The Measure Up! project is a new project funded by the ‘Customer Led Transformation’ fund from Local Government Improvement and Development (formerly IDEA) and working in partnership with Plings to explore the use of social media as a positive activity promotion tool on the ground in some very local contexts.

We spent a morning a few weeks back exploring how the Measure Up project might use different social media tools, both to engage with a small team of young people who will be leading the project with us – and later on in the project to get activity information to young people and to get feedback on what’s good and what’s not. This post shares some of the notes from that session…

Facebook Group

From the outreach sessions that have already taken place it looks like most young people have, and spend time, on Facebook – so we’ve set up a Measure Up! Facebook Group for keeping in touch with young people interested in being part of the small project team.

Its a closed group which means that the administrators (the team) have to moderate new members before they can see what is going on in the group. We used an image of the ‘Media Bus’ as the group image – as this is how the team have been recruiting young people (and we used the handy Cntrl-Shift-4 trick on the Mac to snip the image we needed out of a word document)

Facebook profiles

Each of the workers who are going to be group admins had to decide whether to set up a work Facebook profile, or to use their existing profile and to make sure the privacy settings are tightened up.

Frances set up a work profile, using a work e-mail address and a profile photo taken with the web-cam on computer to show her with her staff badge on. The profile only includes a few details (such as Employer) and has a note on it saying that Frances does not use the profile to take friend request.

We discussed how if any of the project team did get ‘friend requests’ from young people to their Facebook profiles that they can ignore/refuse the requests and, possibly also send a note explaining this to the young person.

Facebook pages

We explored how we could set up Facebook pages at a future point in the project.

Facebook Ads

We explored the Facebook advertising system (see the tips here) to find out how many young people are on Facebook in Nottingham. For 13 – 18 year olds the figure was over 70,000.

Blogging

Using Facebook is a good way to meet young people where they are spending time – but it’s not always an inclusive way to publish and share information. By using a blog we can publish content on the open Internet, and then feed it into Facebook.

We also wanted to be able to have a process blog where we can share our learning.

Jamie demonstrated how we can use a WordPress blog with custom categories, images and future publishing to share information on positive activities and updates about the project.

The categories in WordPress make it easy to post information that is just about Clifton, or about Aspley (or both) and then to use an RSS feed to feed that information into Facebook.

Plings Tools

We looked at some of the Plings tools that could be used to promote positive activities in the local area.
First we looked at the new Plings2PDF. Looking at the list of activities we quickly found there was a quality issue with the information – including some out of date venue data.

Working out how to make sure there is good information in Plings is going to be a challenge for the project.
We also looked at Pling-o-rama – which helped us to identify where some of the gaps in information were.

We talked about how the new FastFeedback widget might also be used on a mobile phone to get feedback from the field. Neontribe are going to add making the widget mobile-ready to their plans for future development.

Talking technology

We looked at the different tools we might need for the project – and decided that a mixture of cheap Busbi video cameras and Flip video cameras would be useful for generating media to give insights into the project.

Putting it all together

As I’m a visual thinker I’ve been trying to map out the different tools we’re using. The trick with social media work is weaving everything together – and sometimes that’s more about the art of ‘social media weaving’ than it is about technology.

The diagram below (click for full size version, 430Kb PNG) captures how different tools we might use can fit together and notes some of the issues we’ve had to think about so far.

Over the next couple of weeks we will be at some interesting events aimed at bringing together developers, social entrepreneurs and young people to build better apps for social good. We hope Plings will be a key focus for development during these events…

24th July – Social Hackathon!
Yes – we know it is tomorrow! Tim and I will be working with a team of designers and developers interested in devoting their skills to make something for social good. We were really pleased that Plings was selected as one of the focal point, and our challenge of that there is “too much” data could help with some filtering tools… We will blog the outcomes of this event next week, but if you do find yourself in East London on 24th July, then why not drop in?

Young Rewired State photo by Tim Dobson

2nd – 6th August – Young Rewired State
Last year, YRS took place over a weekend at the Google HQ in London.  This year, YRS will take place during a WHOLE WEEK, at centres across the country.  Teams of young developers/coders will work together with supporters and mentors to fuse and mangle some of the wealth of open data available, with a view to buildingmore apps for social good.  Teams are already being established in places such as Brighton, London, Norwich, Oxford, Birmingham and of course Manchester.  Some of our partners, such as Neontribe, Practical Participation and Talis are also supporting their local centres – and certainly the Plings team in the North West will be around to support the Manchester crew.

