YouthNet blog

YouthNet launches LifeSupport Appeal

Julie Reynolds — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:07:21 +0100

On WednesdayOctober 14, YouthNet launched its biggest ever fundraising and awareness-raising campaign, the LifeSupport Appeal.

The aim of the LifeSupport Appeal is to completely redevelop TheSite.org, allowing it to reach more young people with even better advice. We have big ambitions for the Appeal and want to raise £5mllion over three years to completely revolutionise our online support for young people.

Underpinning the Appeal is a fantastic piece of research commissioned by YouthNet and carried out by Professor Michael Hulme of Lancaster University. The report, Life Support: Young people's needs in a digital age, shows that young people now more than ever, lead hybrid lives and that the need help and advice online will be even greater for tomorrow's young people.

The Appeal got off to a great start at the House of Commons, where Right Hon. Tim Loughton MP, hosted an event for Professor Hulme to share his findings. This was then followed by a panel discussion with Professor Hulme, vlogger Charlie McDonnell and agony uncle Matt Whyman. The report and Charlie's description of how he interacts with the online world, sparked some interesting debate within the panel and the audience.

Matt and Charlie's presentations can be found on our YouTube channel.

We then had a less formal event in the evening which was held at London's Living Room, which is above Boris' office in City Hall! As the room filled up, despite a few technical hitches, everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. After Prof. Hulme's presentation, Hannah a 17 year-old TheSite.org user spoke incredibly movingly about how TheSite.org had helped her during some very troubled times in her life.

It seemed to sum up the reason why TheSite.org is so special when she said:

"If I hadn't used the internet when I was being bullied and had depression, I'm not sure I would have got through. I was too scared to speak to a parent or teacher because that would have meant repercussions, and I was worried about how they would react. Online nothing else can happen, you're making the first step."

The evening ended on a high note, when one of YouthNet's biggest supporters and founder member of our Development Group, John Donaldson, urged people to get involved.

To round off a fantastic day, the Media and PR team got some fantastic coverage of Professor Hulme's report and the Appeal in a range of media, such as BBC Online and Sky News.

Added to this, one of our key supporters, Yahoo! Answers, have not only given us a month's sponsorship package free of charge to raise the profile of the Appeal but Martin Clark, Community Manager has blogged about us on Yahoo Answers!

Find out more about the appeal.

Providing support out of context

Patrick Daniels — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:08:15 +0100

Over the years there's been a progressive trend towards valuing content over context in how we communicate as a society.

Ever since writing took over from our rich oral tradition, contextualised communication has been increasingly sidelined by the content of what we communicate.

The history of Christianity in Western society is a case in point where historically after the Reformation, debate turned on whether the content or the context of scripture was the right path to spiritual understanding.

Today, the focus on content is really a battle over how we communicate as a society. Is it better to keep our communication clear and singular in meaning? Or is it more accurate to accept that what we communicate is always multi-layered, nuanced and requires reading between the lines?

One way to understand the Enlightenment is as a movement that argued passionately for the former, while the fightback with the Romantics a century or so later, was a passionate defence of the latter.

Social web: where content is king

Many have remarked that the social web is simply a step on from broadcast or mass media, which was in turn a step on from the printing press. Each technological advance has added weight to the 'content camp', and detracted from the 'context camp' approach to understanding and successfully communicating together as a society.

With the dominance of content, the lack of context in communication is problematic to say the least. Again, a popular observation about the social web is that a key characteristic is the cross-cutting context in which much of the communication on it takes place. For example, a blog post can be written in a particular time, reacting to a particular stimulus and shaped by the author's particular mood of the moment. However, that blog post can be found by readers later on in very different times, places (thanks to searchability and durability of the web) and replicated within very different contexts. Web content loses it's context even quicker than other forms of modern communication.

Online support and advice where content is king, on the face of it, is even more problematic than just simply communicating a message.

Online support services: out of context

How do we understand content without the context of body language, vocal intonation, personal connection or understanding of the author's past history, personality and behaviour? Albert Mehrabian's much misunderstood observation on content and context is a great example. Mehrabian understood just how context (verbal and non-verbal cues) can be critical to understanding the content of our communication when we're expressing thoughts laden heavy with emotion and feeling. Surely this tendency of the social web to emphasise content over context, poses an enormous challenge to any online advice service seeking to support users emotional, as well as information needs.

For this reason online advice services must play to their strengths. Through our work on askTheSite on TheSite.org responding to questions posted by users in confidence online, it is clear that putting content before context can have its benefits.

Context can act as a barrier or cloud to understanding the content or heart of the matter. The style of delivery and the packaging of the message can distract, mislead or detract from an advisor's understanding of what the author of the content might intend to mean. Presented with just the content of the issues, with the context of the user's personal history, personality and rapport very definitely in the background, an advisor is in a better position to be able to respond to the user's issues and concerns at hand.

Secondly, enabling service users to concentrate on communicating content anonymously, can liberate them from the embarrassment and anxiety of the context they're in, that may have prevented them from talking in the round about the issues they face. Online support can offer the user the safety of anonymity and confidentiality that may help persuade users to speak up about issues affecting them that they may not have been able to share with anyone else. This makes online advice a vital plank in any strategy to improve the early intervention and support we can offer young people.

Interestingly, stripping out the context, removes most incentives for service users to 'test' the support service, posting joke, blank (silent) or hoax questions. The issue of test callers is a non-trivial matter for many telephone support services, where test callers can place a huge burden on scarce resource and capacity.

Contextual communication: making a comeback

Perhaps as the social web matures, so contextually-based communication is just starting to make a comeback. What to many is Twitter's banality, is misunderstood phatic communication putting the context before the content. Foursquare, on the other hand, is a reminder of the power of communication that comes with a built-in geolocational context.

For all these advances, it is worth noting how utterly dismal current software is at processing contextual information. Content is still king. You only have to look at how it's possible to build a multi-billion dollar business on keyword search of content to understand that. Given this current landscape, it's important that online advice and support services play to their strengths and understand their weaknesses in this content vs context battle going on around them.

Image courtesy of Weidmaier on Flickr

Partnerships Team Volunteering

Katie Jackson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:43:38 +0100

Culpeper farm – I thought we'd be feeding some pigs or goats or petting a nice donkey, but there was no way Dave, our chief organiser, was going to let us off that easily. We were in for a bit of a work out!

Just behind the massive Sainsbury's in Islington is a lovely little haven, away from the busy roads of London. Stuffed to the brim with rows of allotments, archways covered in greenery and even a little pond, Culpeper farm is a thriving community garden.

As Culpeper Farm is completely run by volunteers, it was the perfect place for the Partnerships Team to volunteer and do some team building too! We had no idea what to expect. Kate, the Volunteer Coordinator at the gardens instructed us to 'wear something that you wouldn't mind getting dirty' and for some reason I had images of us knee deep in mud! We were given the task of tidying the entrance to the garden which had been neglected for some time. Brambles and ivy had over taken the area, but fear not, we were here to help (after being given various sharp tool and saws!).

Under the guidance of our resident gardening expert Fiona, we filled about 6 bags of dead and over grown bushes - all sent to be recycled of course. Dave even got to show off his strength by ripping out a whole bush and re-locating it. Working as a team we managed to transform the whole front entrance. But the best bit was planting the bulbs in the freshly cleared ground. Hopefully by next spring when the flowers blossom we'll be able to see the results of what we did in just one afternoon.

Everyone loved the chance to be out of doors and it was great to feel like you had accomplished something together in just one afternoon. We want to say a huge thank you to Kate and Culpeper farm for a wonderful afternoon, and the much needed tea and cakes when we finished! If you don't do team volunteering at your work already – you're missing out! Click here to find out more about employee volunteering. Check out the amazing pictures on Flickr.

What's wrong with face-to-face?

Natasha Judd — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:41:29 +0100

So, YouthNet's launched a new report today: a study by Professor Michael Hulme into how young people communicate, interact and seek information online. It's a really interesting read, encompassing the results of quantitative online research undertaken with 994 young people by The Futures Company, quotes from young people, and comments on the implications for website design and development. It's also too much to cover in one blog entry. So I can only encourage you to go and read it yourself, blog about yourself, discuss the findings and debate the conclusions.

75% of the young people surveyed said that 'they couldn't live without the internet'. That's probabaly an exaggeration, but I don't find it surprising. I'd say the same thing. Then again, I spend at least eight hours a week-day in front of a computer, I studied multimedia, and I work for an online charity. I'm going away for a week in the country at the end of the month, and the fact that I've been told that there's no internet or mobile access is already weighing heavily on my mind. Being such an online advocate, I'm often asked 'what's wrong with face-to-face?'

After all, the very nature of online communication is that it's mediated by a machine such as a computer or hand-held device. With the lack of body-language and eye contact, and the possibilities for deception, it's possible to see the internet as cold, impersonal and isolating. However, what that assumption ignores is the way young people live what Professor Hulme calls 'hybrid lives' – their onlines and their offlines are blurred. Their friends on Facebook may or may not be friends from school or work; status updates on Twitter may become conversation starters in the classroom. 80% of young people surveyed said they use social networking sites to talk to friends or family they see a lot; 22% said that they use them to communicate with someone they don't know.

So, while it's impossible to generalise the experience of every young person, it seems that for many these online tools aren't replacing face-to-face communication methods – they're complimenting them. As Professor Hulme says, "The more we can communicate, the more we will, and do, communicate." What's changing is the amount of communication tools available, and people's ability to choose a communication tool which is appropriate for a particular situation: broadcasting their thoughts in blogs or vlogs, updating a selected group of friends on Facebook, texting or calling an individual, or having a face-to-face conversation.

I don't have a problem with face-to-face conversation. In fact, it's often quite useful. I do have more of a problem with the assumption that it's absolutely-always-without-a-doubt the best form of communication. The internet can be a great way to make first contact with communities of interest, for example. After all, it's easy to search online for groups of fellow social media geeks – in my case – than try and spot them during my morning commute. Once contact is made, a mix of face-to-face and online interactions often result. The internet also allows us to reach out beyond the restrictions of geographic proximity. And, as the report goes on to say, the internet can also be a great way to source information about issues young people may feel less comfortable talking about face-to-face, with websites like TheSite.org allowing young people to access trustworthy advice on a range of topics.

While it's important to realise that there are issues or dangers around communicating on the internet – the possibilities of online bullying, the possibilities of abuse and so on – it's also important to realise that, in many cases, these are either reflected or replaced by alternative issues or dangers when communication occurs offline. Moreover, just as I was taught not to give out my name on the phone by my cautious parents, today young people have learned similar lessons about the internet. 77% of the young people surveyed agreed that: 'On the internet you can never know if someone is who they say they are.'

The past century has seen huge developments in the way we communicate: from telephone calls, through radio and television broadcasts, to the development of mobile phones, faxes and the internet. While it's not my place to predict what will come next, it seems obvious that there's a lot more communication to do, and for each new generation, there'll be more and more new communication tools as the years progress.

Today, 86% of the young people surveyed loved how new technology helps them communicate with people. Let's keep creating technology, creating websites and online services, that will help us communicate with people. Face-to-face, hands-to-keyboard, in the twittersphere and in the blog comments below, let's ensure this conversation continues.

The long tail of volunteering

Patrick Daniels — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:44:42 +0100

When Clay Shirky, social media guru, talked about power law distribution, he demonstrated how equal access to participate in an activity almost always resulted in an unequal range of partipation. Some participants were active, while others (usually the vast majority) were a lot less active.

"Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass participation removes the technological obstacles to participation. Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You'd be wrong." (p.122-123)

After this quote taken from his book 'Here Comes Everybody', Shirky used examples from popular social media websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia. He observed that frequently, you see approximately 20% of the participants delivering 80% of the total value produced, whether that's a Wikipedia entry and a set of photos of Flickr tagged with the same word.

Taken from Clay Shirky's article, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.
The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.
The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem

Chris Anderson referred to this in his oft-quoted book called 'The Long Tail'. He pointed out that the web without the physical constraints of the real world could extract much more value from the 20% of participants. Amongst many others, he used the example of Amazon that was able to make money selling a huge volume of titles that individually sold few copies, but in aggregate added up to a considerable income. Traditional bookshops limited by how many titles they could stock, by necessity had to focus on the most popular titles and neglect the less popular. Amazon with its network of virtual stock had none of these constraints.

Two groups of volunteers

I'm really interested in how we can apply this thinking to volunteering with an online dimension. When I checked my own stats on the level of participation of online volunteer peer advisors in a programme I used to manage, I found an interesting result. Online peer advisors answer questions submitted online via askTheSite - a question and answer service for 16-25 year olds.

Sure enough when I plotted how many answers each volunteer had written to users over the course of a year the long tail effect was clear to see. In fact, the long tail underlined the two distinct groups of peer advisors. There was a group that was incredibly active, and roughly 20% of the peer advisors almost accounted for 80% of the answers over the given year. There was another group though of many more volunteers who had been relatively less active.

The point that is interesting for volunteer managers to contemplate is how to support and engage with these two very different groups. One group that is more engaged in many ways requires a different kind of support. For example, frequently they're looking for progress further in the role, more advanced training and ways to more intensively network with their peers. However, those who are less engaged often required a very different approach to support. For example, they wanted flexibility in how they could commit, along with a low barrier to being able to contribute meaningfully to the project.

Holy grail of volunteerism

On reflection, it hit me how the new opportunities presented by social media are stretching volunteer managers in two different directions. We're being stretched by the increasing variation in the way volunteers can now participate, particularly online, in our projects. Stretched between the smaller group of more intense participants and the larger group of more flexible participants. In the past, a favourite question of volunteer managers was: how many volunteers can a volunteer manager manage? It's almost the holy grail of volunteerism. Finding the balance between the needs of the project and the needs of volunteers has been a volunteer manager's primary tightrope walk.

It's all wrapped up in the broader challenge any volunteer manager has of finding the sweet spot between the stakeholders: service users, volunteers and host organisation. In simple terms, it's about ensuring that there is enough volunteer capacity to deliver what the project requires, while at the same timemeeting the support needs of the volunteers involved.

Are we taking sufficient advantage of this long tail in volunteering? I think we've only just scratched the surface.

Volunteering and participation

If all volunteering activity could be plotted on a graph, I wouldn't be surprised if it demonstrated the contribution of a kind of volunteering that is often labelled as being participation rather than full blown volunteering, e.g. taking part in a survey, consultation, commenting on a website, posting on a blog, etc. Despite the ad hoc nature and short duration of many participation activities, in aggregate it's likely that they make a surprisingly significant contribution to the work of charities and not for profit organisations.

Are volunteer managers creating enough of these kind of these online roles that can scale, so that the larger more flexible group can meet their potential?

Do volunteer managers understand how those participating and engaging in their work can be converted into more active volunteers?

This post was originally posted on the Association of Volunteer Managers website.

Supporting Young Achievers

Helen Williams — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:36:43 +0100

As a supporting organisation of the Young Achievers Trust, YouthNet has made some notable commitments to this charity. CEO Fiona Dawe is an advisor to the board of Trustees and Chris Denholm and I are are trustees. It's been a challenging and exciting year for us so far and we can't wait to be able to show off this year's award winners.

The good news is, you can still influence that decision by making a nomination by September 27th. For the full details go to youngachievers.co.uk and head to the nominate now page.

YouthNet has also housed a communications volunteer who has worked hard on getting the Young Achievers message out. As a journalism graduate, Hoda has had some great work experience placements at the BBC and New Woman Magazine, but her interests turned to the youth sector after working as a press and policy intern at the British Youth Council (BYC) - another charity that empowers young people through volunteering. We've really enjoyed having Hoda in the office and look forward to seeing how her role can develop beyong this nominations period.

So, back to the topic of nominations. If you're wondering how a young person can really benefit from winning one of these awards, here's a list of just some of the outstanding achievements Rikki Colgate (pictured) has made in the last year - a winner in 2008 for the sports category.

Since winning last year Rikki has continued delivering free weekly sessions on the Townsend Estate for youths in his Community. He now delivers two sessions a week . Out of these sessions he has managed to enter the young people into local ASB diversionary football leagues held on Friday nights.

He has been invited to the Mayor's Office for a select gathering of local Community Champions , he's also made presentations to the Council Chamber on Bournemouthon Community Sport and its benefits.

He is now getting paid as a self employed Community coach thanks to support from local community grants and support from Anti Social Behaviour funding streams in the area. He's the lead coach for Nacro on the estate and has under his tutelage 3 younger volunteers aged 16-18 who have seen the positive benefits of Rikki's commitment to volunteering and are now involved themselves in giving back to their Community.

He is currently contemplating returning to Education to do a degree in a sports related discipline and is pondering travelling the world as a football coach - an idea that was alien to him before he won the award.

Rikki fully acknowledges that without the confidence of being nominated, never mind winning the award he would never be where he is today. He is blown away by how far a journey he has come on in such a short space of time and is thankful to all the help and encouragement he has received from the Young Achievers since winning last year.

We're really proud of Rikki and look forward to more young people seeing their horizons expand through this awards scheme.

Private and public identity: Social networking sites and the 'ideal me'

Natasha Judd — Fri, 7 Aug 2009 11:17:32 +0100

Today, I'm handing over my blog account to Emma C Bowler. As our Marketing and Communications intern over the past few weeks, Emma's been thinking about YouthNet's projects and issues around public vs. private social networks...

Within a fast paced office with different deadlines and distinct objectives for each campaign, it's easy to get caught up in YouthNet's projects in isolation. I arrived as the bright eyed over-enthusiastic new intern two weeks ago, busy brainstorming ideas for Facebook ads to let young people know about the development version of Lifetracks.com (officially launched in November), little did I think about possible links between Lifetracks and their completed recent project tackling self harm. The former encourages young people to 'take the next step' in their career and the latter addresses mental health issues. After a few days, I gradually lifted my head out of the sand and began to wonder whether these objectives were only superficially distinct.

The advice Lifetracks can bring young people to engage and support them in getting employment and/or training will without a doubt improve the low self-esteem that is sometimes a cause of self-harm. In such a respect the aims and objectives of the projects complement one another. However, I'm going to ask – throw in social networking, and could these projects antagonise one another? Hear me out.

There are great benefits to be had from using social networking sites, in YouthNet's case, a chance to advertise their projects and engage young people in discussion. However, what about the negative effects of social networking? With constant updates on your newsfeed about your peers – where they are, what they are doing and how well they are doing – can we deny that young people might on occasion be tempted to compare themselves with their peers? How many of us would announce we've just been made redundant on our Facebook status? Or got a Third? Not many. "In what ways do Facebook users project their ideal ego, and what are the perceived effects?"

We need supportive social networking that improves the confidence of young people and widens their perspective, in turn allowing them to make informed decisions about their career. Lifetracks.com will provide this, but nevertheless we need to address how 'ideal ego' shaping that goes on elsewhere might threaten its supportive nature by influencing the activity of its members. It goes without saying that nearly all of Lifetracks' target audience will have a Facebook account and new visitors to Lifetracks.com will continue to come through Facebook ads.

I don't want to come across all anti-Facebook with regard to a young person's career. After all Facebook is the product of a young graduate having a blast at being an entrepreneur to help his fellow graduates network. Also, Twitter can be great practice for a budding journalist, practicing coming up with headlines as you tweet, rather than broadcasting what you'd like to be seen as doing. The point I've raised in this blog against social networking sites is a social phenomenon that I believe is just not being talked about enough.

Emma C Bowler

Brave new world for volunteering

Patrick Daniels — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:34:11 +0100

With the collaborative nature of a lot web tools that have developed over the last few years, such as commenting, discussion, messaging and social networking, etc., the line has started to blur between the ways in which people engage with all sorts of projects and services which aim to effect social change. For example, it's increasingly difficult to define where the role of an active community member ends and an officially recruited and trained volunteer begins.

It's a broad spectrum that now covers community members who regularly comment and engage with other community members right through to volunteers who run and help administer the online community itself. Given the plethora of avenues (commenting, messaging, etc) to collaborate and participate that hard structure of service deliverers and service users is breaking up.

With the falling away of a lot of the more traditional obstacles to involvement (time, location, privacy, resources, etc), so active participation is becoming a more seamless experience. This leads me to ask: does maintaining this distinction between volunteering and participation matter or should our perception of what volunteering is broaden?

Another change in the way people perceive volunteering and the not for profit sector in general is that causes and issues are coming to the fore, and the mechanism or root you take to engaging with the issue or cause you care about is not necessarily now the driver for why people get involved.

Good examples of this are the how groups come together around issues on social networking sites nowadays and it's not enough for big organisations to simply appeal for support without clearly identifying the cause or issue they are working to change. Twestival was a case in point where people came together around an issue not an organisation.

Developments on the web are taking this into account, such as web movements-dialogues like 4Change, Socialbrite and many, many others that put the issues before the mechanism for creating social change. In what ways will this change how volunteering is perceived once it becomes increasingly decoupled from a specific context, i.e. volunteering in a formal role with a traditionally constituted organisation?

Reflections on the #moonwalk

Natasha Judd — Wed, 1 Jul 2009 10:57:17 +0100

Last Friday, after work, a group of us from YouthNet walked down to Liverpool Street station for a twitter-organised moonwalk in memory of Michael Jackson. Given the instantaneous nature of the Internet, I'm almost too late to blog about the event itself. All over the web, you can read about how a tweeted idea became an exercise in mass participation, involving the police and Network Rail, announcements over the loud speakers at the station, and thousands of people bobbing up and down to Jackson classics. There are plenty of photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, and a twitter stream using the #moonwalk hashtag where you can see how it all came together.

However, what's more interesting, from my point of view, is the questions it raises for charity marketers, campaigners, press people and others who spread the word about a cause. It's too easy for social media campaigns to fail – despite the best planning and the most inspiring causes – because they just don't catch on. For all that we may believe that re-tweeting a message about one of our causes doesn't take much effort, I'm beginning to wonder if it actually does. People have to be logged into Twitter to see the message in the first place, they have to pick it out of all the other tweets they're receiving, they have to understand it, engage with it, and choose to pass it on. And that's only one social networking tool.

It's also easy to be impressed that the event went from concept to implementation in one day. And while the moonwalk wasn't actually held in Liverpool Street Station in the end, and while there wasn't actually room for much moonwalking in such a large crowd, the fact that it happened at all is testament to the power of social media to turn buzz into action. As charities, do we have the ability to be this spontaneous? If the mood of the public was to turn in the direction of our cause on a particular day, would we be able and ready to react? And, would it be appropriate for us to do so?

Finally, when you're pressed up against people, it's easy to overhear their conversations. A woman behind me was asked why she was there. "I'm actually more a fan of Twitter than Michael Jackson", she said. And while, like many children of the 80s, I did bop around my room to Billie Jean, the same applied to me. What we had then was a crowd of people who used Twitter or who know people who used Twitter or read reports of people who used Twitter. While there were some real fans, I'd guess that a significant amount of people had come along to see what was happening and be part of it. If we were going to organise a charity event via social media, would that matter? Raising awareness is a goal in itself sometimes, but if some people are 'there for the sake of being there', is that enough?

Would be great to hear your thoughts.

Who will organise the data?

Natasha Judd — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:40:45 +0100

Earlier this afternoon, I attempted to clean out my inbox. I didn't get very far. Old newsletters could be deleted easily; so could old invitations to events, sales emails, and spam. However, I found myself distracted by an emailed link to this half-forgotten YouTube video, entitled The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The video is from 2007, and of course, the internet has moved on over the past two years. However, I was struck by the continued relevance of a question which appears three minutes and one second into the animation: 'Who will organise all this data?' And the answers, 'We will... You will.'

Last week, I was invited to get involved in a Twitter chat about using social media for social change (using the '#4Change' hash tag). While I've been using Twitter since mid-2008, this was the first time I've participated in an organised, on-Twitter event – and another opportunity to reflect on this 'who will organise all this data?' question.

Earlier in the year, I went to Twestival, and in a crowded, dark and noisy warehouse in London, I commented to a fellow attendee that it was so much easier to find people on the internet. Back then, in the distant days of February, I was talking about finding them via Google or perhaps through using the Technorati blog index. I meant by searching for people or organisations based on the words they'd used on their websites or other online content. I still do that.

But, increasingly, Twitter itself is becoming one of my major communication tools. It's often where I hear breaking news – both on the world stage and in the lives of my contacts. It's where I can ask questions, get advice. However, with millions of people now twittering, and even with only 200 of those people on my personal follow list, it's often a case of too many people speaking at once. To make sense of it all, I've found that I need start categorising my contacts, using tools like TweetDeck. There's my 'all friends' list; then there's those I talk to on a day-to-day basis. There's another column for direct messages, one where I can monitor updates relevant to work, and so on. Often it's just as important to say, 'What can I ignore, what's not important for me to know right now?'

The #4Change hash tag is another way of organising/filtering information – a way of bringing together information on a particular topic: in this case, information how people worldwide are using social media for social change. However, it's not just the # that makes things happen. It's also us. It's Tom Dawkins from Ashoka, who had the idea, defined the hash tag, recruited regional organisers. It was setting a time when people worldwide could join in (even if this was between 10pm and midnight here in the UK!) It was sending @ messages to particular contacts, in the hope that it would make the tweet about the chat stand out amongst all the other tweets they received – and the excitement of, later in the day, seeing some of those people join in the discussion.

Twitter is another social media tool. It might be the next Facebook, it might never really catch on. That's not important. What seems increasingly important though is how we individually make sense of the data we receive, how we filter this information, what we chose to trust and why. As representatives of charities and other not-for-profit organisations, we also may need to consider how we can reach out through this barrage of information to raise awareness and support for our cause. It's something that I'm sure will continue to be discussed in future #4Change chats.

For now though, it's back to my email sorting. Who will organise all this data? Much as I sometimes wish I could give others the responsibility of adding 'okay to delete' tags to my inbox, that's just not practical. So, who will organise all this data?

In this case, I will.

Eventually.

YouthNet opts out of Phorm

YouthNet staff — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:07:58 +0100

After much internal discussion and following the media debate, YouthNet has decided to add our name to the growing list of organisations who have chosen to opt out of Phorm. You can read more about our reasoning on the press statement we released this morning.

For reference, here is the email we sent to Phorm.

From: Natasha Judd
Sent: 29 April 2009 09:29
To: 'website-exclusion-AT-webwise-DOT-com'
Subject: Phorm opt-out for YouthNet domains

To whom it may concern,

As a charity, which provides confidential online guidance, YouthNet requests that all our websites, including TheSite.org, do-it.org.uk, YouthNet.org and all related domains, be excluded from scanning by the Phorm / BT Webwise system.

Here is a list of our domains which should be excluded (please exclude any and all subdomains as well):

thesite.org
thesite.org.uk
thesite.mobi
askTheSite.org
askTheSite.org.uk
askTheSite.net
askTheSite.co.uk
selfharm.org.uk
yourtentormine.org
mytentoryours.org
chooseaction.net
do-it.org.uk
do-it.org
doit-london.co.uk
youthnet.org
youthnetuk.com
youthnet-uk.info
youthnet-uk.org
youthnet-uk.net

Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about this request.

Natasha Judd
Marketing Manager

We received the following (auto) response:

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Young people as trustees

Olly Benson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:39:51 +0100

I posted this on my personal blog, but as it's partly about YouthNet I should probably mention it here:

"On Wednesday we had a meeting at work to discuss recruiting new trustees for YouthNet, and in particular the desire to get "youth trustees" onto our board. We've been having similar discussions at the charity I'm a trustee of, the Citizenship Foundation, where I think I am if not the youngest, I'm certainly not that much older than the youngest."

Eating disorders and technology

Helen Williams — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:46:48 +0100

A little while ago I attended the International Conference on Eating Disorders to find out about advances in internet technology and how they impact on treatment. We're no stranger to eating disorders through the content we have on TheSite.org, and discussions about them on the forums are reasonably regular, so it's interesting to find out what's out there to complement traditional face-to-face treatment and what impact it can have.

It was a long and information heavy workshop, but some key themes were drawn from the lecture. The speaker was Steve Wonderlich, Ph.D. Here are five key things that I learned:

1. Technology is primarily used to help people who experience Bulimia and compulsive eating. This is because there are clear ways that it's possible to monitor someone's progress and behaviours if they are binge eating. On the other hand, if someone is experiencing anorexia then it's much harder to use technology to help.

2. It seems that most of the technology is developed either in the US or Europe (mostly outside the UK). Although I'd happily have someone correct me on that!

The technologies discussed tended to take a stepped care approach. I have understood this to mean that treatment comes in steps with varying levels of intervention often starting with self-directed intervention and then more intensive intervention from experts as the treatment goes forward. Here is a breakdown of the programmes discussed:

Interapy This includes no face-to-fact contact at all and is CBT based therapy online. The service is aimed at 16+ year-olds and excludes people who are experiencing problems in other areas of their life e.g they're feeling suicidal or abusing drugs. This is interesting for us working on TheSite.org where we're interested in the interconnected nature of problems and take a holistic approach to advice giving. Nevertheless, this programme was seen to be most impressive by the speaker.

ES[S]PIRIT A German internet-based program for the prevention and early intervention of eating disorders. Its focus is on sub-clinical eating disorders. The most interesting part of this technology was the development of extremely impressive AKQUASI technology which is computer supported treatment of patient treatment response. They have used this technology to send text messages to patients based on their functional and dysfunctional eating behaviours.
Student bodies which is "an online psycho-educational intervention designed to help women at risk for developing eating disorders develop healthier dietary practices and improve their body satisfaction." I think it would be interesting to trial this beyond the student arena.
Hans Kordy's Internet bridge project. This includes weekly chat sessions and online self-help groups. We got to see some of the transcripts which were really interesting. We run online chat sessions for peer support on TheSite.org but the self-help angle may be worth exploring. Internet bridge was the project I could generally most identify with as it referred to techniques some of our askTheSite advisors recommend such as writing without disruption about emotionally difficult topics – otherwise known as journaling which patients send to therapists and receive feedback by email.

3. Digital exclusion is still a big issue for those attempting to provide online advice and treatments. Steve Wonderlich has experience of using technology such as PDAs for treatment of eating disorders where patients are contacted up to ten times a day – I imagine this kind of treatment could also transfer to mobile phones.

4. The way internet tools are used is just as important as deciding which tools to use. The ES[S]PRIT project for instance has the amazing AKQUASI technology I mentioned, but I don't think the automated approach is ever going to make a big impact. Perhaps there are better ways the technology could be used? It was interesting to see that trials of this programme got a better response in Germany than the UK.

5. The use of technology to help treat eating disorders tends to have a small, but significant impact. For instance, 14 out of the 80 students who were surveyed about their participation in the ES[S]PIRIT project said that it helped them a lot and 21 said that it helped them a bit.

At YouthNet we describe TheSite.org as a first-stop-shop for information and advice. This means that the website is mainly a first point of call where young people can find out where or how to get further help. Having said that, young people can get ongoing support through peer support on the discussion boards. What's striking about some of the programmes discussed in these talks though, particularly Interapy, is that this is taking technology to the next level where some patients can get everything they need online. Obviously this is quite a controversial concept and perhaps that's never going to be 100% possible or advisable, nor for the majority. Nevertheless, it's interesting to see that some of the formats we already use for support on TheSite.org such as askTheSite and chat sessions, in theory could grow in scope and provide a higher level of support.

Social Return on Investment

Sam Thomas — Mon, 6 Apr 2009 15:03:26 +0100

Last week we held the latest in our series of breakfast seminars. This time the topic was "SROI (Social Return on Investment to you and I) – a new impact model", and the audience was treated to presentations from Claire (our Operations Director), Sarah (our Research Manager), as well as Andrew Wilson (Managing Director of Corporate Citizenship) and our very own Martyn Lewis.

You can see the slides below, but do let us know if you want more information or would be interested in meeting up to get some more context.

The three things I learnt from the presentation were:

The SROI model involves making some assumptions about what you do. The key is to be transparent about what assumptions you've made and the calculations you've used;

It's really hard to put a clear, binary outcome on some types of work. SROI came out of evaluating employment programmes that either resulted in employment or didn't – it's much harder (although not impossible) to quantify programmes that improve self-esteem, for example;

The reaction from funders attending the seminar was very positive – both in terms of the fact that we were up for doing the research, and the clear benefit to society per investment made that we can now demonstrate.

Here are the slides:

YouthNet SROI Presentation

View more presentations from luc_b.

An armory of weapons against the young

Sophie Manning — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 17:34:38 +0100

First we had blue lighting in toilets. The idea was that in the great venn diagram of social misbehaviour, heroin users and young people overlap perfectly. Blue lights would conveniently drive both away. For users it becomes difficult to spot a vein, and the sinister effect in loos would also help to deter youths who aren't shooting up from simply 'hanging around'. There aren't enough letters in the alphabet to enumerate the stupidity of this policy.

a)    Addicts are not necessarily idiots: it didn't take those that were shooting up in toilets long to start marking their veins beforehand.
b)   Effectively blindfolding a needle user is dangerous.
c)   Nobody else will go to the toilet either – they'll either be scared by the potential presence of drug addicts or repelled by the horrible blue lights.
d)   What the hell happened to customer service?
e)   The whole thing makes a very noticeable and high-profile statement about the 'dark times' in which we live. Such statements fuel conservative paranoia and further alienate the generations. 'Tough measures' against crime quickly become 'tough measures' against vulnerable people...

Which brings me to the Mosquito: for £500, shopkeepers can purchase a sonic torture machine that emits extremely high noises at a frequency that only young people can hear (because your hearing range deteriorates as you get older). Is a teenager's money worth less than a forty-something's to these small businesses? In fact, young people have less to spend (partly because they are also discriminated against with the unequal minimum wage, whose tenth anniversary is today), which means that this social and economic discrimination seems to be going unchecked.

But the latest pink lighting scandal can't fail to attract attention. One residents' association hopes to start a trend by paying for pink lights to be installed on streets and underpasses, because it highlights acne and may deter young people from gathering in groups. It is eye-wateringly abusive. Can you imagine if we tried to humiliate older people into submission by installing special lighting that showed up their wrinkles?

