Exploring youth engagement in a digital age

Journey into Online Youth Participation

In the beginning some of our projects were utilising Facebook and myspace etc to keep in contact with children and young people connected to that project however this was
uncontrolled and poorly managed or understood and unsurprisingly this
led to problems. Thus all such activity was banned until proper
procedures, policies and protocols were put in place. When I was hired
as Participation Worker this was something I was keen to put back into
place as well as having a blog targeted at staff discussing
participation.

I have just attended Katie Bacon's OCN accredited training course Social Media and Social Networking course which was both fascinating and
inspiring. Since I have been given the organisational lead on building
Spurgeons' Facebook presence,
developing the appropriate policies and protocols and running a pilot
project. It promises to be an interesting and eventful journey and
hopefully by discussing my progress others can learn and avoid mistakes.

I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I'm sure I will.

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Comment by Suze Youde on May 6, 2010 at 11:09: Really looking forward to attending Katie's next course and to reading updates as your project develops - there are more than a few parallels with work I'm trying to put in place so it'll be interesting to share the learning!

Comment by Siumee Keelan on May 11, 2010 at 15:23: I am trying to collate samples of guidelines that local authorities are using. I manage the Ealing young people website www.youngealing.co.uk and we are looking at using SNS to communicate with our young people. However prior to using this on a mass scale, we need to establish some guidelines to our youth workers. Any help with a sample?

Comment by Vanessa Griffin on May 11, 2010 at 15:38: Actually yes. I have something that Katie gave me and also something that I have been working on based on this. Ill send you them in an email.

Comment by Tim Davies on May 11, 2010 at 22:00: Hello Siumee, Welcome to Youth Work Online.

This thread has some useful bits of policy discussion: http://network.youthworkonline.org.uk/forum/topics/post-your-policies

Please do create a blog post to share any policies you find or ideas you come across - as this is a common question here on the network...

Comment by Vanessa Griffin on May 12, 2010 at 8:57: None of our policies are confirmed yet. I am willing to share some of the things that I have worked on but would wish to point out that have not been approved and therefore cannot be affiliated with my organisation.

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