It’s not too late to get involved in YRS.  Check out the project pages and sign up details for both young developers and supporters…

If you can’t make it to either of these events, then not to worry.  Why not drop a comment through this blog or via twitter with any ideas…

Introducing a new and fun way of searching for Plings in your area.  The Pling-u-like is a game that helps you to work out what you like to do.

Instead of searching for a keyword or browsing by category just click on the title of the activity which appeals most.  After sixty seconds we’ll show you the keywords related to the activities you’ve chosen.

Have a go yourself at pling-u-like.com.

Pling-u-like is a widget that can be installed in any website, if you’d like the widget included in your site then please contact us.

Plingorama in Knowsley

We’re very happy to announce our first prototype of Plingorama, an interactive visualization of Plings data (Flash required). This first outing shows the where and when of Plings in a selected area. Pan around the map to find out what’s going on, and zoom out for a heat map of activity in Greater Manchester.

Plingorama’s customized map has been built using Cloudmade. This service makes use of crowd-sourced Open Street Maps data, and allows you to pick and choose colors and styles for map features. We particularly like the way we can include public transport and cycle paths on the display.

Hot spots

Activity in and around any city tends to be concentrated around a few areas. At lower resolutions, it’s easy to loose these patterns if you try to mark everything with a pin. We can fix this with a heat map, which highlights the activity hotspots in orange. Zoom in, and the colour code is repeated, so that venues with multiple events show up in orange, turning to red the more busy they become. This way, you can easily see where the action is near you.

Tell us what you think!

Plingorama can be customized to show places to go and things to do in any neighborhood, and will be available during the Summer of Plings. Pretty soon, we’ll be bringing in new features, such as keyword filtering, searching and further browsing options.

In the meantime, we’re eager to hear from you. If you’re involved with Plings and you’d like to help us develop the service in your area, please contact us to join our feedback panel, and we’ll provide a custom view of your region. What would you like to see? Found any bugs or other problems with Plingorama? Tell us about it!

We always knew that this pre-summer holiday period would be busy – so this is just a quick post to run through some of the things going on around the project and the moment. Most will be covered through subsequent posts, but hopefully we can capture the headlines here!

Data In
Many thanks to the numerous local authorities who have stepped up to the mark and coordinated and collated their summer holiday data. We’ve been genuinely amazed at the speed, scope and scale through which people have acted.

In addition, you may also have noticed that the feed from FIDy to Plings, via the Plingomatic – was enabled. This has boosted the reach and quality of the data, particularly as we focussd just on the positive activities category.

If you have any more data to add, then please contact us!

New Apps
We’ve always said that Plings was all about the application of the data. This summer, we’ve a number of new apps from partners to illustrate this. Some have been in the plan for a while, whilst others came from dialogue with yourselves. So:

• Plings2PDF is a service that enables you to grab Plings data and output a PDF to circulate via email/print.
• Pling-u-like is a widget that enables people to compare random Plings near them – and so get a quick insight into what sort of searches to make
• Plingorama is also a widget, but visualises the time and place aspects of Plings differently.
• Radiowaves have a bunch of new functions and facilities within their network for exploring Plings
• On the mobile front, we have a standard version of Plings, plus an iPhone application and an Augmented Reality app in the mix
• In terms of feedback, we have a set of tools coming through to help collect and understand feedback data.
• And not forgetting Boredometer!

All these apps are near to a stage for usage – we will obviously announce in detail separately

Plings Website
You may also have noticed a few changes on the Plings website too.  Well, as a result of having many many more Plings, plus all the new apps – we felt we had to make some changes to enable people to easily search and filter, but also get the apps they needed.   The old green website wasnt really stretching enough to do this.  We pressed the “live” button a *tad* early to ramp up project – but we are continuing to refine things this week…

Plus, we wanted to *talk* about some of the great things happening.  We’ve introduced a “featured Plings” part of the site.  Got something you want us to feature? Just drop us a line…

Phew! Things are moving at a pace.  Many thanks to all those involved in the different aspects so far.

(PS: we also managed to upgrade the blog to the wonderful new WordPress 3)

As some of you might know over the last few months we’ve been working with 1UPDesign to develop the pling-o-matic, a system to generate plings from FIDy records.  After a few months of careful testing and tweaking we’ve made the leap and put the twenty best local authorities data live at plings.net.  There’s a full list of the LAs on the plings wiki page but there’s a visualisation of all the activities we’ve generated on a map of the UK here.

