blog.

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.

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!