I was 22 last week – a pretty youthful looking 22, if I say so myself. My anger about ageism (in both directions) only increases. I continued to be stunned by this vicious emotion, lethally combined with sneaky use of modern technology and the misapplication of the law, against young people. I guess it's not possible to legislate against privately-bought coloured lights, but with a bit of imagination and empathy, it shouldn't be necessary.

life behind the statistics

Emma Rubach — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:01:10 +0100

I’ve recently discovered that life for young people in Britain isn’t nearly as glamorous as Skins might have us believe. As the journalist for YouthNet’s new Lifetracks website (so new we don’t have a URL yet), my first job along with Multimedia Editor Chris C has been getting out and meeting some of the people behind the stats. It’s been an eye opener, but not in the way you might expect.

It’s made me realise how stark the difference is between the media’s view of young people and the reality. We obsessively glamourise both youth and violence in this country - a winning combination for advertisers, newspapers and TV script-writers - but to be honest, the young people I’ve met have not seemed particularly dangerous - or particularly glam. People forget being young often means being poor – earning the minimum wage or less; eating crap food (pizza anyone?); never having any credit on your phone and being bored stiff because you can’t afford to go out in the evening. Youth clubs with peeling paintwork and blaring TV screens are the only place to meet if you don’t want to spend money.

And, of course, the ‘current economic situation’ means moving on up is a tough prospect. At the Regional Skills Event in Bolton, a woman working for Connexions told me she’d only got 12 jobs to offer - unless you want to go in to the army, which is on a major recruitment drive at the moment. About half of the event was taken up by army gimmicks – you could make your own dog tags, try on a bomb disposal suit or wave an machine gun around. There were even chances to get up close and personal with a three metre-long bomb.

The story was similar at a drop in centre on the south coast (but with less military hardware), where it seemed being laid off was the order of the day. One lad had even been told he was no longer required at Morrisons, despite supermarkets proudly trumpeting that they’ve got jobs to offer when everyone else is having a hiring freeze.

We met several people who saw dealing drugs as a kind of rite of passage to get themselves out of debt. One girl told us she had become addicted to cocaine at the age of 12, running up huge drug debts while her teachers thought she was hyper from eating too many jelly babies. In order to clear the debt from her habit, she was forced to deal for another few years, even after she got clean.

Of course, being a journo, I can’t help focusing on the most extreme examples to keep you reading. But they’re circumstances worth bearing in mind next time you read a statistic about our knife-wielding, happy –slapping youth and wonder what’s happened to make them like that.

On top of these social issues, the world young people now have to navigate is hugely complex and rapidly changing. They’re now asked to seriously consider what job they want to do and take qualifications to suit - at the age of 14. As well as A Levels and GCSEs, both of which are changing, there is now the option to take an apprenticeship, diploma or raft of other vocational qualifications for jobs that 30 years ago did not require so much as an O Level. By 2015, young people will have to stay in full time education until they are 18. But at the same time, the economic crisis means it’s the toughest time to graduate – ever.

The more I find out about the expectations placed on the shoulders of young people in the UK, the more it becomes apparent that life for them is a wildly confusing and challenging experience. Obviously, a website alone isn’t going to resolve the deep rooted social issues which have caused young people to be demonised, but at least we can provide a few navigational tools.

If xLy iff yLx is true, then x cannot stop loving y unless y also stops loving x ... Thoughts on Relationships Advising and Philosophy

Clare Foster — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:32:40 +0000

Earlier on this week I rediscovered a website called askphilosophers.org. It's a question and answer service where people post questions which are answered publically by philosophers. All the sections are pretty interesting (check out the environmental philosophy section) but particularly relevant to us on askTheSite was the section on love and emotions.

There was a really interesting mix of some of the sorts of questions we would get in the Relationships section of askTheSite ('Can a guy REALLY love you if he comments on other girls saying that they're cute?'), to questions that took a step back and saw the issue in terms of a more general dilemma ('If, within a marriage, one partner denies the other sex, can they morally still demand that the other refrain?').

In my previous job I was once asked a question about the meaning of life. It wasn't phrased quite like that, but in essence that was what the question was. It went something along the lines of 'I'm not suicidal, but I keep thinking that, when I die, my family and friends will be sad for a while, but then they will get on with their lives, and they will die and it will be as if I had never existed at all. I just don't see the point'. The user was concerned about this question to the extent that she felt the need to write into a helpline to help her find meaning in her life. But where else could she talk about these issues? Possibly askphilosophers.org? Patrick and I were thinking about whether we should have a section in askTheSite for more general religious and philosophical questions – young people come up against these all the time but don't really have a young person orientated forum in which to ask them.

Philosophical thinking, whether we are aware of it or not, certainly informs the way that we think about relationships and what we are trying to do when relationships advising is helping people to take a step back and providing a richer and clearer framework within which to think about the issues they are struggling with.

What askphilosophers.org does is merely make more explicit the sorts of fundamental dilemmas and differences in opinion that underlie relationship problems. People will often get in touch questioning whether or not they have a right to feel angry or upset over a certain situation, or asking what they should do in a certain situation. Questions about trust, contracts, promises, the nature of love and the motivations of human behaviour are all commonly seen in the askTheSite relationships inbox.

For example, if you are thinking of breaking up with your partner because you have fallen in love with someone else, there are a number of different ethical systems within which you could frame your actions.

You could think about what course of action would cause the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. Is the happiness of you and your new love going to outweigh the misery of your previous partner. A utilitarian ethical system would say that, if so, then breaking up with your old partner is the right thing to do. However this also means that if your old partner's unhappiness was greater than the sum of happiness created by your new relationship, it would be morally wrong to end things with your old partner. Many people would find this a dubious argument. However, if you took into account your longer term unhappiness from being in a relationship you no longer enjoyed vs her misery if you broke up, there might be again an argument for the first course of action. Where do you stop?

What if you were married to your first partner? A basic formulation of Kant's universal law would suggest that it is morally wrong to break a promise or a contract (such as marriage) regardless of the unhappiness that holding to it would cause you. If you thought about it in this sense, rather than on the happiness of those involved, then it would be wrong to leave your first partner. Interestingly this seems to support an older fashioned take on marriage than the one today's society seems to accept.

Another way of looking at the situation would be through the concept of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics looks at the character of the individual performing the action rather than the consequences of the action. What makes one a moral person is the virtues you embody. However, given that different people, societies and cultures have different ideas about what constitutes a virtuous life, it is pretty much impossible to create an idea of the virtuous human. Looking at the sort of person you are and that your actions make you, rather than focussing on the idea of duty or consequences is, however, an interesting and relevant way of making decisions in relationships.

Finally, you could bring in the idea of rights. The concept of a human right has long been considered a potentially flawed idea (Bentham called the idea of inalienable natural human rights 'nonsense on stilts'), but what if you felt that the right to self esteem (for example) was a basic human right? If by breaking up with your partner, you destroy her self esteem, is there a sense in which you are denying her of a basic human right and thus performing a morally wrong action?

When making these kinds of decisions, I imagine that most people draw on ideas of morality pulled from a number of different systems of what is the right thing to do. What struck me about a similar question to this that was asked on askphilosophersorg was the deeply rational way in which it was couched ("a couple of months ago, I had an experience which spawned an ethical dilemma which I find fascinating"). In rationally analysing his relationship, the user came across as quite cold and heartless. We don't naturally associate rational analysis with matters of the heart. Some questions just seem as though they should not be asked within this logical framework – take this one for example - "there are billons of people on this earth, and yet so many people proclaim that they have found their one-and-only soul mate. Is it reasonable of them to say that if they haven't met everyone on the earth? Is there really such a thing as a "soul mate"? If not, then is it safe to assume that people simply settle for what is within their reach and then redefine what love means to them?".

It feels as though the questioner here has somehow misunderstood what we are trying to say when we speak of the idea of soul mates. It isn't something as tangible and obvious as he makes it out to be. We start to make some kind of distinction between our emotions and our rationality. A formula for answering a relationships question such as the one in the title of this article seems incomplete.

These thoughts are interesting in relation to the work on the head and the heart that we do in training peer advisors. We make a distinction between appealing to the user at the level of the head and at the level of the heart and highlight that a good answer will appeal to both. Moving away from philosophy and into psychology, we talk about how rationally answering with technical information and solutions ignores the feeling brain that often needs to be engaged if we want the user to pay attention to the answer we write. Rationally exploring the morality of actions in relationships and the meaning of trust, contracts and rights is a useful way of helping ourselves and users to understand what we are talking about – but we shouldn't lose sight of the messy and irrational emotional element of every human relationship.

Before I finish, I'll link you to a blog called The Splintered Mind where the writer suggests that love is not a feeling but a way of structuring ones values, goals and reactions. He makes a distinction between passion (a word he notes derives from the same root as passive) which he calls a feeling one does not control and love which he sees as a way of managing and structuring a life with someone else. It provides an interesting new take on the definition of love. One of the questions I always suggest my friends think about when they come to me with questions on relationships is to think about what they mean when they say they are in love with someone. It's too easy to use the word love without thinking about it.

Harry G Frankfurt (in his lectures 'Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right') says that 'both reason and love are chronically problematic and the relationship between them is obscure' and another user on askphilosophers.org asks, "I've heard it said that philosophers as a demographic are overwhelmingly single (in the unmarried sense). I don't know if this is true, but if it is, could it be because love and reason conflict?".Maybe it's about time I stopped philosophising about this altogether and get on with something useful...!!

Newspapers told to tell the truth

Olly Benson — Wed, 4 Mar 2009 15:41:34 +0000

We've all seen countless stories in the newspapers about "outrageous" young people who "trash" a family home in the name of a birthday party (usually after organising it via a social network).

And whilst there is no doubting that it can sometimes happen (these pictures prove testament to that*), it's far more the case that a good story makes better copy than the truth.

So it's good to see that a parent has stood up to eight newspapers and Sky News and received a substantial payout for libelling her by suggesting her daughter's party got out-of-hand.

Amanda Hudson took the action even though there was no suggestion that she was to blame. Her legal counsel, David Price, said "The true position is that the house was not trashed, wrecked or destroyed. Only very minor damage was caused to one door and no property was stolen."

Let's hope Amanda's daughter Jodie has signed our respect pledge.

* It's worth pointing out that if 2000 people did turn up as the result of a single Radio 1 shout-out, it will go down as by far the most effective radio commercial/call-to-action ever broadcast.

Update: Craig Silverman's excellent corrections blog has some of the apologies.

Image courtesy of CUTClean Photography. Used under licence.

Getting my hands dirty...

Clare Foster — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:58:02 +0000

Since moving to London I have been working with volunteers; young people who want to work with YouthNet as Peer Advisors in the relationships section of askTheSite. However I've only met about 12 of them face to face. The same goes with the partners we work with; I have emailed and spoken on the phone to many of our charity partners and freelance advisors but only met a few of them in person. Given that some of them are based in Australia and New York as well as Brighton, Manchester, Norfolk and Sheffield, it's not that surprising. And the online nature of the job means that we can all work together providing answers on askTheSite despite being from different towns and countries.

It's great to be able to provide online opportunities like this, but I was reminded of the benefits and joys of volunteering when I took a day's leave from YouthNet to volunteer for ecoActive - a charity which provides environmental and sustainability education for both primary and secondary school children as well as teacher training and community education in Hackney, Enfield and Haringey. The ecoActive project seems like a great one (even if their website could use some work) - and, with only two full time members of staff, it relies on volunteers and session workers to run its activities and projects. I spent the day getting messy in sludge when making recycled paper, piling up manure and sand and adding worms to make a wormery and teaching others how to reuse tetrapacks to make wallets, magazines to make beads and newspapers to make gift bags.

