Beyond the local youth offer

In general, the data we are collecting and publishing via plings tends towards the local activities and events, that sit neatly underneath a local youth offer.  So – a youth club, sports centre, arts project, music workshop, dance group – tend to sit well within the local area that they operate within.  In terms of then publishing these positive activities our model of “what’s on near me?” works well.

But – we know that this is not the whole story.

Recently we have begun to talk to a few activity providers and projects that organise events and schemes that are of interest to a much wider population of young people.  Over the coming weeks we will start to publish more detail and interviews with these organisations, but to kick off, here are some thoughts.

Trip to the theatre

West End

Mousetrap theatre projects contacted us with details of their scheme for ultra cheap tickets for West End theatre, dance and opera productions and talks – aimed specifically at young people.  We’ve entered one such event into Plings, which sits it underneath Westminister.  Obviously, the catchment area for an event in central London is far beyond a local youth offer (could even extend to people from Manchester!) – so this starts an interesting issue as to where these activities “sit”.

Going away

Over the summer holidays, the Youth Hostel Association will be running a series of adventure camps for young people – called Doit4Real.  The very nature of these activities mean that those attending will not always live in the areas adjacent to the camps – so how would we promote these to “local” young people?

A festival of activities

Festivals

Coming up in October and November (phew!) will be the Juice Festival, NewcastleGateshead’s Festival for Children and Young People.  We’d imagine the programme and activities will be exciting and diverse, meaning that people would want to travel in from further afield – especially given the excellent Metro system locally.  So – where would the activities best sit from this?

Gone Fishing

At Substance, we also have  a major project researching into the social and community benefits of Angling.  Again, this “pasttime” is not always something that is organised within a local authority area..

How far is local?

Whilst we can most probably see some solutions at the presentation level for these issues – adverts, buttons, Facebook Fan Pages, widgets, etc – our interest is more around the relationship these activities have with the local.  Of course, this is then tied to issues such as transport, travel and resources – but the question remains “how far is your local youth offer stretching?“

Aiming High with Social Media

The DCSF has just published two guides and a set of videos on using social media to promote positive activities. This is great encouragement from DCSF for authorities to take a social media approach to promoting positive activities.

Enabling the direct feed of positive activity information in social media spaces has long been one of the advantages of Plings (and you can find mention of Plings in the guide) – as the output API enables a whole host of approaches, from the Application-based Bordometer, to automated widgets and feeds of event listings to Facebook pages.

Here’s how the DCSF ‘Social Media Explained’ guide introduces itself:

Social media is here to stay and it is changing the way millions of people communicate.

If you have not yet joined Facebook or Twitter, or watched YouTube, you may well wonder what it is all about.

But for most young people using social media is second nature, so as professionals at the heart of youth engagement,

it is important to understand it and be part of it.

With this in mind, this guide is specifically for you, youth project managers, with the following aims:

• To explain social media technologies and functions using simple language.
• To provide you with the tools to increase interest and attendance at your project by working with young people and promoting your activities through social media.

The Social Media Explained guide is also accompanied by some old-school guidance on creating videos for the web, and a series of video clips that outline ways of creating a high-quality video clip about a youth project. Of course, as well as carefully planned video clips, ‘quick clips’ created and shared online (with the appropriate consent and attention paid to making sure they are shared safely) can help promote activities – and so we’re hard a work right now on identifying how the ‘PlingBack’ framework in development can build links between multi-media and Plings records, building on the photo-links recently added to the national Plings.net.

For more on using social media in youth engagement, you can also check out the developing online ‘Youth Engagement and Social Media’ guide and the Youth Work Online community, and if you’re already using social media in promoting your positive activities, then do drop in a quick comment on this blog post to let us know what you’re trying and what you’ve been learning from the process…

Linking Plings and PKHD

Just before Christmas, Pete Nickless of 1up design combed through the data available in the Parent Know How Database (PKHD) and compared it to the data available in Plings. Pete was searching for positive activities contained within the broader PKHD data. And there were some to be found. As Plings.net moves to provide a national service, being able to draw on the data within PKHD and to turn descriptions of provisions into real activity records, could turn out to extent the information we can offer to young people.

You can read Pete’s full feasibility study here (PDF). As you will see, whilst there is positive activity data to be found in PKHD, it’s not always in standard formats, nor is there a uniform amount of information available across the country. However, being able to find perhaps 50 key positive activities for a local authority are is better than nothing, and provides a start to a broader Plings service.

So, Pete and his team are hard at work now building a prototype tool to integrate PKHD data with Plings in some of the Plings pilot local authority areas, to evaluate in practice the possibility to linking the two systems.

Making the links, however, does raise a number of key issues:

• PKHD describes providers and their services, Plings describes activity instances. The prototype import system uses a complex mix of regular expressions to try and locate activity, date and time information on the free-text activity descriptions of PKHD.

  Because different system suppliers offer different interfaces for uploading information to PKHD, and because local authorities collect information in different ways, accomodating all the different ways information is expressed can be a challenge.

• When we turn a description like ‘Badmington every Friday at 5pm’ into instance data (i.e. a set of entries on the calendar), how far ahead in the future should we project the activity? We’ll be checking PKHD every day for updates – but if we only project forward one week, people browsing for things to do in a couple of weeks time will miss out on discovering an activity that is very probably taking place.

  And what should we do about holidays? If a record doesn’t specify – how do we work out whether to display it during school holidays or not?

• How do we handle assertions about the safety and security of an activity. Right now, Plings activities come from trusted local authority partners, and we link activities back to those partners. However, with activities coming from a wide range of sources, and with PKHD containing basic information about the extent to which the authorities responsible for services have checked the information is correct, we need to think about how to carry over these indicators or ‘trust’ and ‘assurance’ into Plings.

If you’ve been exploring any of these issues in your own work with PKHD or other systems – then we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch via the comments below…

Plings.net going national

We’ve got a big vision for Plings. We want any young person in the country to be able to easily answer the questions: “What’s on for me? What activities can I get involved in and how?”. We also want to pose a question to activity providers: “How can you help develop the talent and potential of young people who show an interest in the activities you are organising”. We hope the new look and feel begin to convey this message.

With the launch of a new Plings.net website this week, we’re a step closer to that vision – though there is still a long way to go.

When we started building the Plings positive activity information platform over two years ago, there were many areas where the data and information on activities existed only in peoples heads or locked up in printed flyers, and at best, in spreadsheets on someones hard-disk. Now, for many of the 20 local authorities we’ve been working with as part of the DSCF funded Information & Signposting Project, much of the information on positive activities for those areas is available through our output API ready to be syndicated to local and national websites, and used in any number of widgets and tools. Whilst we’ve brought activity information together in one central place, Plings is very much about supporting local information providers to develop new ways of collecting, sharing and amplifying positive activity information – and we continue to encourage local websites to make use of the data feeds of positive activities we provide.

Our vision though, is bigger than providing information in just 20 local areas, and so the new Plings.net website provides a space for young people from any area of the country to take the first step on a journey to finding positive activities where they live. Right now, if we’ve not got information for a local area, we try to signpost young people to the local youth websites that we’ve found and categorised. We’re also working with 1Up Design to identify activity information that has been added to the national PKHD directory, and to use that to start gradually improving the coverage of Plings positive activity information across the whole of the country (more on that soon…).

As we continually improve both our list of local website links (all suggestions always welcome), and, more importantly, the data held on local activity provision, Plings.net becomes a key launchpad for any young person wanting to explore their interests, or get involved in something new. But Plings has never just been about a website – it also increases the availability of data in our Output API for anyone to use and innovate with – presenting ever-more-ingenious ways of encouraging young people to find and engage in positive activities.

So, as, over the coming months, we transition from Plings.net as a pilot in 20 local areas, to a Plings.net that can serve young people anywhere in the country, we hope you’ll continue to share your feedback and ideas with us – and to join us on the ongoing journey..

Putting the Pictures in Plings

A picture is worth a thousand words. Seeing is believing. Image matters.

For a while we’ve been wanting to find ways to add more visual appeal to individual Plings listings. We think that having a photo next to each activity listing could make a difference when it comes to young people discovering, becoming interested in, and hopefully getting involved in, new activities.

The main Plings website has had the option of attaching images to activities by way of a Flickr Machine Tag for a while now, but of course, images on an activity-by-activity basis are, at the moment, few and far between. So, for the launch of the new Plings.net, Ben Webb took up the challenge of creating a simple mechanism for attaching ‘generic’ images to activities based on their tags.

Challenge 1: Finding images to use

Gathering images of every possible activity in Plings is a big task. We needed a solution that allows us to incrementally build up a collection of images. And we need images that we have permission to use (no copyright restricted images!). Fortunately, many of the images on the photo sharing website Flickr have been uploaded under Creative Commons licenses that give permission for their re-use.

Challenge 2: Collecting the images

Once we found images on Flickr that could be used against types of activities (e.g. Football, Canoeing etc.) we needed a way to tag them as such. Flickr doesn’t offer an easy way to tag other people’s Creative Commons photos in the way we needed, so, we turned to trusty social bookmarking service Delicious.

Using delicious we can bookmark the pages that contain photos on Flickr, and can add our own category tags to our bookmarks – choosing tags that match the tags which activities are given.

