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Comment by David Baker on November 21, 2008 at 12:14pm

Faontastic work Kate and thanks for sharing this warts n all :O)
It is a great way to interact with young people and to stimulate their interest. At the moment Hertfrodshire have set up a youth portal called Channel MOGO This interactive site offers vidcasts, mp3 downloads, competitions and all the latest information about what’s on and where to go in Herts and also a links to information for young people. It does have potential IF young people start to use the site. It is being promoted a lot at the moment but I will see how it developes and keep people posted as to how this is going if they would find it interesting.

Comment by Michael Logan on October 30, 2008 at 1:24pm

Charlie - hi I'm from Belfsat and we have been looking at a number of ways of engaging and providing young people with information about the services we provide through the internet.

We have looked at websites but these take up too much of youthworkers time in adding and removing information.

Then we looked at and set up a bebo site this worked well for a while but then we felt it got away from us in the way young people were chatting and posting information, pictures etc, so we closed this site.

Lastly we took a strong look at sns and the ning.com site, after much discussion within the centre between staff, parents and young people we have now set up our own site where young people can use to chat and engage with other young people from the centre as we found many of them were sitting on their own bebo sites chatting to other young people from the centre and local area, through the ning.com site we are in a position to monitor new members as we only accept members from our youth projects and admin staff need to approve comments before they appear on line.

We use the site to promote the different services we provide from event, programmes, meetings to issues raised by the young people through blogs, discussion, and comments, to date we have had no problems with negative comments, offensive material to other members as we know all those young people on the site. We do how ever allow other centres to view the front page of our site but they are not permitted to post comments - through this way we are still able to promote and access a wider range of groups and young people but are able to safe guard our own members and site.

To get the site up and running at the start we gave all young people 13 years and over within the centre a permission slip requesting permission from parents for their child to use the site and provided them with an overview of the format of our site and the content we were going to provide.

From this we were able to build a base of young people to work from, on our site we have included groups within the centre like Dance, Drumming, Football, Staff, Girls Group where those young people who were already involve within the centre in these groups were able to join - and chat and find info on up and coming events programmed for these groups, thus resulting in a space for them to provide feedback to others on what they were doing, we have used this as an evaluation toolin helping to chage or improve our programmes.


I would say give it a go if it does not work for you then its just a click away from closing the site.

Good luck
Michael.....

Comment by Terry Husher on October 15, 2008 at 10:03am

Nice One Katie, Thank you

Comment by Katie Bacon on October 13, 2008 at 1:17pm

Good call - just uploaded the film clip.

Comment by Terry Husher on October 10, 2008 at 4:20pm

HI Katie

Is there any cahnce you could get the video of your chief exec doing his stuff hosted on here. I have seen it on Facebook and shown it to our head of service who got really excited about it. He would love to show it to our chief exec but he is unable to access facebook from any of the town hall/ office based computers.
Cheers

Terry

Comment by Charlie Bluglass on October 7, 2008 at 1:14pm

Hi Katie,
it was really useful to hear about your experiences of setting up a Bebo to support your Youth Council in Devon.
I thought it was great the way you used the challenge as an opportunity for young people's engagement, and a useful object lesson on the risks. We would have been in deep water even going near Bebo in Lancashire - see my profile for the advice we have been given for starting up a blog.
Its great that the negatives got turned round.

I still think SNS could be useful, but we have some way to go before we could set one up.


Any feedback on blogs, SNS etc very welcome.

Comment by Jon Jolly on September 30, 2008 at 1:15pm

Thanks for this Katie, I've embedded it into a blog post on my site here

Comment by Tim Davies on September 30, 2008 at 9:44am

This is absolutely fantastic :)

We definitely need to get the group blog set up to feature great clips like this...