As someone who spends their days working at a keyboard, it was wonderful to be able to get my hands dirty and work with young people in the same room as me. Working online has the advantages of being able to connect and liaise with a huge variety of people, but denies you the pleasure of holding something in your hand. I got a great sense of satisfaction from actually creating something tangible, helping others do the same and see the immediate impact of the work I was doing on peoples' faces.

On the other hand, for those who spend their days attending lectures, working in banks, teaching or looking after babies (as some of our volunteers do) volunteering for YouthNet must provide this variety in the opposite way - a chance to get away from their lives, put down whatever they are holding in their hands and engage in something completely different, and often quite challenging, online. And we couldn't answer all our relationships questions without them.

Sometimes, swapping your time and skills for experience and a CV boost can be the main benefit of taking up a volunteer position - but swapping your time and skills for simply some variety, interest and enjoyment is not to be underestimated!

Volunteering Hinterland

Patrick Daniels — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:03:59 +0000

There's a volunteering hinterland coming into view. Much discussion and buzz has been created about the social impacts that the latest developments and changes on the 'interweb' are having as they seem to almost take place in front of your eyes (see Beth Kanter for a great example). Yesterday's Twestival, a Twitter-inspired fundraiser that knows no national frontiers, has been just the latest in this growing trend.

Volunteering and other social action just got easier to paraphrase Clay Shirky, author of the brilliant "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations". It might have got easier to form groups and take action, but it's also true that with the web playing a greater role, the totality of smaller scale social action is more and more visible like never before.

Before the web, small scale local social action was only really visible on a local level. Now, this local action is visible globally, thanks to the web and the advance of social media. Twestival demonstrated the power of volunteering and inspired social action- in particular local and more informal volunteering.

The question is: whether more specialised web platforms develop with an eye to social action and volunteering, or whether it will continue to be the most widely adopted social media that sets the pace in tomorrow's social action and volunteering.

Blogging about blogging

Patrick Daniels — Fri, 6 Feb 2009 17:01:40 +0000

When YouthNet took a leap of faith all those years ago and headed out on the bloggers' journey, we had no idea where it would take us. We knew where we didn't want to go and our Public Relations Manager certainly knew where they didn't want it to go. We knew we didn't want it to be top down or just about marketing a brand.

Over the years different members of staff have taken the opportunity to shout about their own personal bugbears and argue a point of view. Others have used it to debate the topical and we really appreciate the contribution of all those who've commented and joined in the discussion.

Now it's time for a rethink. Today together with YouthNetters with talk and the blog, so in a way it's only appropriate to blog about the talk. Watch out this space for new bloggers and more discussion! As they say on Twitter - thanks for the follow.

Snow day 2009

Natasha Judd — Tue, 3 Feb 2009 13:22:01 +0000

Yesterday, it snowed. In fact, the news tells us this morning, that on Monday 2 February 2009, London experienced the heaviest snowfall in 18 years.

Now, 18 years ago, I was at primary school and living in a country where it never snowed (at least at my place). However, I can still say with a fair amount of confidence that the working world has changed quite a bit since 1991.

I woke up yesterday morning and turned on my laptop. This is a fairly regular morning ritual – only yesterday, the weather report on my desktop said it was snowing. I looked outside the window and so it was. Then the text messages started arriving, saying that, if we couldn't get in, we could work at home – and a webmail message from the chief executive saying the same.

Working from home is nothing too unusual in 2009. Due to the wonders of broadband internet, I've got access to webmail and the documents I need from any computer with an up-to-date browser. To see what my colleagues are up to, all I need to do is turn on Yammer, or follow their twitter feeds, or send a text message or email.

So, working from home in 2009 is relatively easy. However, working from home on a snow day in 2009 raises a few more issues. And to make things even more difficult, YouthNet has a stand at Skills North West this week – which involved four staff members needing to overcome the public transport chaos to get up north to Bolton.

That's when I noticed that snow has an impact on technology as well. The South West Trains website wouldn't work. The front page of the Virgin Trains website said 'There is currently a good service on all Virgin Trains routes', which seemed pretty unlikely. My mobile stopped ringing: all calls went straight to voice mail. And when I tried to call our travellers, I got a network busy message. So technology's not the answer to everything. Sometimes we still have to wait on hold for half an hour on the Virgin Rail helpline to see if we can change the times of train tickets (I couldn't). And sometimes, we just need have to travel through the snow to the station, talk to someone face-to-face and ask again (this worked).

In contrast, social networking websites come into their own on a snow day. In between writing reports and answering phone calls, it was lovely to see the snowy pictures which had been uploaded by my friends on facebook, by users on flickr and to read the #uksnow reports coming on twitter.

Walking through the common in the evening, throwing snowballs, making snow angels and taking my own pictures, my thoughts turned to how things have changed over the last 18 years.

How the new communications technologies can connect us and make us aware of the bigger picture. And how this has far wider implications than snow.

Employer Supported Volunteering - who's it for?

Sam Thomas — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:18:53 +0000

I went to a conference on ESV (Employer Supported Volunteering for those not in the know…) earlier this week that I found pretty thought-provoking. In particular, a panel debate between two broker organisations and two companies got my brain ticking over. The debate was all about why ESV isn’t the norm for businesses if it’s such a great way of developing skills.

What got me thinking was the overall tone of the messages I got. To grossly simplify things, I felt like the message I got from the private sector was:

“Operate more like us, and talk our language. Sell us creative ways to engage lots of our staff – but make sure it’s genuine and don’t make any of it up. And measure the impact of our activity for us. But don’t ask us for any money.”

I’m fully prepared to admit I’m a bit defensive about this, but sometimes it feels like there aren’t many genuine conversations between businesses and charities when it comes to ESV.

There seems to be an understandable frustration from businesses that increasingly charities and brokers charge for their services (eg. “What? I thought volunteering was free?”), with the sneaking suspicion that charities are trying to make “profit” from ESV.

I can also see a lot of businesses rolling their eyes when they don’t get the level of professionalism that they perceive they should do from their charity partners.

I can understand these frustrations, but it does seem a little one sided. For me, one of the wonderful things about the voluntary sector is its diversity and passion for a wide range of causes. We don’t all speak the same language, and whilst some charities don’t operate like businesses, they are extremely good at operating on a shoestring budget whilst still meeting their mission.

This doesn’t make us incompatible with the private sector, it just sometimes makes us different. And when you bring together organisations that are different, it gives you a tremendous opportunity to learn from each other.

P.S. Whilst I'm ranting about conferences, ages ago I posted about the demographic breadown at most fundraising conferences. Although this is completely un-scientific, I have noticed that a couple of conferences I've attended recently haev been less female dominated - anyone else noticed this?

What, face to face??! Relationships in a digital age...

Clare Foster — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:21:24 +0000

This article was originally written for our Online Peer Advisor update but Patrick suggested that I post it on the blog as well.

The above quote was the response that a young person who I was speaking to in my previous job made when I suggested that he resolve a relationship worry he had by speaking to his girlfriend. He was younger than our remit - a lot of our users don't conduct their relationships entirely online. However, it is interesting to think about how the growth of computer based communication such as instant messaging, social networking sites and text messaging has changed the way we start and conduct relationships, and how it has affected the sort of questions we get asked.

I noticed that over the last few weeks there were a lot of questions that touched or focussed on this subject in one way or another. Concerns can include worries that, after a period of intense messaging, a potential boyfriend stops replying, ex partners using facebook status updates to provoke jealousy or trying to work out how, after a long period of getting to know a guy online, one should take a relationship to the next level.

All these issues are ones that wouldn't have come up ten years ago, when the question would tend to be 'Why hasn't he called?', rather than 'Why is she taking longer than usual to reply to my text message', or 'Why is he leaving messages on his ex girlfriend's facebook wall?'.

It is a particularly interesting issue for us to think about as Online Peer Advisors. We ourselves are using similar technologies to enable us to advise, and getting to grips with the different issues that that causes. Our users are more likely to approach us because they can ask anonymous questions that they may be too embarrassed to speak about face to face, but this very anonymity that the internet provides means it can be harder for advisors to know enough about the user to get the emotional tone and content of the support we give quite right.

In many ways, the kind of issues we meet when advising online, reflect the issues that users may face in conducting relationships online. The users can preserve a sense of anonymity on a social networking site or messaging service and can carefully manage the impression of themselves that they give to others. This can enable people to be more forward, flirty, or open than they find themselves able to be in a face to face situation. This has been called the Online Disinhibition Effect and you can read about it in this interesting psychological analysis.

The same goes for text messages. They feel less 'committed' and more lighthearted than a phone call, but any change in 'texting behaviour' – he's texting less, she's taking longer to reply, should I text him again or wait for his reply? – can lead to all manner of analysis, doubt and distress, which just didn't happen when you didn't ever expect to be in contact with someone every hour of every day.

Now someone has their mobile on them all the time, a lack of immediate response can easily be interpreted as a conscious decision on someone else's part not to reply. On top of this, different people have different attitudes to technology; meeting someone who is rarely online, or who doesn't leap to reply to every text message can cause users to decide that someone isn't interested when in fact they may be very interested but just don't show their interest through digital communication in the same way.

Digital messaging is another phenomenon that has changed the way relationships work. The ability to copy and paste from message box to message box means that what someone is saying in what they thought was a private space, could actually be shared with other users, sometimes while the initial conversation is still continuing. And once you've typed it, your words are out there to be passed around, analysed by future partners and future partners' friends and often taken completely out of context.

It's no wonder we get a lot of questions surrounding these issues. There is an interesting study on 'Digital Relationships in the MySpace Generation' on this link below if you would like to read more.

You can also download a study on 'Young People, Wellbeing and Communication Technologies' on this link.

The writer of this article has a lot of time for online relationships, while some users don't like social networking sites at all.

Sometimes, just helping a user to recognise that communicating digitally is quite different from communicating face to face, and the problems it can cause, is enough to help them look at their issues from a fresh perspective. In other cases, encouraging them to talk to a partner face to face and giving them information about the best way to do this – we have all seen TheSite.org article on Communicating as a Couple. There's also a good section in BBC Relationships.

For some questions, the fact that they can communicate online will help the user to solve their worry. Sometimes the issues are complicated or difficult for the user to speak about face to face. In these cases, suggesting they write things down in an email for their partner, friend or family can sometimes help them to put across what they want to say clearly, ready for a follow up discussion later on.

An interesting looking book I found on Amazon called Cyberspace Romance: The Psychology of Online Relationships.. wonder if the YouthNet budget would stretch to it....

Volunteering: Where do you do it?

Natasha Judd — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:32:59 +0000

Greetings blog readers,

Just wanted to let you in on a little do-it.org.uk experiment we'll be running from later this week, and take this opportunity to ask for your help.

We know anecdotally and from the do-it.org.uk statistics that there's a whole lot of volunteering going on out there.

Perhaps your organisation works with some of these volunteers. Perhaps you're a volunteer yourself. Either way, we'd love you to get involved.

We're going to be asking people to take photos of themselves volunteering and (to keep with the do-it.org.uk theme) holding up signs which say 'I'm doing it in [location]' or 'I'm doing it at [organisation name]. Here's one of me from earlier this weekend, which relates to last summer's volunteer stewarding adventures.

To get things started, we're going to need some early submissions – and that's where we'd like you to come in. If you're volunteering or working with volunteers over the next couple of weeks, why not take an 'I'm doing it' picture? Make sure you get permission from any people in the background of your shot, and then either upload it to Flickr, tagged doitpic, or email it along with your first name or a pseudonym to marketing(at)youthnet.org and we'll add it to the collection.

