Events

UK Youth Online

Tim Davies has blogged again about UK Youth Online, the barcamp he is arranging for somewhere in London on 17 May. It reminded me that I have totally failed to post about it yet.

What’s it all about? Well, according to the rather lovely invite Tim has designed:

We are a collection of youth workers, participation workers, youth website managers,  innovators, technology developers, optimists, open minded sceptics, young people,  consultants, practitioners, managers, and many more things.

  • Between us we are interested in topics that include:
  • Online information services for young people
  • Supporting young people’s online interaction and activity
  • Researching young people and the internet/blogging/social networking etc.
  • Developing online tools and platforms for young people
  • Exploring online technologies in education and participation
  • Young people’s civic engagement online
  • School councils, youth councils and local e-democracy
  • On-line video and web radio

And we’re coming together on 17th May 2008 in London for a BarCamp – and informal conference where we set the agenda on the day and have creative, constructive and dynamic demonstrations, discussions and knowledge sharing.

Sounds good to me. I will certainly be popping along, and I would encourage everyone that reads this blog to do so as well. you can sign up using Tim’s nifty Google Docs / Pageflakes mashup wotsit at http://ukyouthonline.org.

Oh, and if anyone knows of a venue, do let Tim know. Thanks.

Tuttling

I attended my first Tuttle Club on Friday morning, and it was well worth having a day off work and the train fare down to London, not least because I got to meet Neville Hobson in person, finally, after several years on chatting online. We spent a happy time talking mobile devices, video, and Qik, with Tim Davies. Tim had some great thoughts on how this kind of content creation can be used to draw young people into greater levels of participation. It has its risks, of course, but potentially great benefits too.

There was also the chance to introduce myself to Josh March, and I am eternally grateful to him for not punching me 😉 Lloyd Davis was, as always, a great host and good conversational value. Even if the Tuttle Club develops no further, as a weekly gathering of like-minded folk it can’t be beaten, and he deserves our thanks for that. Hopefully, though, things will gain more momentum and it sounds like Lloyd has a number of volunteers ready for action. With Lloyd’s vision and the enthusiasm of this remarkable community, anything is possible.

Most of my time was spent with Tim and David Wilcox, talking through ideas around increasing participation and how roles, worldviews, platforms and processes can be developed. Here Comes Everybody was mentioned, of course, and the Shirky mantra of organising without organisations is becoming central to our thinking about issues. It’s a great concept because the online isn’t necessarily given priority and the blending of offline techniques with social media will probably produce the best results. Discussions around news and journalism were interesting, especially in the light of David rebranding himself as a ‘social reporter’.

The three of us then had a chat with some ladies from Qik, the live video streaming from your Nokia people. We had a great chat recorded onto Qik which I also recorded on my traditional camcorder. I’ll bung the results up on YouTube when I get the chance. Qik is an amazing service technologically, but it also has potentially huge ramifications for citizen journalism and the setting of the news agenda. Every person with a decent Nokia phone now has a TV studio in their pockets. Amazing. I’m sure I will be writing more on this in the near future.

Tuttle Club is fab, therefore, and I’m hoping to get back down there before too long.

Down in London tomorrow

Have taken the day off work for a trip to London tomorrow to visit Lloyd Davis‘ Tuttle Club, or London Social Media Cafe.

It’s going through an itinerant stage at the moment, finding a home wherever there are willing hosts and free wifi. You can find out more on the wiki – tomorrow’s meet is taking place at the Coach and Horses in Greek Street (should that be Geek Street?).

It should be great, a few of the folk from Saturday’s barcamp will be there, as well as Neville Hobson who I have communicated with on many occasions but never met. Looking forward to it.

Thoughts from barcampukgovweb

This is probably going to be the first post of many as I try and get my head around the barcamp, what it all meant, and what happens now. The latter is the most important, I feel.

The day went well, everyone got along famously and it was brilliant – and worth the train fare – just to meet some really cool people for the first time, like Jeremy Gould, Lloyd Davies, David Wilcox, Jenny Brown, Tim Davies, and (finally!) Simon Dickson – who is, as I expected, a real livewire and a truly top guy. I also got to catch up with Steve Dale – always a joy – and Nick Booth, who is planning the next meeting of the Birmingham Social Media Club, as I think it is now going to be called. What was interesting was that this group of folk got on very well, and a germ of an idea was floating about with regard to meeting up more regularly, working more collaboratively to try and push forward our shared agenda, which is to get the public sector using the web properly.

One thing I am pleased with is the Pageflakes page I put together, which seems to have done a good job of pulling together the outputs from the day – photos on flickr (this one is of Steve Dale talking CoPs), for example, and blog posts are popping up in the Google Blog Search and Technorati feeds. Cool. Perhaps this is the future of distributed online communities: use the tools you are comfortable with and build the community through common tags and RSS feeds. Why should I have to write a blog post about the barcamp, for example, on any platform other than my own blog? I don’t want or need another account, or site to maintain – just let me use the one I already have in a social way.

Two questions popped into my head during the day though. Neither were answered – which is perhaps not surprising and not necessarily a bad thing – but nor were they asked, which might be a bigger issue. Firstly: what’s the big idea? Where are we going with this? What do we want out of it? Secondly: what are we actually going to do?

There is talk of a new ‘Digital People’ project, involving those inside gov as well as those outside who have services and skills to offer, which may help to take the agenda forward. It should certainly cement the relationships which have begun to be built at the barcamp. But what’s the endgame here? What’s the point? Consultation is certainly a possibility, and perhaps political engagement too. But we need a clear idea of what we want to achieve before we can even begin to think about how that might happen.

Here are some posts I have spotted so far following the event: Tim Davies, Feargal Hogan… more to be added as they emerge.

Public Sector Social Media Meet

Members of the Community of Practice for Social Media and Online Collaboration are meeting up at the Learning and Skills Council National Office in Coventry on 26th February 2008 between 10am and 3.30pm for a day of Web 2.0 fun and frolics, including:

  • The benefits of using social media in the public sector, real life examples
  • Building social web sites: blogs, wikis, forums and social networks
  • Making social online video
  • Group discussions on where the potential is for social media to make a real difference and a "how do I?" : Matching tools to problems
  • Future developments of the CoP

If you aren’t already a member of the community and you feel it would be worthwhile attending please join us here and sign up on the wiki to say you’ll come.

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