insight into the process (although I admit they've not always distilled learnings as much as I'd like… something I'm still learning to do) and that they've not disrupted the flow of other posts.

This isn't the end of improvements to Tim's Blog, and I hope it won't be the end of the very helpful suggestions, constructive criticism and input I've recieved from many readers. Thankyou to all who've helped – and to all the other 31 day challengers, I look forward to continuing to read your writings, and to opportunities for more peer learning in the near future…

Leading Work with Young People – The Active Involvement of Young People (space for feedback…)

Leading Work with Young People - Book

I've just got back to the office to find a welcome package on my desk. A copy of Leading Work with Young People has arrived. The book includes a chapter that I co-wrote earlier this year with Bill Badham. The chapter is on 'The active involvement of young people' and explores both the need for the need for strong leadership to make young people's participation in decision making a reality, and the way in which leadership in a participative organisation is radically different from conventional models of heirachical leadership.

Whilst I can't post the whole chapter here, I'm hoping to post more on the role of leadership in participation soon – and I thought that it would be useful to provide a space here open to any feedback, questions, or discussion on the chapter from those who've read the book (in particular those reading the work for Open University course E132 – Leading Work with Young People).

So, if you've read the chapter, and have any reflections on it or issues it raises, both Bill and I would love to hear them. You can drop me a line by e-mail, or share your thoughts in the comments below.

Is there a ‘voice of youth’?

The idea that there is one 'voice of youth' is clearly nonsense. Yet this idea underlies many invitations to a small group of young people to participate in comittees and to 'represent the voice of youth' in those settings. Nevertheless, whilst there is no one 'voice of youth', that doesn't make it illegitimate for groups of young people to speak with one voice – and to make calls on behalf of their fellow young people.

Roger Schmidt has just added this this comment to my post reviewing the Civicus World Assembly 2007. The Civicus World Assembly included, for the first time this year, a youth assembly – which, as this post explains led to a 'Call for Intergenerational Collaboration' drafted collaboratively by the young people present. In effect, a youth declaration from the assembly.

Civicus World Assembly 2007 - Whole Group

Delegates at the 2007 Civicus Youth Assembly

Roger comments:

“…it is right to prepare young people for the participation in larger “adult” assemblies. But it is wrong to have a seperate youth contribution (declaration) or whatever because there can't be a unified youth opinion. Youth in itself is so diverse. I think that is another issue to discuss because it helps to clarify the sometimes conflicting goals of preparation and meaningful contribution.”

I agree with the claim that youth is diverse. Though the same claim can be made of any age grouping. It may be particularly interesting as a claim about young people, given a significant aspect of 'youth' (as a life-stage) is about experimentation with identity and identity formation which, it could be argued, increases the diversity of youth (as a generation). But the argument that diversity precludes collective declarations doesn't neccessarily follow.

Whilst inviting a few individuals to speak as themselves 'with the voice of youth' is flawed, young people often have shared interests: as a group collectively impacted by specific oppressions; as a group affected by age-related laws; and as those who will see the impact of decisions far beyond the time-horizons of most adult decision makers. And those shared interests can ground a specific youth contribution to a debate.

It's important that, on these issues of shared interest, young people are allowed to represent their claims as 'a voice of youth' (note, not 'the voice of youth', and not 'a voice of a young person'). Declarations that call for action from a collective young peoples perspective are a core part of forming political movements of young people to create change.

In conclusion

Individual young people claiming to speak with the voice of youth does not make sense.

Inviting a few young people to give their opinion on some issue which clearly affects different young people differently cannot be called listening to the voice of youth (it is listening to the specific views of some young people).

But where shared interests exist, and where a suitably large and diverse group of young people come together to discuss those shared interest and to articulate them, a declaration can be made as a voice of youth, and significant weight should be given to that declaration or call.

Quick reader question:

On topic: I've tried to untangle what I think are common confusions with respect to the idea of 'a voice of youth'. Does this work? Do you agree?

Meta-question: Are these 'philosophical' posts of interest? Should I just try and write up the conclusions… or is the reasoning of interest (this is already a heavily edited down version of what I first wrote…)?

