blog archive.

We are very excited to announce that we have joined forces with CERNIS Ltd an independent London based company specialising in the development and improvement of children’s services and we have gone and won our first tender!

We will be working together to develop a new online tool to assist with evidencing the impact of young people’s participation on the mental health services that they receive.

The direct engagement of young people has been central to policy in recent years as a means of informing commissioners and service providers. This has been influential in delivering improvements to practice and lasting outcomes. This programme will build on previous work in this area, but by introducing a web based platform, far more young people will be able to become involved.

Workshops with groups of young people will be taking place across the country to gain their feedback on the look, feel, features and functionality of the tool and how it should be used. The application is scheduled to be launched in early 2011.

We’ll keep you posted on progress!

I have had the pleasure this morning to support Les Compton of Bristol City Council with presenting our website Go Places Do Things at the Engage event at the Watershed.

The workshop was arranged to discuss digital tools for participation and active citizenship with participants from the UK, Germany and Denmark.

ENGAGE is a continuing professional development programme for European youth workers who wish to understand the new ICT-enabled culture and explore how web 2.0 and social media tools can help to extend and enhance their practice.

Les and I went along to talk about our participation with young people while developing and evolving the GPDT site, as well as discussing the challenges that we have faced and the plans for the future. We discussed the access we have given to youth workers and other activity providers for adding their own events and direct feeds that have been set up from the BCC events online and 1 Big Database.

After Bristol the programme will move to Aarhus, Denmark and then on to Hannover in Germany where participants will continue to develop their understanding of how developments in ICT and online technologies can amplify and extend the voice of young people in European society.

The session was really interesting and we had the opportunity to discuss the other online solutions that people have set up, as well as talking about how to get young people to participate and engage as young editors on website content.

I will certainly be following the progress of the programme via the Engage website and will be looking to keep in touch with some of the participants at the workshop.

Google and Youtube announced one of the most far reaching and ambitious (and ruddy exciting!) user generated content experiments yesterday.

Life in a Day is a film project, asking people the world over to upload a film of a day in their life - specifically July 24th, 2010.

The idea is to get as many people as possible to upload their films, which will then be sifted through by such illuminati as Ridley Scott (no less!) and edited down to a feature length film to take to the Sundance Film Festival.

Never ones to shy away from a challenge, we'll be weilding our acting / production / general 'luvvie' skills and winding up to the big day on 24th July.

Keep you posted with any storylines as they take shape, and of course any news of irreconcilable artistic differences!

Any ideas of what we should do, or if you want to submit something for us to include, get in touch!

As we announced previously Connexions West of England is now called Learning Partnership West and we have just launched their new website.

This is the first phase of the project set up to promote the new brand and services. Additional phases are in the pipeline that will see the introduction of user accounts for access to additional features and a whole new area for the Shared Commissioning Services.

You can see the website here and LPW would love to receive your comments on the site and/or questions about their service.

The new Connexions West website (a delivery branch of LPW), which will be purely tailored towards their young service users, will be launched at the beginning of September. It will include a new website design and tools such as an online CV builder and eConsultations – making the organisations online offering far more interactive.

Whilst we normally write about matters of the web, we think it's sometimes good to pause and reflect on other creative disciplines that can inspire our general life. 

Here are two short pieces that are brilliant and worth seeing no matter what you're interested in. Thank you to Creative Review for spotting them first.

Parkour flipbook animation:

Amnesty International: Death to the Death Penalty: