Live

The Youth Summit has been a great success for all those who attended, bringing together practitioners, policy makers and young people to discuss the key issues affecting the implementation of the Government’s ten-year strategy for children and young people. A wealth of ideas, debate and dialogue were generated, the most relevant of which have been captured as video interviews, podcasts, powerpoints and transcripts downloadable from this website. We will ensure it informs our work as we move forward and hope you find it valuable as well.

Throughout the Summit we were recording workshops and plenary sessions through Youth Summit Live. Below are links to some of the key posts in each theme.

Staying Safe

• Summary workshop notes from day 1: assessment of the challenges and a full list of day 1 workshop notes give an overview of the staying safe topics covered. The workshop was led by young people from Corby using an attitude finder activity
• Discussions of the harm caused Mosquito devices played a big part in the workshop, as the young people from Corby tell is in this video interview and as a workshop participant reflects in this one.
• Workshop notes from day 2: priorities for action give a sense of the issues that participants wanted to take forward.
• Darshna from Churchfield Primary School also used the blogging feature on Youth Summit Live to offer an imagined advice column to young people on issues of bullying.

Being Healthy

• The summary workshop notes from day 1: assessment of the challenges in health give an overview of where we are falling short for young people, with all the different issues identified covered in this post.
• Workshop notes from day 2: priorities for action gives a wide-ranging list of priorities from the health workshops, focussing in particular on funding and investment, better sex and relationship education, and improved training and sharing of good practise.
• A what's changed example and two videos from the Maypole centre help explore some good practise sharing
• Plus - we captured the launch of Youth Access's new resources on commissioning mental health services for young people

Enjoying and Achieving

• The workshop notes from day 1: assessment of the challenges build up a clear picture of where change is needed.
• Young people from NACRO Newcastle who led these workshops put enjoying and achievement into practise whilst at the summit - by making the most of their London visit and working hard to build a presentation overnight including their photos from around the city that fed into day 2.
• The workshop notes from day 2: priorities for action identifies a range of campaigning, spending, policy and practise changes required.
• A presentation from Actions Speak Louder highly commended project Rolling Base

Having Economic Wellbeing

• The workshop notes from day 1: assessment of the challenges set out some serious topics for discussion on day 2.
• But as the woorkshop notes from day 2: priorities for action show - the group generated practical forward planning ideas and shared examples of where action to ensure young people economic wellbeing can work.
• We also capture Anthony Lawton's three tests for good housing through Bill's blogging and a discussion has developed on this blog post about gangs placed in the economic wellbeing category.

Making a positive contribution

• The making a positive contribution workshop notes from day 1: give a wider ranging assessment of the challenges, added to by points from the young volunteers helping lead the session
• The notes from day 2 with priorities are here. The group had a particularly interesting set of discussions about compulsory volunteering.
• Mike from Yomo, watching Youth Summit Live whilst working in Ireland, shared some background resources that might be useful for organisations exploring young peoples volunteering and participation.

Plus - outside the core themes of the Youth Summit we had lots of activity on Youth Summit Live. This poem started of a wave of creativity, surfed by Barney from conference organisers NSA with this poetic input. Holly Hill proved to be star blogger, regularly dropping into the media centre to share her reflections. Plus - Tom Wylie's suggestion that there be a national Youth Board sparked a lot of discussion, including an online poll and a couple of video interviews.

Where next for Youth Summit Live?

The Youth Summit Live website will continue to be available and open for contributions for another couple of weeks. After that, we'll pause the ability to add information - but will keep it available so that practioners, policy makers and young people alike can share the collected wisdom and insights of all Youth Summit Live contributors.

The National Youth Agency, supported by Practical Participation is starting a deeper exploration of how methods like this can help us to communicate with and deepen our dialogue with young people and other NYA stakeholder alike. We'd welcome your continued comments, reflections and input.

The Youth Summit Live model

Youth Summit Live was concieved, designed, developed and run in just under a fortnight by Tim Davies of Practical Participation, working with the organising team for Youth Summit live from the National Youth Agency and Neil Stuarts Associates. It was championed and supported by Bill Badham. The Roving Reporters team made the media happen by roving through the Youth Summit gathering photos, reports and more. If you have any feedback about Youth Summit Live; you're interested in exploring how a Youth Summit Live style model could work at an event you are running; or you are interested in wider explorations of how new media can work for your organisation or project, please do contact tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk.

So, the final session of the conference is happening, and we're setting down the media centre.

Over the last two days there have been 100s of visitors to Youth Summit Live - and over 80 different contributions to the site.

Notes from all the workshops are here, as well as comments, video interviews and more - on topics from Mosquito devices, via the idea of a national Youth Board with a Ministerial chair, right through to evaluations of the food and the fun.

But this isn't the end of the blogging. We'll be back in the morning Thursday to summarise some of the posts that have been made and to make sure you can find the information you need. And we'll be keeping the site open to comments and access for at least the next month.

We hope you've enjoyed the Youth Summit Live experience - and do let us know your thoughts and feedback.

And do get in touch if you'd like to explore a similar new-media aspect to events you are running the future :)

What a day!

The Youth Summit has been generating a wealth of information and dialogue and we've been trying to capture as much of it as possible here on http://live.youthsummit.co.uk

You can see how quickly posts came into the site by taking a look at the Timeline. We've had blog posts from young people and adults at the event, reflecting on different parts of the event and inputting views. Plus check out the video interviews on YouTube reflecting some of the debates of the day.

You can also view write ups from each of the workshops today (well, yesterday by now - but from day 1...) by clicking the 'Themes' at the top of the front page... or if you fancy exploring the input in a more interactive way - this 'tag cloud' will show you the frequency of particular phrases and words in the reports from each session. The size of a word in the tag cloud represents how many times it occurred in the workshop reports...

And if you're finding it a challenge to keep up with all the information being shared here on Youth Summit Live, look out for a summary of key issues from the Roving Reporters newsletter available in the morning at the Conference Centre and here online.

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"

Watch the video for quick introduction to the site...

Welcome to the Youth Summit Live website

From here you can:

• Follow what happens at the Youth Summit
• Record your reflections and inputs into the summit if you are present
• Add your voice to the summit if you've not been able to make it
• Share and view a range of supporting information that can inform dialogue at the Youth Summit and beyond.

For more information, find the Youth Summit Live team at the event, or call/text Tim on 07834 856 303.

I'm just putting the final touches to the Youth Summit Live website.

Through this site you'll be able to see live reporting from the Youth Summit, and you'll be able to input your ideas, reflections and thoughts into the discussions - whether you can make it to the summit or not.

Look out for more information on Friday about how it will work for you...