Challenge 3: Displaying the images

Fortunately both Flickr and Delicious have useful APIs that we can use to get information back from them. So, whenever an activity page on Plings.net is visited, Ben’s scripts looks at the categories assigned to the activity, and  checks to see if any photos have been tagged on the Plings delicious account with these activity categories/tags. If so, by looking at the URL of the tagged page, and extracting the Flickr Photo ID, the script can fetch information about the photos referenced, checking that they are licensed in ways that allow us to re-use them, and then displaying them on the activity page.

If there is suitable machine tagged photo on Flickr for this specific activity, then that takes precedence over the general images.

If no photos are found, then a collection of general placeholder images are used to make sure that pages don’t end up looking dull.

A distributed – re-usable system

Both the bookmarks, and photos are public online resources – and so this solution could be used by anyone else providing information on positive activities.

If you’re interested in the code we’ve used, just get in touch. We’ll also be thinking about how we might add images more directly to the Plings data feeds in future – and welcome and thoughts and reflections on that.

#uksnow – is the youth club open?

As the snow hit last Tuesday I spent quite a while – as I’m sure many other people did – trying to find out if our school would be open or closed. The school landline was engaged, the city council website wasn’t updated and so it was left to huddle round the radio, tuning into the growing list of school closures that were being read out. Both BBC Radio Manchester and Key 103 did a fine job in keeping this service going, quickly publishing the names of schools on their websites.

With the heavy snowfall it was probably obvious that any out-of-school activities and venues would be closed, but how would we know? Probably more tricky would be the status of these activities as the snow starts to shift and melt. Whilst the airwaves are open for alerting people about important closure to schools or postponements of football matches (which I had a ticket for!), it is the community-based events that Plings collects that become the focus.

Obviously heavy snow, burst pipes and icy roads are not a new phenomenon, and so I’m sure word-of-mouth and common sense would have prevailed in many cases – just as it would have done in the pre-internet age. The slight issue we have now, however, is that in the commitment to publish information, we are also leaving it there for people to find. At face value, the youth club may still be open. When you have online information, it’s important to make it updated and current online information.

A couple of examples have helped:

- Our friends at Primary Technology utilised Voice-over-IP technology (VoIP), whereby schools could request a phone call, to then inform a database that the school was closed. This happens very quickly and easily and as the call is from system to the phone number on file, it is verified but also requires less human intervention. VoIP could be a cheap and scalable technology through which to do this.

- Oxfordshire youth service informed me that young people were using Facebook to track, monitor and share the status of the youth club openings. This doesn’t necessarily come with the verification of the previous example, but does illustrate that the word-of-mouth method is also shifting to other spaces

As we move to publish more and more data, this aspect of editing and updating particular instances will become more interesting and of need. Whilst the snow is an obvious example, there will be many other examples. We will continue this theme through the blog over coming months…

Finally – any ideas on how snowman building can be a positive activity? I spotted this one whilst out and about – there are some fine snow sculpting skills out there!

Getting better data with Tag-It

The Tag-It Tool Version 1

What do you do when you have information about 100s of activities, and you need to categorise them all, but your current database won’t let you add new fields and information? Even if your database will let you add new categories to your data, going in and editing every single record can be a time consuming job.

That’s why we’ve recently re-purposed a tool we built as a pilot for the 2morro festival in the Summer to provide an easy way for users of Plings to add tags and categories to all their data.

Tag-It works by picking out unique activities, and providing users with a simple interface for adding keyword tags, and selecting from pre-defined categories that activities should fall into.

If tag-it detects that an activity is repeated, then instead of having to tag each instance of the activity, Tag-It applies the new categories to every activity in the series, and all the updated tags and categories are soon available through the Plings Output API

We’ll be rolling out the Tag It tool to partners in the Plings pilot soon – and making good use of it when it comes to categorising data ready for returns to the DCSF…(more on that soon…). Get in touch with the team to find out more about how you can make use of Tag-It locally.

R U Bothered about Plings?

Here at Blackpool we have been very busy over the past two months redesigning our youth offer website (www.rubothered.co.uk). We had some tense moments on December the 1st when we flicked the switch and the new site went live, thankfully everything went fairly smoothly! Over the years rubothered has gone from strength to strength, what started off a small website by our local youth council has now grown to be the leading young peoples website in the area!

When we were redesigning the site we decided that we were going to put a much bigger focus into what we were previously calling our “What’s On Guide”, we renamed this to Things 2 Do and have now centred the new look site around activities. On nearly every page of the site young people can see (at the very least) activities that are happening in Blackpool today!

