Youth Information Platform

ERYICA and Youth Agora were granted a new project under the Youth in Action programme: Action 4.5: Call for proposals for projects for supporting information activities for young people and youth workers.

Project Details

Goal: The creation of online platform for youth information workers.

Objectives of the Online Youth Information Platform:

  • Encouraging the collaboration between youth and youth workers in the field of youth information projects
  • Promoting active participation and contributions of youth and youth workers in the field of youth information projects.
  • Promoting and distributing the use of new ICT technologies and open-source software systems to support youth information projects.

Approach

The Focus of this project will be the creation of a Website Template for Youth Information centers and Youth Information Projects.

Since all Youth information centres and Youth projects need a website to inform the youth and youth workers about them the needs of those websites are similar. Re-implementing the same tools in every website is a loss of time and a loss of resources.

These templates are meant to provide a possible solution to these needs of all projects and organizations active in the field of youth-information. These templates would be supported by a popular open source content management system, packed with hundreds of features, that ordinary, non technical people can update in an extremely intuitive way.

Another important point is that the community of organizations and youth workers involved in the field of youth-information, in spite of the common interest, is often an isolated community: within it almost no knowledge and/or practice is shared and this in turn produces two main disadvantages:

  • Information collected within different projects and by youth and youth workers, useful to the whole community, is not shared and it is difficult to reach;
  • Youth and Youth information workers often spend resources and time to implement the same range of projects, tools and services;

Therefore ERYICA and Youth Agora consider it as a main goal to develop a youth information platform that deals with the above mentioned issues.

In the creation of a Youth Information Platform Youth Agora considers 3 key-steps

  1. Creation of a website template for Youth Information Centers and Projects
  2. Creation of Central Platform collecting information from these templates
  3. Providing tools for analyzing the collected information to enhance collaboration

An example of collected information from different Youth Information centres using the website template could be: ongoing projects, partners and project-calls

This information collection is vital as it will give the youth workers the possibility to better recognize collaboration opportunities between the different players in the field of  youth information.

It will be also part of the project to provide information and organise a training activity for youth and youth workers to use this open source website template. Every youth worker will be able to download and install this template in a few minutes and customise it to become a useful website, fulfilling all the needs of the visiting youth and youth workers

Planning

Main activities with Youth Agora involved:

  • 2009 January: Pilot Meeting with ERYICA:
  • 2009 April: Follow up Meeting with ERYICA
  • 2009 June: Presentation of the draft website-template and the concept of automated  information collection at board ERYICA.
  • 2009 October: Evaluation Meeting with ERYICA
  • 2009 June-December: Evaluating and enhancing the template to fulfil the needs of the youth workers
  • 2009 December: Final Template presentation + Training
Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati