YouthNet blog
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Thursday Oct 26, 2006
YouthNet's volunteer recognition party
YouthNet held its first official party especially for all our volunteers last week. In our eleven years as a charity, we've been fortunate to have many fantastic volunteers in both office-based and online capacities. Volunteers have contributed in a variety of roles, including online peer advisors to askTheSite, moderators on our busy discussion boards, online proofreaders to ensure our partners' volunteering opportunities are clear and engaging on do-it.org.uk, bloggers telling the world about their volunteering experiences, and a busy group of people helping in our office in our editorial, partnerships and fundraising team
s. Young people are also active on advisory groups, such as that collaborating with, advocating for and giving buzz to our Respect? campaign.
Both current and formerly active volunteers were invited first to our office in Islington,
All in all, it was a great evening! We'd like to say a big thanks to all of our volunteers. And, hope to see many of you at our next party – we'll keep you all posted.
If you'd like to check out YouthNet's current volunteering opportunities, chec
k out our Volunteer for YouthNet page. Or, of course, there's a whole range of opps waiting for you at do-it.org.uk!
Wednesday Oct 25, 2006
The cost of safeguarding
A slightly surprising group of people, ranging from former OFSTED chief Chris Woodhead to children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball, have written a letter to the Times to protest against the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill.
The Bill provides for a central vetting process built on the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), with a new independent statutory Board which will take decisions on including someone on the barred list where evidence suggests that they present a risk of harm to children or vulnerable adults.
The worry for The Times letter signatories is that while it will do little to protect children, it will be another layer of bureaucracy to deter volunteers. In The Guardian, Marcel Berlins takes up the argument.
If the bill becomes law, I predict that the flow of good-hearted adult volunteers deciding to withdraw their time and effort will become a torrent - not because they have anything shameful or criminal to hide, but because getting vetted is an imposition too far, and an insult to those who, for years, have been gladly trying to improve the quality of children's lives. The result will be fewer sports, fewer youth groups, fewer outings, less tuition in things such as art and drama - all of which depend on a constant supply of eager volunteers.
It’s not entirely clear how the vetting process will differ from the current CRB checks. But the new body that the Bill seeks to create, the Independent Barring Board (IBB), certainly sounds like something George Orwell might have created. And there will be a new duty on organisations must report people to the IBB if they fail the “harm test” – i.e. that they might harm vulnerable children or adults.
Quite what the appeals process will be, I’m not sure. Could someone (volunteer or employee) be accused of some malpractice and reported to the IBB without their knowledge or the right to appeal? At least the CRB checks deal with actual convictions.
Naturally the children’s charities are in favour (the NSPCC calls it “significant step forward in ensuring that children are protected from people who may pose a risk to them”) but is legislation of this sort really the best way to deal with risk?
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:03 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Thursday Oct 19, 2006
Podcast listening makes me lonely
Podcasts, along with blogs, social networking, wikis and video sharing, are seen as key developments of the new, fancy Web 2.0 approach to the web.An ethos of all these services is one of user participation, a DIY system where users can easily become creators. Another binding factor is that of multiple niches; that no matter what you're interested in, you'll find content around that interest - and other people interested in it too (ala the Long Tail).
Now, I love podcasting. There's a bunch of audio shows that I download every week, copy on to my MP3 player and listen to on the bus on the way home from work. But I do have one big problem with it. Instead of being a connecting thing, where you meet others with mutual interests it instead feels like a totally solitary experience.
No one I know (in the real world) listens to the shows I do. Fragmentation and personalisation means that we all stick to our own interests and there's no chance for water cooler conversations.
Each week, I listen to s US tech show called This Week in Tech. Not even the techies in my office would listen to this as the angle of the show is more about the business of IT than IT itself. It is also Very, Very American, something many Brits can't acquire a taste for.
I also listen to a couple of podcasts from my home country New Zealand, and there aren't many people in London who would choose to do that. And I look out for NBA podcasts, particularly if they're talking about the Houston Rockets. Yup, that's niche listening and unsurprisngly, no one in my offline networks remotely cares about Yao Ming, Tracy McGrady and co.
But I'm missing the point, I hear you say. The internet also enables me to go online to talk about these shows and the issues they bring up. True, but I just don't get round to it. Podcast-capturing software means you don't even have to visit the sites where the communities are; the software just pulls the files down automatically so I have no reason to visit the online homes of This Week in Tech or bFM. And even when I have, you come across frightening reminders that user-gnerated content isn't always the most readable content. Also, just because me and a Texan 16 year old both follow the Rockets, it doesn't mean I want to be his friend. Which is probably a good thing, right?
I'm not necessarily pining for the old days of three TV channels and everyone listening to the chart show on Radio 1, but there's something great about sharing media experiences with colleagues and friends - something I'm not currently getting with podcasts. Posted by Dom Waghorn ( 3:17 PM ) Link to this post Comments[3]
TheSite.org Community redesign
If you haven't seen the redesigned Community section on TheSite.org (YouthNet's information and advice website for young people) yet, then take a look.