Even if you're not a volunteer yourself, we'd be very grateful if you could pass the message on. Tell your friends, tell your family. Tweet it; facebook status it; blog about it. Help us create a picture in pictures of the diversity of volunteering opportunities available in the UK today.

We look forward to seeing (and sharing) the results.

Christmas, lists and sexy geeks

Sam Thomas — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 10:27:39 +0000

It's impossible to escape one thing at this time of year.

No, I don't mean Santa, Jesus and increasingly desperate high street retailers trying to sell you the "magic of Christmas".

I'm talking about "Top 10s". Call me a geek, but ever since I was a kid I've enjoyed perusing the year end lists on pretty much anything and everything. So, in the spirit of "Top 10s", I've complied some of my favorite lists/reviews/interesting posts of 2008 from across the blogosphere - in no particular order. Add your own if you like!

First up we have the Guardian's Top 100 sites for the year ahead (only slightly disappointed that TheSite.org wasn't in there, but hey-ho..)

Along a slightly similar line we have Read/Write's Top 100 products of 2008.

Moving into the realms of charities, justgiving posted a very comprehensive review of 2008 - so comprehensive it needed a part I and part II.

From across the pond, the Non-Profit Tech Blog published a Philanthropy and Non-Proft Top 25 list - very interesting to see some "traditional" charities dropping out of that list this year and some less obvious ones appearing for the first time.

Moving closer to home, as Helen noted, TheSite.org had a creative end to 2008. Whilst we're on TheSite.org, in case you do over-indulge too much this Christmas it's worth finding out how much your dead body is worth.

There's also been plenty happening on the do-it.org.uk blogs - I've particularly enjoyed having some student stereotypes being busted on the Student's Blog.

As this post is all about lists and Top 10s, I couldn't not mention Robin Goad's Hitwise Intelligence blog - always packed full of interesting stats about online search.

No list round up of mine would be complete without a music section, so here's the (ever so slightly pretentious) Pitchfork 50 Best Albums of 2008 list. For all you sports fans out there, here is the Guardian sports blog Classic YouTube 2008 round up - worth checking out for the Shteeve McClaren interview alone.

Finally, just to prove what everyone knew in 2008 - here's Wired Magazine's Sexiest Geeks of 2008 list.

Enjoy!

Media organisations engaging with young people...

Olly Benson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:16:02 +0000

I've spotted two things that media organisations have done that really interest me.

The first is Dazed & Confused, the monthly style magazine founded by Jefferson Hack and Rankin, handed over the entire editorial of their current issue (January 2009) to teenagers. And the result, albeit on first glance, is really interesting. In a world where media organisations are increasingly unwilling to engage with young people without completing a small forest of forms it is genuinely refreshing to see a mainstream magazine put resources into engaging directly with young people and giving them a platform that goes beyond tokenism.

That said, the articles do all seem to be written by and about young people with names you'd be hard pressed to hear used on a council estate. And, as with all style magazines, it's as much about look as the substance. But, beyond the arty photos and clever typography lie some real issues that concern young people today.

The second thing I've been impressed by is the BBC's murder map (that's not actually its name). There was a time when it appeared every weekend there was another stabbing or shooting of a young person, but whilst the map and accompanying statistics and full list doesn't make pleasant reading; it does put the issue into some context.

In 2008, 72 teenagers (aged 10-19) have been murdered (or manslaughter) in the UK. That figure is relatively stable, but the figure for killings in London (29 this year) are far higher than an average of 17 since 2000.

The average age of those killed was 17, and most of them were stabbed. Saturday was the day when the majority of the killings took place.

Presenting the information this way makes the point that for all the hysteria about wayward teenagers, every one of these young people is a victim. And it is a factual resource that proves that huge parts of the country (including places like Nottingham, Bradford, Wales or Northern Ireland) haven't seen the sort of violence that if you believed certain parts of the popular press were a guaranteed occurrence on every high street.

Hopes, Fears and Aspirations in the UK Today

Becca — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:45:54 +0000

Last month, YouthNet staff, supporters and a panel of young people gathered together on the 29^th floor of Millbank Tower, in the aptly named venue, 'Altitude'.

The aim of the evening was to showcase our latest piece of research, 'Fear and Hoping in the UK'. This report provides a fascinating insight into the hopes, fears and aspirations of young people in the UK.

From housing and knife crime to terrorism to global warming, respondents let us into their views of the world today.

In order to discuss the results further, a panel of six 16 to 24-year olds, hosted by our Chair and Founder, Martyn Lewis CBE, joined us. As well as allowing the audience to really get to know them, their enthusiastic approach challenged the negative stereotype of young people that is so often portrayed in the media.

Guests from the public and private sectors enjoyed stunning views of London at night, in what was a very enjoyable and enlightening evening.

We'd love to hear what your hopes, fears and aspirations are, so do feel free to post your comments.

If you would like to view a summary of the report, please click here.

Alternatively, if you'd like to receive a hard copy of the report, please contact us

View from across the Atlantic...

Olly Benson — Mon, 1 Dec 2008 23:37:05 +0000

I've recently got back from a trip to the US. It was supposed to be a holiday, but a couple of things made it a bit more working, and a bit less holiday. Firstly, I've probably bored my colleagues senseless with my excitement at doing a spot of freelancing for the BBC on the night of the US election... being in a restaurant/studio overlooking Times Square when Obama got elected is something that'll never forget.

But along with the holiday bit, the other part of my trip to the States that counts as working was going to the YPulse Mashup in Boston. I've been a follower of Anatasia's youth media and marketing blog for a good couple of years now, even contributed a few times. So on the ridiculous notion that "you're in America. I'm in America" I dropped her an email to see if she was anywhere near me and we could catch up over a coffee. Better than that, she'd got a whole conference that slotted perfectly into my schedule.

So 36 hours after I'd witnessed one of the greatest election victories of recent years, I was in a sports hall at Boston University meeting a variety of people involved in youth media/marketing in the US. The whole conference has been successfully blogged and written up here, but here are a few things that I think YouthNet can learn from the conference:

Millennials/GenY (defined as those roughly of people born from 1980 until about 2000) have a totally different relationship with their parents to those born earlier (GenX). As a generalisation, GenY's are as likely to go clubbing and seek advice from their parents; whereas GenX's avoid their parents at all costs. The downside of this is helicopter parents.

GenY also have a totally different outlook on work: they know they being exploited so seek rewards in recognition of this fact. They totally blur the boundaries between work and home... they'll update their Facebook in the office but not think twice about checking their work email over the weekend. They also want regular praise (but then who wouldn't?)

We have a mobile version of TheSite.org – and we're planning for more of our interaction to be via wireless internet (but in the long term, it's unlikely to remain a separate entity to our web version). The US mobile phone model is different to Europe – and the popularity of SMS is about seven years behind us – but this doesn't sound that unfamiliar: girls text more, guys use mobile internet more.

In discussion about video, the panel said that "viewers value authenticity more than production quality", short videos work better than TV shows on the web (although the US doesn't have an equivilant BBC iPlayer) and that a lot of teens don't want to create video. Our multimedia editor, Chris Chapman, has been doing a lot of work on improving our video offering and the points the panel raised tie in nicely with what he (and the rest of us) have been up to.

Finally: two ideas to interest our fundraisers. Firstly, MyYearbook is apparently the fastest growing social network in the US. I don't know whether it will go mainstream this side of the pond, but it has quite an interesting funding model. In return for putting up with ads, users earn "lunchbox money" that they can turn into real cash to support actual causes.

Secondly, Virgin Mobile in the US has been running a pro-social awareness raising campaign on the issue of youth homelessness. In return for a text message, a hoodie was donated to a young homeless person. It's difficult to equate the equivalent easy win for YouthNet, but using mobiles to raise funds still seems like something worth tapping into.

The great thing about being an online charity is that we have a worldwide presence, even if our target beneficiaries are in the UK. Anastasia has already been bigging up YouthNet in Business Week, and more importantly referring young people who get in contact with her to TheSite.org. And we've been talking about joining a proposal to develop an application in partnership with another US organisation we like: YouthNoise.

Overall I think the thing I left the conference with was actually how (not surprisingly) the issues that our US-cousins are facing are pretty much the same as we are. If you change a few of the brand names, ignore the accent and don't mind that they say "mobil" where we say "mobile" there is very little difference between us.

Olly is Editorial Manager of YouthNet.

My new favourite video...

Olly Benson — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:58:56 +0000

Every so often something comes along and "blindsides you on a some lazy Tuesday afternoon" (as I believe Baz Lurhmann once said). Anyway, this dropped into my inbox, and I have to say it's totally changed my perception of one charity as a result. It's a bit long, but worth it for the pay-off and the simple message at the end.

Our ambitious plans for do-it.org.uk

Sam Thomas — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:02:59 +0000

We are very proud of our achievements at do-it.org.uk. Over the past eight years, with the support of our voluntary sector partners, we've built the UK's largest volunteering database, containing more than one million opportunities to volunteer.

But that's not all. We now have over 300,000 registered volunteers who apply for more than 30,000 volunteering opportunities with over 21,000 charities each month.

That's a lot of people, doing a lot of volunteering. But we're not ready to stop there. We believe volunteering can transform society, and we want to connect more people with the causes that need their help.

To help us do just that, we have launched a fundraising campaign that will help us revolutionise do-it.org.uk.

Some of our registered volunteers will have received an email about this campaign today. If you are one of them, I hope the email you received conveyed just how passionate we are about volunteering, and the difference it can make to the world.

We'll keep you updated on our plans for do-it.org.uk on this blog, but if you have any thoughts, ideas or suggestions, why not add them as a comment to this post?

Skills London

Natasha Judd — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:33:49 +0000

The team's just come back from the first day of Skills London, a careers fair for 14 to 19-year-olds at the ExCeL centre. This is our third Skills event since September – and we've had stands for TheSite.org and the Life Choices consortium at each of them.

On TheSite.org stand, we've got a laptop with the website on show. We're handing out postcards and taking orders from schools and colleges. We're telling young people about the Respect? campaign and getting them to sign our pledge. With each event I'm getting better at describing what TheSite.org in a couple of sentences. Forget 15 minutes of fame – here we've got 15 seconds to attract someone's attention or they'll move onto the next stand.

The Life Choices consortium stand allows us to get young people's thoughts on this exciting new project, which has been funded by The Vodafone Foundation and v. We've got two panels on the back wall. One says, 'What life choices do you need to make this year?'; the other says 'What would make these choices easier?' Visitors write their answers on post-it notes and stick them on the wall. They can also use do-it.org.uk to sign up to be a volunteer as a website or marketing adviser or a content creator for the new website.

Fiona, Rosie and Kuljeet on the Life Choices consortium stand this morning
With each event, I'm getting better at judging how many bags of sweets we'll need for a day, how many pens we'll lose, how long it'll take me to set up the laptops. You'd think after a while I'd get a bit blasé. But the great thing about a live event is speaking to so many different people – some of whom have heard about us before, some of whom are learning about TheSite.org and YouthNet for the first time. It's totally exhausting, but somehow it's also energising and inspiring as well.

We'll be on stand E54 at Skills London from 9.30am-3.00pm tomorrow and 10.00am-4.00pm on Saturday if anyone out there in the blogosphere wants to come by and say hello.

Congratulations Jamie!

Sam Thomas — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:35:56 +0000

We had some news that put a spring in our step this today - one of our legendary Royal Parks Half Marathon runners, Jamie Markham, has been selected as Justgiving's "Fundraiser of the Month"!

Jamie went above and beyond the call of duty for YouthNet, raising well over £3,000 and recruiting another three runners for us in the process.

What makes this extra special for us is that the Royal Parks Half Marathon was our first "mass participation" fundraising event, and Jamie's contribution in terms of fundraising and recruiting other runners sent a long way to making the event a success for us.

In fact, you could say he really went the extra mile for YouthNet! (sorry - I'll get my coat).

Congratulations to Jamie and thanks to Justgiving for highlighting his fantastic support!

Newsflash: young people speak out

Sophie Manning — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:29:48 +0000

Even the most tough-nut, savvy Press Officer will tell you how difficult it is to influence the media. Imagine how powerless a young person with no industry experience feels to change what's in the news.

And yet quite a lot of what's in the news affects us. Reports swing between demands for tougher sentences on young criminals and polemic about the latest government policy to protect the young from themselves. Constantly discussed but rarely consulted, we're developing an image that we just don't recognise at all, and it's completely outside of our control.

Or is it?

YouthNet and the British Youth Council believe in helping young people to take control of their lives. That's why we started the Respect? Campaign, which has been seeking to end unfair representation of young people for over three years. This was our thinking:

Just like racism or homophobia, the current trend for youth-bashing is a form of prejudice. And like any other prejudice, it's not going to go away without a struggle. Of course those young people that go about their lives quietly doing good are not going to get the recognition they deserve, because at the moment they're not the ones writing the news.

The third phase of the Respect? Campaign is about admitting that it's really up to us to tackle misrepresentation actively. For some people, getting their opinion printed or published or even posted online would be like flying up to the clouds in an aeroplane and asking them not to rain. But it doesn't have to be like that. The campaign is providing information, guidance and suggestions about what we can do; here are some of them:

1) Tackle the mainstream media: writing a letter to the editor or posting a comment on internet news portals reaches a surprising number of people and can be quite a buzz.

2) Comment on blogs or start your own. The internet is a network of opinions where one person's views are as valid as the next. It's the news agenda, but not as we know it – open and democratic.

3) Volunteer: do-it.org has thousands of opportunities listed under 'Marketing, PR and Media'. By volunteering as a media assistant or doing shifts on your local hospital radio, you'll be getting yourself heard and gaining experience at the same time. Two birds, one stone, and no good excuses not to!

4) Sign our pledge to do some of these things: we're hoping 1000 people will join us. Join the Respect? Facebook group to find out more.

The big launch

After some practices (girls in front? Boys in front? People at the side? People holding it up?) we were joined by Martyn Lewis, the famous ex BBC broadcaster, to do his thing with the microphone. Once we'd all stopped messing about, we think the five or six photographers managed to get some nice, striking photos, while some of us stood on the street handing out flyers to young passers by, asking them to sign our pledge and get their voice heard too.

Getting noticed as a committed young person, and being at the centre of the media's attention for once, felt really good. Ok, maybe the front page was a bit ambitious...but a little effort could help other young people understand that it's our news too!

Today the weather was on our side as we launched the third phase of the campaign. Several members of the Respect? Young People's Advisory Group struggled up Fleet Street with a billboard designed to look like a huge newspaper front page. We wanted to go somewhere with a sense of the media's long tradition – a history we're hoping to change the digital age marches on.

Engaging the digital natives

Patrick Daniels — Wed, 5 Nov 2008 13:39:45 +0000

For the purposes of this piece, the digital natives are young people who have grown up not knowing a time when the internet and other digital technology hasn't been around. Let's focus on the opportunities that the internet is opening up. In particular:

The evolution of this new kind of online virtual reality
The step change in information and advice provision that the internet has enabled in a new more open society
The internet's social effects and how getting together in groups has got easier

Exploring the online virtual reality

Today young people are faced with living in a new kind of virtual reality- an online virtual reality.

It's important not to get carried away, virtual realities are nothing new: since humans have been able to imagine, virtual realities have existed. Art, fiction and dreams have all conjured up powerful 'virtual' realities down the ages.

But this new digital virtual reality is different.

It's persists (our lives lived in this virtual digital reality can stick around for a lot longer than we ever imagined)
It's searchable (not only does it stick around- we are getting cleverer at opening up this reality to new search technologies)
And it's coming to a home near you (anyone with online access can reach this information)

This is a virtual reality that is breaking down the conventional barriers between public and private lives. The boundaries between our public and private lives is blurring.

For example, who has a Facebook account with work friends and home friends, and has had some kind of situation where some of your home friends have posted a photo of you in a home friends kind of a party- and now your work friends get to see what you get up to at the weekend.

To give you another example, who checks private emails at work, or who gets work emails to a private email address?

Who knows who is reading your emails when you send them? You think you know, but how often have emails been forwarded on repeatedly to people the original sender of the email (you) never would have imagined might eventually read them? Who has hit the 'reply to all button' or replied to a group email list- thinking they were just replying to the sender?

Who has taken part in a online discussion in a chat session, discussion board or forum? Who do you know has seen what you wrote? You don't. Before, when you wrote an article in a newspaper or print publication or letter, you didn't know who read it either. The difference with digital is that we often kid ourselves that we do know to a greater degree than we should. Or may be our sense of security comes from far off and unclear consequences. This can lead to sharing parts of our private lives or thoughts that in days gone by we would never have dreamt of having done. In short, the line between our public and private lives is blurring.

As a result, if we want to engage young digital natives in our youth work, one of the first things we need to be able to do is consider their privacy and confidentiality. If you're looking at third party apps that are remotely hosted, the following offer options to limit access to the content you publish on the web:

Google Sites - allows you to create web pages and then control who can view and edit them. We've used Google Sites to set up a secure space online to help support peer advisors who answer relationships questions on advice service askTheSite
Vox - is blogging software that gives you the ability to set privacy controls for every post - let your friends see some, your colleagues others. You don't have to share everything with the world
Drop.io - allows you to fileshare simply, upload the files to a URL you create and then set an access password as necessary

Open Society

One of the things that gets people most excited about the web is that it promises to change our society. Let's get political for a second. One way of seeing society before the internet is to see it as a wheel or hub. At the centre of the wheel are the people who traditional have been the main sources of information in our society.

Information has been held centrally. However, since the invention of the printing press that model has progressively been challenged more and more. Now with the internet more and more people have the means to publish, the means to distribute what they publish and possibility to interact with their audience.

The possibility for access to all kinds of information we need in our day to day lives is unprecedented. Young people have an opportunity now, as we all do, to be empowered to make the choices that are appropriate to them in their circumstances.

For example, take financial information in a survey YouthNet conducted in partnership with Citizens Advice, young people told us that the internet was the first place they looked for financial advice, after parents and friends.

All this means today with potential access to an unprecedented level of information, we are faced with a new kind of problem: with this quantity of information out there now, how do we find the information we need, when we need it? In many cases it can seem like a case of information overload.

Three examples of where to start in the fight to make the firehose of online information manageable are:

Delicious.com - we've used Delicious to help manage the online resources we've collected whilst looking for support for our users to askTheSite, such as articles, videos, organisations and services
Advanced Google - may be pointing out that Google is a great way of finding needles in haystacks of info on the web is a bit like getting gran to suck eggs. However, many overlook a bunch of advanced Google features like restricting your search to a single domain or using related pages to pull up clean lists of similar organisations
Local advice finder - we offer access to UK Advice Finder (UKAF) for free on TheSite.org. UKAF is a database of advice services that the professionals use to identify support for their users
Socialmedian.com - is a brand new site just out of private beta that offers a fresh approach to collating and organising news information according to the topics and subjects that interest you

Group forming - getting social

The social effects of the internet are only really now being felt as this new technology is becoming bedded in to our technology today. Social uses of the new internet technology have in the past almost been an afterthought. Now, as Clay Shirky says in his book 'Here Comes Everybody', group action just got easier.

Shirky points out that one of the most powerful social networking tools on the internet has been the 'reply to all' button in email. It allows groups to be formed at the touch of a button. For the first time it was as easy to reply to everyone the sender of the message had contacted, as it was to contact the sender alone. This meant that groups could formed in an instant based on the fundamental equality that anyone could contact anyone else.

Now we're surrounded by social web applications like Facebook, MySpace and the others. But it's easy to forget that these have really only sprung up during the course of 2007. As far as designing a social web, it's really early days.

Shirky has done a lot to focus the debate on social effects of the internet. You don't need organisations to organize nowadays. A favourite example was the students who grouped together to campaign against the HSBC's decision to scrap its promised interest free overdrafts at the beginning of the student year in 2007.

What makes this new digital age of the internet particularly distinctive has been that not only can we publish and distribute quickly and easily; we can now congregate and interact with this content too. This means that any web page now effectively the seed of a new online community.

In the past, it's worth noting how many charities trace their beginnings back to a letter or article published in the pages of a newspaper, Amnesty International, War on Want and Rethink to name but a few. Now this same phenomenon continues but on a scale hitherto unimagined. Every news article published on the internet draws together people with diverse passions or interests by stimulating comments either directly on the same web page or indirectly on another blog.

Guide to Modding (moderating) on TheSite.org - Building community requires support for users, as well as security. In practical terms, this means that anyone who moderates needs to be able to offer support to users in need, not just to keep the community secure from spam or other kinds of abuse.

100 top learning tools - It's crucial to think through how we can make our opportunities for young people to engage also opportunities to learn. Jane Hart has one of the best run downs of great e-learning tools out there on the web.

Finally, the most important place to look for new web tools is of course from the young people themselves that we, as organisations, are hoping to engage. Sounds obvious - but in the new digital age whose social effects are only just being felt and understood, being driven by the needs and lives of young people is not just a question of good practice, it's about remaining relevant and being able to justify our existence.

What YouthNet staff get to after work (part 2)...

Olly Benson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 15:07:58 +0000

Regular readers of the YouthNet blog (if such people exist) will have seen my post last week about me and 25 other colleagues spending an evening after work packing condoms to send out to TheSite.org users.

But that's not all we do outside office hours. As an organisation that champions volunteering, it was heartening to see from a recent staff survey just how many of us volunteer, and what diversity there is.

Here's an incomplete list :

Al Arabiyyah Al Islamiyyah
Alzheimers Society
Amnesty International
British Humanist Association
Cancer Research UK
CTT
Citizenship Foundation
Epilepsy Action
Fairtrade Foundation
The Food Chain
Friends of the Earth
Greater London Volunteering
GUCH
Guatemala Solidarity Network
Leukemia Research
Manor Gardens Befriending Scheme
Masjid-e-Umer Trust
Oxfam
Terrence Higgins Trust
RSPB
RSPCA
UNICEF
Waltham Forest Faith Communities Forum
Ummah Welfare Trust
World Vision
WaterAid
WWF
York Lesbian Arts Festival (YLAF)
Young Achievers Trust.

I can claim two of those.

A fundraising success story for the internet age

Sam Thomas — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:01:25 +0000

I'm sure you've all picked up on the British Humanist Association's campaign to raise £5,500 in order to run some ads on bendy buses in London.

To give you a brief summary - they reached their fundraising target by 10.06am on the first day of their campaign. As I write, they have now raised over £112,000.

This is obviously a hugely successful campaign, but one of the things I love the most about it is how it began, and the completely pivtoal role the web has played in it's success. The idea for the campaign came from Guardian journalist Ariane Sherine back in June this year. Pledgebank was then used to generate more support for the campaign, their justgiving page was set up (check out the Justgiving blog for some great stats on the number of donations) - and the result is a smashed fundraising target, acres of press coverage and a spate of similar pledges on Pledgebank.