31 day blog updates

Late night updates to Tim's blog inspired by the 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge seem to be throwing up more problems than they're solving as a tinker with the blog website. However, after a brief spam-related outage, comments are working again and I've been catching up on a few of the 31-day challenges. Details below…

Day 14 – Analyze Your Blog’s Competition

Google search for youthworkOf course, as this isn't a money making blog, this is more about analyzing other blog in the same field / talking about similar or complementary topics to explore what they do well, and how Tim's Blog adds something to the picture. As far as I can tell, reflective blogging in the secular youth work sector is relatively slim on the ground. Christian youth workers seem to have all-but-claimed the term 'youth work' online (which throws up interesting challenges for developing blogging amongst non-faith-based youth workers in terms of finding tags and keywords that both allow cross-overs and distinctions between faith-based and non-faith-based youth work), and whilst there are a lot of bloggers talking politics, not all that many focus on young people's political empowerment and participation.

One key learning from exploring other blog I read regularly, and particularly from taking part in the international-in-nature 31-days challenge, is that I need to look more carefully at the language I use. For example, I often talk about youth participation, but, as Mike asks, what is youth participation? I've started work on finding out exactly what the niche of this blog is, as that should help me work out what assumptions about terminology I can make, and which terms I need to explain. So far I've drafted up some principles for this blog, and I'm considering trying some definitional posts (answering the 'What is participation?' question and related others) in the near future. Hopefully with that done, I'll be able to have a strong sense of what I am writing about, and how, when I've worked out who 'the competition' is, it can always be bringing something extra to the picture.

Day 15 – Make Your Most Popular Posts Sticky

Post It NotesI write a blog chronologically. Visitors often arrive from search engines. Many will not know what a blog is. If, with a few extra clicks, a visitor could find something useful on this blog, or may find a subscription to the RSS feed or e-mail updates useful – then I'd like them to realise that they can and so to 'stick' around on the blog for a little longer. Where posts are part of a series, it would be great if readers were supported to stick around and read the rest.

That means two things:

  1. Making sure every post explains in some way that it is part of a blog, and has details of how one can interact with a blog (like the About page compressed into a few words).
  2. Making it easy to contextualise blog posts that are part of a particular thread of series along with their companion posts.

I've added a little blurb to the bottom of each post to help with (1), and I've got some ideas for (2), partly around manually creating links in past-posts to point to updated series, but also exploring use of the Drupal Node Queue module or Views modules to make easy-to-update blocks that introduce particular series. That however, shall have to wait a while…

Day 16 – Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog

Heat Map of Tim's Blog using CrazyEgg.comA website heat map displays spacial areas on a web-page where users click most often. Standard web-statistics only tell me that from the front page, 45 users visited my about page… whereas a heat-map will help me identify which link they clicked in order to do it.

I added a crazyegg heatmap to the front page of Tim's Blog a couple of days ago, and whilst there isn't a wealth of data flooding in, it has already persuaded me to switch from whole blog posts displaying on the front page, to only displaying the first few paragraphs with click-for-more links.

It highlighted what my statistics already suggested, which was when there was a long post on the front page which pushed another new post 'below the fold' (off the screen), the new post just off screen got only 1/2 the traffic of the top one.

I was also suspired by how many people were clicking through straight away to the About Tim page over the About This Blog page, so, thanks to this and earlier encouragement from fellow 31-day challengers About Tim has had an overhaul and hopefully gives a better idea of exactly who it is writing all this.

Day 17 – Run a StumbleUpon Campaign for Your Blog

Along with other 31-day challengers, I'm leaving this one for the moment – until I have content that I think might appear to a StumbleUpon audience… as which point I'll be off to explore it more…

Wikipedia on the sneeze (I just like the topic listing...)Day 18 – Create a Sneeze Page and Propel Readers Deep Within Your Blog

A sneeze page is a sort of landing page to summarize a particular topic and show what a blog has to offer on that topic. As Tim's Blog is still building up content that would need the sort of 'crating' a sneeze page offers, I'm going to hold off on creating anything in particular right now… but again this is going into the little list of blogging good-practice and 'content-curation' tips.

