Social Media Youth Participation in Local Democracy for download

A few people have asked be recently for copies of the Social Media Youth Participation in Local Democracy resource I worked on with LGIU out of a practitioners action learning set last year. You can get hold of a print copy from the LGIU direct, or a PDF is available for download below or for viewing on Scribd.

The guide contains four sections:

  • What’s it all about? – giving an overview of key concepts
    • Youth participation
    • Social network sites
    • Participation and social network sites
    • How are young people using social network sites?
    • Why use social networks to involve young people?
    • Making the case for using social network sites in youth participation
  • Practice – drawing on learning from practitioners across 20 different organisations
    • Principles and values
    • Strategy
    • Safety
    • Measuring impact
  • Resources – highlighting practical tools and technologies that can be used
    • Three key concepts
    • Listening dashboards
    • Facebook
    • Bebo
    • Ning
    • Blogging
    • Video sharing and YouTube
  • Find out more – signposting to further support
    • Online communities
    • Practical guides
    • Toolkits

It’s a sign of the pace of change in social technology that this report, written back in mid 2009, includes detailed sections on engagement on Bebo, which has virtually disappeared as a platform used by young people. However, much of the rest of the content remains as relevant as ever – with case study sections such as the ‘Social Networking for Young People in Care’ section of increasing interest as Children in Care Councils and other groups look towards advocacy and empowerment when resources are reducing.

Download: Social media and youth participation in local democracy (PDF)

Social Media and Youth Participation in Local Democracy

Shared Practice Through Video

[Summary: Handy guide to all the stages of creating a video of a youth project; from selecting equipment and sorting out consent; to planning, shooting and editing your film]

The Open University have been working on developing a new space in their  Practice Based Professional Learning (PBPL) environment for youth workers; and I was asked to put together a short guide on how youth practitioners can create video content to share insights into their own practice.

The result is ‘Shared Practice Through Video‘, which, in the spirit of sharing, is under a Creative Commons license and available for download as a PDF here.

You can also browse through it on Scribd over here. The guide won’t win any design awards (in fact, if anyone fancies taking advantage of the Creative Commons nature to remix it into a slightly more stylish design I’ll happily send you all the original material), but it does take you through all the stages of creating a video in the context of a youth project (or other project contexts for that matter).

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:

New One Page Guides: twitter, tagging, crowdvine

A few additions to the one page guide series, this time developed for the 2gether festival. Blogger here mainly for people in the Talking Tech session. You can find a range of other guides here.

We've got a new overview of Twitter (PDF)

An experiment with a more image based style for an overview look at tagging (PDF).

And a How To for the CrowdVine conference social network in use at the festival.

You can find the original files for each of these guides (created in iWork Pages on the mac) below – and they are all licenced under Creative Commons so you're free, indeed you are encouraged, to take and adapt these for your needs. (Erm – it's a bit of a slow upload here from the venue WiFi – so I'll post the original files later on…)


Attachment: Crowd Vine.pdf
Attachment: Twitter.pdf
Attachment: Tagging.pdf