We purposely cherry picked Local Authorities which

• hadn’t already setup an automated link to the plingsIN API.
• had relevant, good quality and wide ranging data
• had good quality records which fulfilled the strict validation of the pling-o-matic and the plingsIN API

For example Derbyshire have over 200 activities going on over the next seven days which is great!  In terms of Plings however their data, which focuses on babies and toddlers, isn’t relevant to the 16-19 year olds Plings cater for.

We’re delighted that the records we’ve generated has helped plings reach their latest milestone of 15,000 activities in the next week!

We’re currently working with a number of other LAs across the country to support them to bring their data up to the minimum standard required for the pling-o-matic.  If your data isn’t currently being uploaded and you’d like it to be then give us a shout

It is just over a week ago that we held our second developer day -  Plings I/O (input / output).  Many thanks to all those that came along and made it such a productive day, along with Becki and the Studio Venues in Manchester for making things go smoothly.

In my initial “state of play” address (which sounds far more stately than it really was!) I made a point that we had reached the point of the there being 10,000 Plings being aggregated and published by the project every week.  Indeed, the contrast between this and the Developer Day last year were quite clear.  Last year it was all about the idea of Plings; this year we now have the reality.

But, alongside this new level of data, we have a vibrant and active community of developers around the project.  It was great to see a room of 40 people (from all over the country) get together to focus on the Plings API and the wide range of applications being developed/tested/thought of.  This is our challenge – how to continue to stimulate and support such a “market”, whilst at the same time effectively sift through the volume of data.

We were joined by Matt from Hidden Creative, who gave us an enlightening talk on Augmented Reality and how that could help with promoting positive activities. And some Star Wars stuff.  Many thanks Matt.

Throughout the day there was plenty of discussion, deliberation and development amongst participants.  It is probably unfair to think that a room full of developers for a day would result in “something” being fully built  – but here is a run down of some of the activity we witnessed, in pictures:

A round table of Drupal engineers and advocates including Luke (Ecobee), Callum (Neontribe), Simon (Colugo), Chris (Menus & Blocks) and Darran (Lancashire YPS) swap notes and code in terms of how it can work with Plings related data I/O

Iconomical demonstrate the workings of the forthcoming Plingorama (working title) widget that can be embedded into third party sites - and gather Beta testers

Pete (1UP Design) and Adrian (Synergy) take a peek behind the scenes their various Plings-related apps

Tim (Practical Participation), Andy (Norfolk Connexions) and Peter (Bolton MBC) work on code for Facebook integration

Harry (Neontribe) and Tom (PushON) delve into Boredometer stats

David from Substance leads a demo around the Plings API

Luke (Ecobee) styles a Plings tee!

More photos on Flickr - again, many thanks to all that made the day so interesting.

Developments since

In the ten days since there day, there have been a few developments that we wanted to highlight:

• Chris from Menus and Blocks blogged and published a Drupal module
• Tim put the Facebook search code onto the wiki, which Peter at Bolton implemented
• Alice started to look at Couch DB and Plings
• Callum from Neontribe started to prepare the Layar app for release
• Liz from Iconomical blogged in relation to their Plings widget
• We’ve organised an event in Manchester on the 8th July to start Young Rewired State Manchester
  

Please join the developer mailing list to tell us more. Again, we found it really rewarding to bring everyone together.  The cakes were not bad either!

In case you may be wondering, “let a 100 flowers bloom” (encourage many ideas from many sources)  was an original phrase from Chairman Mao, but has been re purposed by Anthony Wilson and Clay Shirky amongst many others!

We’re really excited to be working with Substance to develop a transferable widget for visualizing Plings. Throughout the Summer of Plings, it will be possible to embed a visual browser for the Plings network in any web page, configured for any town, with minimal installation requirements, making it easier than ever to find fun activities in your neighborhood.

But it turns out that visualizing Plings data is no easy task. The best thing about Plings is that there are so many of them, and that’s what makes things difficult. With hundreds of Plings per day in some areas, how can you possibly find what you’re looking for?

The answer lies in visualizing the bigger picture, and offering multiple perspectives for drilling down, changing the view as you go. By showing activity hot spots, popular tags and different times of day, you can see clearly how Plings are spread around your neighborhood.

We’ll be posting here some of the features you can expect to see in the forthcoming Plings browser, with screenshots of designs and visualizations we’ve made. In the process, you’ll find out how to make customized maps, what’s possible using tag extraction from Plings, and how we’ll be dealing with the prickly problem of social networking.

Meanwhile, here’s a very early taster of what to expect:

Information is filtered by keyword. Scroll through events for a quick overview.

