Live

On Monday and Tuesday next week I'll be at the Youth Summit co-ordinating 'Youth Summit Live'
- an online space for capturing input from the conference, and opening
up the conference to a wider audience and range of inputs.

The billing for the Youth Summit sets out a big challenge:

The Youth Summit will herald the new era of service provision
for young people with emerging priorities from the Government’s
ten-year strategy for children and young people and the Comprehensive
Spending Review. The event will explore the Government’s ‘youth offer’
and map out the policy landscape for outcome-driven services for young
people and their communities. It will hear directly from a wide range
of young people as experts by experience.

This two-day event will bring together Government Ministers,
senior officials, leading policy makers, service providers and a panel
of 100 young people from across England, forging dynamic links between
young people, communities and government. Delegates will take an active
part in moving from words to action to help ensure improved services
and outcomes for young people.

And the plan is that Youth Summit Live will create a platform to capture the mapping, whilst also recording and opening up to wider dialogue, plans for action.

The platform itself is a quickly put together Drupal
website set-up with four types of content which both those at the
summit and interested parties who aren't there on the day can
contribute to:

• Blog posts - inviting narrative and free comment
• Where are we now? - Assessment of provision for young people at present (linked to the workshop discussions on day 1)
• Where do we want to be? - Space to identify priorities for action (linked to the workshops on day 2)
• Supporting Evidence - Additional content which can inform the dialogues at the Summit

The Summit itself is structured around the Every Child Matters
(ECM) outcomes framework, with workshops taking place on each of the
five ECM outcomes on both the first and second day. Content submitted
to Youth Summit Live
can therefore be categorised by ECM outcomes and the plan is to pull
out all the content under each heading at the end of day 1, and make as
much of it as possible physically present in the workshop rooms for day
2.

I'm also on the look out for good visualisations that can be
projected up on walls to help the information collected make a big
impact straight away. Suggestions on that front welcome. I'm making use
of the timeline widget for drupal, and news bubbles, and I'm exploring some RSS screensavers - but I've so far failed to find an easy-to-implement system to convert rss feeds to newsmaps.

Challenges
One of the challenges we face is that the conference centre WiFi is too
expensive to be made available free to delegates, so we have relatively
conduits for content input and output. We've got paper versions of some
of the 'Where are we now?' and 'Where do we want to be?' input forms -
so we can capture content directly from workshops and then convert it
into a digital 'live' record - and we'll be running a small blogging
station when laptops are not being used by workshop fascilitators - but
we are limited in the chanels through which we can invite input and
share live feeds of content from the Youth Summit Live site. That said,
we will have a team of young roving reporters
with us at the event creating an overnight newsletter - so that should
provide some extra space sharing the outputs of Youth Summit Live - and
I'm off to explore mobile-phone enabling the website...

Opportunities
Whatever the challenges, Monday
and Tuesday are certainly set to be really exciting (if exhausting...).
We've got over 100 young people taking part in the Youth Summit, and
we've got a number of digital and social media activists joining us,
including DK from Mediasnackers, Steve Moore from Policy Unplugged,
and a group of young people from a radio project linked to the Ministry
of Justice. There is a lot to go into the mix - and, as the youth
summit billing says, we quite probably are on the edge of "a new era of service provision for young people"