Back in the room

Apologies for the extended break between this and the previous entry, it wasn’t actually meant to be quite as long as it was. My last post, in early August, was just before I went to Scotland for a few days, and ever since I’ve been back I don’t seem to have got in the swing of updating my blog.

However, many long-running TV programmes have a “summer break”, and I think being away from a blog for a while probably is no bad thing. That’s not to say I haven’t actually written anything in that time, but I’ve never got to the stage where I’ve wanted to publish anything.  Perhaps I’ll go back and you’ll see some ‘catch-up’ posts over the next few weeks.

I haven’t totally been skiving in my time away. As well as trips to Scotland, Wales and France, I’ve been busy at work worrying about the Olympic and Paralympic Games. But I’ve also been working on a new project (which, if truth be told, I actually did back at the start of summer but also seemed to get lost in the lazy days of September).

We Need Young People is an idea I’d been kicking around for a while. Partly it is me trying out some new technical ideas (everything from producing XML feeds to generating automatic Twitter updates). But primarily it is based on my thinking that “there must be a better way to do this.”

At work we regularly get emails sent around saying ‘we’re looking for young people to…’, whether it’s from a TV production company desperate for a teenage mum to appear in a documentary, to cash awards that are available for innovative projects initiated by young people. I’m sure there are countless projects, competitions, requests etc that are floating out there, all hoping to reach young people.

Email is obviously quite effective, but it’s not desperately efficient and also by only telling people you already know about projects, only the same young people hear about the same projects.

Surely, if someone could pull all this information together, and present it in a way that it could be divided up so the signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t quite so high, then it could become a really useful tool. Particularly if the data wasn’t just available on a single website, but able to be placed wherever young people, and their adult supporters, were likely to be looking.

So that’s essentially what I’ve built.  Add your project etc (or one that you’ve found) by completing a simple form, wait for it to be moderated, and then watch as it is released for the rest of the world to consumer as they see fit. Or, take the data and build something clever with it; on your website, on Facebook or whatever you feel is most appropriate.

It’s early days, and I’m realising that like most great projects there needs to be a critical mass of data in the system before it becomes useful, but hopefully if people can see the benefit they’ll spend a bit of time adding their content.

Let me know what you think, it is very much a work in progress so it’ll develop over time and all feedback is useful.

And, I promise, it won’t be a couple of months before my next post.

Photo courtesy of Bob AuBuchon. Used under licence.