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?“

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!

Find something to do this summer

Our tagging team have been at it again – finding and linking to websites with details of the Youth Offer for young people in the 2009 Summer Holidays.

Whilst we’ve got thousands of activities for the summer available at PlacesToGoThingsToDo.co.uk, we’ve only got 22 local authorities covered by Plings right now. So – if you’re looking to find what your local area is putting on as part of the Youth Offer this summer, take a look at our list of links at http://youthoffer.plings.net/summer09/

P.S. Don’t forget that that http://youthoffer.plings.net/ you can also find a general list of all the websites we’ve found with year-round Youth Offer information on them…

The library of youth offers

I was interested, and shocked, to see a recent news item around the planned closure of several school libraries, with the subsequent dismissal of the school librarians.  I suppose that this could be represented in a new world vs old world paradigm – in this information age of computers, internet and ubiquitous information access, what is the need to buy physical books for actual shelves – can’t it all be downloaded?

The path that wasn't built

But hang on.  Let’s think about the role of the library, and the librarian, in the process of information management for young people. It can be argued, that in this age of information overload, we need people to be able to signpost, validate, annotate and curate information resources?  By this I don’t particularly mean a walled garden, where librarians spend their day checking Wikipedia entries and running content proxy filters, but rather the skills held by librarians in information management are most vital to anyone growing and learning in the 2.0 world.

But perhaps this needs a new twist.  David Weinberger highlights the limitations of library cataloguing systems in Everything is Miscellaneous, which included the extent to which the Dewey Decimal System was becoming stretched to the limits.  Instead, the unstructured and evolving world of tags and folksominies can help us to organise and access information.  The power of the net, enables us to aggregate and make sense of this local information management.  Less control, equals more order.

Links tagged as "youth-offer" on Delicious

With these discussions in mind I took another look at the various website we had tagged in the social bookmarking tool Delicious.  As we found a site that aimed to publish Places to Go and Things to Do for young people, we added the tag “youth-offer” so that we could easily group them together, and of course share them.  The challenge was then to look at how we could start to take this data in Delicious, to represent it in ways that could engage people, and provide a platform for new links and collaboration.

We found inspiration in the Digitalgovuk site built Steph Gray and the social media team at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), who helped out by sharing the code.

The youth offer library

So – with some teaks (and a couple more to come) we now have our own library of Youth Offers.  Whilst so far we have collected and currated the links in this site ourselves, anyone can add a new resource, through tagging a site “youth-offer” in their delicious account (we will of course keep an eye on things!).  Equally, we used just two additional tags in delicious:

“youth-offer, “name of local authority”, “name of region”

Which enables us to group youth-offers by region in the tag cloud.  Of course, we can start to expand upon the tags and tag clouds as more people add information….

Let’s learn from libraries, instead of shutting them down. As the song goes, “Libraries gave us power” …