Whatever anyone thinks about the campaign, it couldn't have happened in a pre-internet age.

Imagine the resource that would be needed to get this up and running using the phone, a pen and some paper. I also think that many fundraisers will be surprised that so many people have donated towards an advert on a bus - as opposed to wells, mosquito nets or vaccines.

So, whilst the end product (an ad on a bus) isn't particularly emotive, it is very tangible, it clearly resonates with many people and, most importantly for me, the campaign has created a sense of togetherness and being "in it together" to create something new.

What YouthNet staff get up to after work...

Olly Benson — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:26:05 +0100

Yesterday it involved condoms and beer (from TheSite.org blog).

Sex and the Scouts

Olly Benson — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 16:48:08 +0100

Was I the only person who saw the news that Scout leaders are going to start giving sexual health advice to the young people in their charge and wondered, not why are they doing that, but what have they been doing up to now?

Sex education in this country is rubbish. There are pockets of brilliance, but too often sex education is taught by people who don't particularly want to, in the wrong setting (school) and in the wrong way ("I tell you this. You listen.").

Youth workers aren't just babysitters: they help young people develop as individuals through informal education. When I saw the headlines this morning, I couldn't help wondering whether tomorrow the papers would be leading with "Firemen to fight fires". Engaging with young people and educating them about their sexual health is *exactly* what youth leaders should be doing.

Much that I think PSE and Citizenship should be part of the national curriculum, it's not enough to simply fit it between Maths and Geography with some fact sheets and the odd video thrown in to make it interactive. Young people need to be given the space, time and right environment to explore their identity, and youth groups are excellent places to be doing this.

So, congratulations to the Scouts for teaching sex education; but stop being so apologetic for it.

Olly

Only two more sleeps to go...

Felicity Jones — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:46:25 +0100

...until the big run. I haven't had a minute to myself this week to be able to create an interesting and newsworthy blog about what I've been up to in these last couple of weeks before the Royal Parks Half Marathon.

Instead as the dreaded day looms I’d just like to wish my fellow runners a huge good luck and a massive you should be very proud of yourselves, now run for your lives.

Finally a very special good luck to Dan and Sarah and if you are reading this and haven’t sponsored us yet please do so at www.justgiving.com/royalrun THANK YOU!

Online Cultivation & Stewardship

Sam Thomas — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 09:40:32 +0100

There's a lot of talk nowadays about stewardship, cultivation and online fundraising. Sometimes I think these terms are used interchangably and I get the impression that many of us aren't clear about what exactly they mean.

I'm always keen to get different perspectives on this, so I was interested to see The Gilbert Center's short survey covering these issues. It only takes a few minutes to complete, and the more of us that complete it, the more meaningful the results will be. He's the link:

http://news.gilbert.org/clickThru/redir/6731/rms

I'm particularly interested in seeing the results of the question about separate budget allocation for stewardship and cultivation - I'm not sure that this is something that most charities have thought much about.

Yay for us

Sam Thomas — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 13:54:43 +0100

Excuse the self-congratulatory tone of this post, but we've won awards a-plenty recently and we're really pleased about it!

First of all we won Fundraising Charity of the Year at the 2008 Professional Fundraising Awards, followed by the Open Internet Award at the Nominet 2008 Best Practice Challenge.

Then guess what happened? Yes, we won another one - this time Best Charity to Work For at the 2008 Charity Times Awards.

Pretty awesome huh?

New TheSite.org postcards now available

Natasha Judd — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:48:13 +0100

It's always exciting when the boxes arrive. Even when you've been working on a campaign for months, even when you know the graphic design of a piece of collateral intimately, even if you can recite the copy word-for-word, there's nothing like opening up that first box of postcards and holding that finished product in your hands.

Last week, we had our first delivery of the new TheSite.org postcards, designed by the lovely people at Point Blank Collective. Here's the front of four of them:

Chat-up lines may not be the best way to get a relationship started (refer to TheSite.org for more advice on that one), but they make us laugh and we think they're great for any sort of social setting.

If you're from a college, youth group or similar and would like some of these postcards to display in areas where 16 to 24-year-olds hang out, you can now order them through our online form.

The postcards have also started appearing in postcard racks in student unions and cafes around the country, as well as other venues here in London. They'll also be accompanying us to the Regional Skills events in Newcastle (30 September – 1 October) and Sheffield (8 – 9 October). If you spot one, pick it up and use it to enter our fantastic competition. There's a Sumo bean bag up for grabs for the winning entry.

We'll also soon be launching matching banner ads. They're just getting their final design tweaked, before being delivered - amongst similar levels of excitement - into our inboxes. I'll let you know when they arrive.

Do volunteers get drunk?

Olly Benson — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:38:52 +0100

Recently I heard of a volunteering organisation that has introduced a ban on its name or logo appearing on any clothing that will primarily be worn for socialising. As a significant number of their volunteers are students; the ban is particularly aimed at those going on group pub crawls etc. The organisation is worried about the negative association of their brand with a bunch of rowdy students off-their-faces creating their own pavement pizzas in the small hours.

I have no doubt that this organisation isn’t alone in introducing such a ban, and you can sort of understand the reasoning behind it.

But, given that one of the major findings of the Russell Commission (the inquiry caterpillar that turned into the V butterfly) was that most young people thought the image of volunteering needed to change, then perhaps it’s not bad thing that volunteers are seen to go out on the lash.

It might also help to dispel the notion that the young people out pubbing and clubbing on Friday and Saturday night are somehow different to those who give up their free time to do goodly deeds. Chances are they are often the same people.

Perhaps next year’s Volunteers’ Week should simply be a piss-up?

You only hear what you want to...

Felicity Jones — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:05:07 +0100

...the above phrase is something I have heard (mainly) the women in my life say many times in a number of different variations, 'you only see what you want to see' and so on. I think this is otherwise known as selective hearing, perhaps you only hear certain bits or in the case of the males in my life they only hear what they want to hear. This selective hearing thing is something I have really taken to heart when it comes to my training schedule for the Royal Parks Half Marathon. In particular I've found I'm pretty good at selective reading. So the 'manual' says the following:

The book says, 'eat a balanced diet' I read, eat anything you want, you are in training so why not, actually the more chocolate and chips the better.

The website told me to, 'run at a steady pace and speed up slowly'. I interpret this to mean run slowly, it's more important to get through it than to do it in a distant time.

My friend told me to, 'make sure you rest in between runs to eliminate chances of injury', surely their saying not to train very much.

The guidelines say, 'make sure you drink plenty of water', I prefer just drink plenty.

My point is despite all the advice I've heard and my training plans best efforts I've had to ditch it all as I'm simply not taking it in. With only three weeks to go panic is beginning to set in...

Be great...

Olly Benson — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:50:32 +0100

This is a very good website from the states promoting getting involved / volunteering with Boys and Girls Club of America. I'm guessing it's aimed more at the adults than the kids...

And from a purely radio-anorak point of view; this is possibly the best use of soundscaping I've seen used on the internet.

Olly

Are you feeling the crunch?

Sam Thomas — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:40:39 +0100

A couple of interesting news snippets caught my eye this week, in the midst of the current financial chaos.

Surprisingly, two of the three were good news stories. The first was Cancer Research UK raising a whopping £420 million in 2007/08, and the second was City Action's comments in the Sunday Times about volunteering by City employees being up by 40% on last year.

On the flip side, The Guardian reports today that charities are "reeling" from the impact of the current economic crisis.

Somewhat boringly for this post, it's probably too early to tell how great the effect will be on fundraising. One thing is definitely true though - the more eggs we have in different baskets the better. Cancer Research demonstrate this pretty well - their income pie chart is fairly evenly distributed, which should help them ride out the financial storm.

We've tried to broaden our income streams over the past few years for precisely this reason, and I certainly wouldn't feel that comfortable right now being a charity that's very dependent on donations from the private sector.

So, are any other fundraisers out there feeling the crunch?

What becomes of an ex-volunteer?

Olly Benson — Mon, 1 Sep 2008 09:24:09 +0100

Two months ago I left the organisation I'd been volunteering with since I was a kid. It was a fairly amicable split (at least on my part) and I'd been planning it for a while. The reasons that I left aren't that important (nor particularly interesting); what is more significant is what happens now.

When you leave an established job, unless you've been disciplined out or made redundant by evil new management, the chances are when you have your farewell drinks won't be the last time you remain in contact with the organisation or it's employees. The level you stay in touch is really up to you: from setting up your own consultancy that your old company then hires you back to do the work you were previously doing whilst in their pay, through to an occasional drink with your former colleagues when you happen to be near their office.

Good managers recognise that as an ex-employee you have tremendous knowledge and experience about what they do, and often it's a good idea to keep you on side. Quite often that's informal; I've occasionally taken calls or emails from my previous place of work asking "how did you do that when you were here?" or "can you remember the code for this thing?". And generally I'm happy to answer them.

But with volunteering it's a bit different. Because there is no payment involved, any contact you have with an organisation is "volunteering", and once you step down from being a volunteer for them, then it needs to be a total split. In a lot of ways, that's a good thing; otherwise you get the infamous voluntary sector workload-creep, and suddenly you find that despite leaving the organisation you are still doing things for them and worrying about them.

However, it also means that volunteer organisations aren't very good at building on best practice: if someone has been doing a role for a while and then leaves, you need them to be able to explain why they made the choices they did in their role, so others don't have to go through the same learning experience. Volunteers, like employees, can have huge knowledge bases about a particular area of your organisation's field of work.

And whilst employees have to give notice periods, volunteers can be here-today-gone-tomorrow. They can leave right in the middle of a project or event. I've known projects that have come to a standstill as a result of a key volunteer leaving. How many websites are there which haven't been updated since a volunteer webmaster quit – often forgetting (or refusing) to pass the login details on?

As for me - I'm not quite sure what my next move is. But, I've already had several invites to be involved in things for the organisation I left. On the one hand, it's flattering to be recognised for the contribution that I can make. On the other, I left for a reason. That should tell them all they need to know.

Do-It day

Olly Benson — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:03:52 +0100

The TUC have launched a new campaign to have a new bank holiday, and suggested that rather than it just being an excuse to get horribly drunk and regret it the next day; this day should be a Community Day where people would be encouarged to spend a day volunteering and doing something different.

Knowing most of the volunteers that I do, they'd be automatically volunteering on that day anyway (be it formally or just spending an extra day doing paperwork and all that other hidden volunteering that goes on). What we need it a way of encouraging new people to take up volunteering, to "do it" if you will.... perhaps having a really easy website where you could sign up to one million volunteering opportunities.

Therefore, and perhaps this is a bit cheeky---but it is the Friday before a Bank Holiday---I'd like to propose that it's not named Community Day, but Do-It Day.

Oh, and we've already got the website to support it: do-it.org.uk.

Changing TheSite.org

Olly Benson — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:48:00 +0100

Alongside our regular day-to-day stuff is another stream of work looking at how we change TheSite.org. There are various levels of work going on; including a fairly quick but quite major sprucing up of the look of the site, which you should see the results of in the next month or so. Beyond that there is a much deeper, bigger and more wide-ranging discussion about how we change TheSite.org.

So we've been running a blog for the last month at changethesite.org which hopefully will promote discussion both internally and externally about what we want to do with TheSite.org.

I'm glad to say that DK from MediaSnackers is the first of a number of external contributors we've asked to be involved. You can read his answers, plus some other thoughts and stuff at changethesite.org. And you'll find more information, plus ways to contribute, at the end of the blog!

Happy reading....

Olly