Day 19 – Respond to Comments on Your Blog

I'm already making an effort to respond to as many comment as I can. One omission from this blog at the moment is an option for visitors to sign up to RSS feeds or e-mail updates of comments to a post, and I'm going to look into sorting that out at the end of August…

Day 20 – Run a Reader Survey

Many of the potential readers of this blog are not, in general, blog readers. So rather than survey just the readers of this blog, I'm thinking about a wider survey to discover the best ways of sharing resources with, supporting conversations amongst, and providing information for, youth workers, participation workers and social activists is. Again, the summer precludes in arriving too early… but keep an eye out for more on that soon…

Added extra: streamlining image adding

Christine mentioned in a comment over here the challenge of finding images to use in blog posts. I've been making more use recently of a little utility called 'Capture a Screen Shot' (although any screen-shot tool that lets you grab just a set area of the screen will do) to grab images of web-pages / sections of images to easily add to posts. BlogDesk which I use for posting, helpfully offers options to crop, resize and position images – so it makes it really easy to liven up posts with a few pictures. The challenge of making sure the images are relevant, however, remains… and I'll let you judge from this blog post how I'm doing on that…

Youth led media: getting the distribution right

Film is powerful. But to have the strongest impact it needs to be used in the right way and seen by the right people. That's why thinking about distribution needs to be a key part of youth video projects.

Birmingham Youth Strategy FilmA great video about the challenges young people face in a local area, that is never seen by those who are responsible for the decisions that could improve things, is an opportunity missed. Identifying who should see your video, and inviting them to watch and respond to it, is an important part of any change-making video project*.

A lot of videos miss getting the audience they deserve. Social media and online distribution have a big role to play here. Beth Kanter has remixed a version of the Social Media Game for Documentary Film Makers. The social media game can provide a great starting point for exploring the opportunities presented by new technologies for reaching wider audiences.

Distribution in action:

Youth Media Reporter ArticleAs I was preparing this post I came across this story from Youth Media Reporter which shares an account of how young film makers in Baltimore made sure their work was well distributed and created conversation. The group realised their their videos, shown on local Public Access TV were not getting enough viewers, so they turned to the Internet and social networking sites to build a bigger audience.

But, as well as sharing video online, the group looked to showings in the local community, and have created their own do-it-yourself distribution guide including a focus on community screenings. A short quote:

Montebon explains the importance of community screenings in this new approach: “The reason for a screening is, you can [sit at home and] watch something on TV… but it takes another step to have a type of forum. I think what the community screenings are supposed to serve, is a platform where people can start a sort of discourse.” Airing a youth-made TV episode in a community context, such as a public park, museum, or neighborhood event, creates a potential for dialogue. It is easier for people to talk to one another about youth-led issues in a group setting, as well as engage with youth media makers on the issues they raise.

How do you make sure your video projects start conversations and create change?

Not just video:
If a video has been created to lobby for change (for example, to get a local authority to provide cycle lanes on a route to school, or to call on a local leisure company to make their activities affortable to all young people) then it is also worth thinking carefully about other tools that will be needed to create change. A video is one of the most effective tools for getting decision makers to understand a problem – but will everyone who is in the meeting that makes the decision you want to influence have seen the video? And have you provided a clear proposal along with your video stating in words what you want changed?

————

*I don't want to suggest that all video projects have to be externally focussed. All art-froms can be effective tools for individual and group learning as an end in itself. However, where a change making impact is within reach, then I would always encourage its pursuit…

Comments working again

Just a quick note of appology in case you've tried to add a comment to Tim's Blog in the last 48 hours and come up against error messages. Comments should now be fully working again.


The server hosting Tim's Blog fell foul of a number of systems trying to post comment-spam all over the place which a) brought the server to a grinding halt, and b) caused me to try and up the defences, messing thinks up so no comments at all could be posted.

I've since un-messed-it-up, and am looking at other ways to keep the spam at bay.