I've had no involvement in the project myself so feel (just about) neutral enough to say what a great job has been done. There's a massive amount of information to organise but it also needs to feel alive – much of the content, after all, is user-generated. I think the balance in this design is pretty much spot on.
It got me thinking about the impact of MySpace on web design, especially for young people. They've taken customisation to the point where usability suffers badly, but it doesn't seem to matter:
As Business Week has noted, MySpace has created design anarchy that works:
User pages on MySpace can look truly hideous (and many, many of them do), but the site's operators aren't trying to help users make their pages look better. If they were, they might offer some pre-built page design templates or color schemes, or even constrain the design choices users have.
Instead, the system allows users to do almost anything to the look of their pages, whether it's a good idea or not. Regardless of its aesthetic consequences, this customizability is one of the site's most attractive features, and the do-it-yourself sensibility of the site resonates with the audience's desire for self-expression.
It would be a foolish web designer that simply tried to mimic MySpace users' page designs, however. You can't fake the youth-look. On MySpace, as on TheSite.org's Community pages, the design works because the users really are in control.
Posted by Tom Green ( 11:15 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Tuesday Oct 17, 2006
What the well-dressed young person is wearing today
According to The Daily Mail this is a new gadget from Toshiba "that enables the wearer to experience a full 360-degree view on a 40 centimetre dome-shaped screen."
The Guardian's Jack Schofield is not convinced.
Exactly how do they think you can see a 360 degree display? At best, given a dome-shaped fish-eye screen, you might see 180 degrees or even more, but most of us don't have eyes in the backs of our heads. (Projecting a real 360 degree display from a point source is a bit tricky, especially if there's a human head in the way, but so is making spherical LCD screens.)
Let's hope he's right. Here at YouthNet we're only just getting to grips with putting our websites on mobile phones. Making them visible through 360 degrees might take a little work.
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:21 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Thursday Oct 12, 2006
Risky business
On The Safe Side (.pdf file), a timely report by Kathy Gaskin from Volunteering England (VE) into risk, risk management and volunteering, managed to make it to the headlines of The Today programme on Radio 4 yesterday morning. Few will argue with the main conclusion:
There are widespread concerns that the sector is bogged down in bureaucracy and that measures are not proportionate to the level of risk. Organisations say that there is no flexibility in the system and that it is not an evidence-based system. People are becoming less willing to volunteer and expose themselves to risk, and are being deterred by risk management procedures and responsibility. There are serious anxieties about the future of volunteer involvement if strictures become increasingly rigid and volunteer roles continue to narrow. While accepting that old-style volunteering may be a thing of the past, there is real concern that applying to be a volunteer is becoming like job recruitment and the instinct to help out will be stifled by precaution and paperwork.
The only real solution is the application of common sense. Over-zealous risk aversion must be challenged. Excessive bureaucracy resisted. A new risk management tool kit (.pdf file) from VE should help. And they've set up a blog to discuss the subject.
Ultimately, as Kathy Gaskin says:
The overall assessment of the state of risk and risk management in volunteering in England is that there is concern but not a crisis. But there may be one if the drift to risk aversion continues. We need to carry out a risk assessment of risk management itself and decide which is the bigger risk.
Posted by Tom Green ( 9:45 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Monday Oct 09, 2006
Google and YouTube to own the world
Moments ago Google announced that they were buying YouTube for US$1.6 billion in stock. It's quite incredible how YouTube in little over a year has become the hottest thing on the internet. In Saturday's (paper) copy of the Guardian I counted four articles that mentioned the video-sharing site.
But is anyone that interested? Does this news really matter to the people who don't obsess about blogs, podcasts and the long tail business models (and if this research is right, then that's almost everyone)?
Well yes, it does matter. Just because people don't know what podcasts are, it doesn't mean that radio people aren't running scared. Or that video sharing isn't making TV broadcasters gulp with fear. Or that anyone who is involved in top down, non-digital media isn't thinking about their careers.But this is just an issue fo media-folk, right? Wrong. Anyone who wants to get messages out needs to understand how and where people are moving (or in some cases, moved). This is a big thing for charities and non-profits too. I spent last Thursday with a bunch of people at NCVO looking at social networking and how charities might benefit (or at least cope) with the new, distributed, peer-to-peer world. The key point for me was that the opportunities are massive for charities willing to dive on in.
And if they don't, others will. The US government is already posting just-say-no drug videos on YouTube. The enemy has struck first; now it's time to respond. ;-) Posted by Dom Waghorn ( 9:06 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
Tuesday Oct 03, 2006
Mini-food
At the risk of taking more abuse, one of the things that I do like about a voluntary sector conference (or, more likely, a reception) are mini-food canapés. Normally the best you can hope for are chicken goujons but every now and again the catering comes good. I can remember clearly the first time I had mini fish and chips. And mini lemon meringue pies were one of the highlights of my working life.
The mini-food bar has now been raised, however, by this beautifully crafted mini fast food meal. Cute!
(Thans to Tracey for the link.)
Posted by Tom Green ( 3:53 PM ) Link to this post Comments[0]