How it Works

rubothered uses our Plings input tool (codenamed “plingput”) to add information to our activity database and in turn this feeds in Plings through the input API.

plingput is staffed by our team of administrators at Blackpool Young People Services who input activity data on behalf of our youth workers. As well as this we have a limited number of partner organisations providing data including Sport Blackpool and Aztex Theatre School.

What’s Next?

The next stage in the evolution of rubothered is going to be the ability for young people using the site to discuss and evaluate the news items, venues, services and activities we have listed. We are planning to use a commenting platform (either Disqus or Echo) which integrates with Facebook & Twitter logins to try and get maximum uptake by not forcing young people to register for yet another account.

We have already started getting lots of feedback on the new look of the site with people using the words professional, outstanding and brilliant which is always nice to hear!

Linking up – learning from the Data Quality Working Group

The first meeting of the Plings/PKHD Data Quality Working Group took place last Thursday – exploring the opportunities to share learning and data between these two local data projects.

The results of a survey carried out across the local authorities involved in the Plings project highlighted that the teams responsible for collecting and publishing information on positive activities are mostly working separately and independently of the Family Information Service (FIS) staff who are responsible for much of the content in the Parent Know How Directory (PKHD). However the face-to-face meeting last week demonstrated that there are many opportunities for collaboration and building links between the two projects.

Linking agendas to get prioritised

Plings is, in the scheme of things, a small budget research project. Some members of the Data Quality Working Group have found that, compared to PKHD, with it’s top-down mandate, and funding to support local authorities to adapt to it, it can be harder to secure management support for work on Plings and promoting positive activities to young people.

By finding the links between positive activity information and PKHD, there are opportunities to benefit both projects – and secure increased support for positive activity information work.

Linking learning

One of the big challenges both Plings and PKHD have been exploring is ensuring data quality. There is a balance to strike between only having information in a database when it has been quality assured, complies with quality standards, and is complete information (which would dramatically cut the amount of information that could be added to the database), and putting all information into a database regardless of whether it can be checked out easily or not – and publishing it with caveats explaining to the end-user how they can verify the information.

This challenge becomes particularly acute when sharing information between local authorities – where different policies to govern how information is collected and added to the database may be in operation.

In the PKHD project, a simple field to explain what standards have been applied in the collection and publishing of data by any LA has been used – so policies and processes can differ across authorities – but end users have basic information on how to respond to the data they are given.

Through the Data Quality Working Group, members were able to discuss learning from Family Information Services about putting in place processes and procedures to ensure the quality of data – and were able to discuss the sorts of standards that would be necessary to allow data from Plings and PKHD to be easily exchanged.

Linking locally and nationally

The sorts of information the PKHD may hold for parents, and that Plings contains for young people, can often overlap. It makes sense then, to explore how there could be integration between the two systems to prevent double-entry of information.

Integration can happen at different levels – and between now and the next Data Quality Working Group meeting the team will be researching into the various possibilities more.

Integration could be at a national level – with data from PKHD and Plings swapped by the central platforms. This would require the data fields from the two systems to easily map onto one another.

Or integration could take place locally – with authorities adopting a single local system to feed both platforms. This would require thought about where the responsibilities to manage data fell in the local authority.

Keeping the focus

Thinking of integration raises a number of further challenges that the Working Group will be exploring. PKHD is a directory for parents. Plings is focussed on information for young people. Careful thought needs to go into the right places to integrate, and the right places to let each dataset retain it’s own distinctive content and style.

More to come

The Data Quality Working Group will be meeting again in January and we’ll have more on the blog soon after they meet…

Barncroft, Battins & Bondfields

What have Barncroft, Battins & Bondfields all got in common?

Turns out they are all local authority wards near where I used to live in Havant Borough. But I never knew that.

One of the main ways to get information out of the Plings API is via Ward (we’ve got a list of all the wards here), and organising data by ward turns out to be pretty useful when you want to show councillors what activities there are for young people in their patch.

But, talk to most young people about the ward they live in, or where the ward boundaries are, and you’re pretty likely to get a blank look. In fact, talk to most adults and you are met with the same blank look. (If you’re amongst those wondering which Ward they are in, entering your postcode at WriteToThem.com is one way to find out).

So, Wards are useful, but we’re discovering they may not be the best tool to offer young people to help them browse for local positive activities.

With the promise of more open data from central government, including the National Transport Access Node database (read: where the bus stops all are), the EduBase list of schools now available as linked open data, and with more easily accessible information from Ordinance Survey on the borders, sub-units and overlapping geographical areas of any point, 2010 looks set to bring new possibilities for how we could allow young people to navigate local activity information.

What categories do you use to help young people find activities near them?