Plings Tag menu for browsing events in a particular neighborhood.

Liz Turner is founder of iconomical specialists in dynamic data visualization, and makers of the interactive dashboard at Where Does My Money Go?

Blast is the BBC’s way of injecting creative inspiration into Britain’s 13-19 year olds.   Blast goes on tour every summer and hosts hundreds of free multimedia workshops where young people can take the plunge and harness their creative energy.

Blast gives young people hands-on experience and training in a wide range of creative activities.  Workshops include almost every creative activity you can think of, from break dancing to sports photography, from computer game design to samba, and from  DJ skills to guerilla theatre.

The workshops are an opportunity for young people to try out new skills, showcase their creative work, and find out more about working in creative industries.  Last year over 170,000 young people took part.

The Beeb says:

“At each event Blast builds an impressive mobile creative village, with purpose built digital workshop spaces and a separate performance area. Teenagers get the chance to use professional equipment to produce their own creative work, with advice and support from BBC staff and industry professionals.“

Blast is visiting towns and cities across the UK throughout the summer –  including Bury St. Edmonds, Coventry, Hunstanston, Torbay, Penzance, Bristol, Whitehaven, Ayr, and London.

Blast-ing Plings

BBC Blast events on Plings

We’ve been hard at work to get all the Blast events across England listed on Plings.  This means young people can use Plings to find Blast events in their area – including the event name, time, location, and the BBC’s bespoke description of each event.

In addition, these events then begin the filter out through such tools as the Boredometer or Radiowaves.

Putting hundreds of events into Plings – that must take forever, right?

Well, no actually.  It could have been a lengthy process, given the sheer number of activities that Blast is putting on in the space of just a few months  However, because the Blast website is well-structured, we found a short-cut.  Ben used his technical know-how to scrape events data from the BBC Blast website and automatically push the data into Plings.  Web scraping sometimes gets a bad press, but in this instance it worked well.  As the data was authored at the BBC website and presented in a way that we could reuse it, it resulted in a rich source of information.

BBC Blast events are presented in a structured way

Good news, then, for positive activity providers.  If you can identify to us where your events are, and that they are in a format that has some structure to it, then we might be able to use this.

What do I need to do?

Take a look at how your positive activity data is published.  Some aspects that help us with scraping include:

• Presenting the data in a table
• Having unique IDs for each event
• Providing the full address and postcode for the venue
• Being consistent in terms of presenting the date and times

As you may gather, it is more about consistency than anything uniform – we’d love to hear more about your data….

At the PlingsIO developer day on Friday there were discussions about using Augmented Reality as a way to give young people a glimpse into what to expect at a youth centre; conversations about ‘calls to action’ and linking activities to online booking; demonstrations of location based applications that make it easy to find nearby activities and get directions to them – and lots more. All these layers could be (and are being in some places) added on top of Plings to mean that we do more than just provide ‘activity information’.

Whilst there is still much to do before the basic quality of activity data is fully assured across the country, in many places we are at the point where we can turn more attention to these added layers on Plings – and planning how they fit together can benefit from a conceptual model around young people’s journey’s to taking part in activities. This post starts to sketch that draft conceptual model – building on a presentation I made at the Summer of Plings event in Birmingham earlier this year.

Information needs
It’s hard to meet young people’s information needs when information on positive activities is not accessible – so Plings has focussed a lot on getting good activity information in. But when it comes to sharing that information with young people there are many different information needs for us to meet. Take for example these quotes from young people in Aiming High for Young People:

“I don’t have enough information about what’s available, where would you go?” Young person (18)

“I would like to join an art club but I don’t know where to go to look for it.” Young person (19)

“We don’t get told about anything.” Young person (20)

These all raising information issues – but the first quote highlights a lack of information about activities and places to go, the second a lack of awareness of sources of information, and the third, a desire to be more actively informed of provision. These are subtly (but importantly) different information needs. When PriceWaterhouseCoopers looked at the “Market for Provision of Positive Activities” for the DfES (as was) in 2007, they found that the barriers to young people’s engagement in positive activities included: “a lack of time, a limited desire to engage in the range of activities currently on offer, transport constraints [and] prohibitive associated costs..”. These are not all information issues – but information has at least a partial role to play in resolving them.

Take for example Bordedometer – building on Plings information it tries to address both the limited desire to engage in the activities on offer; and young people’s lack of time – or the constraints of finding activities at times when young people are available – by creating a social layer around the information, thinking about how young people can help their friends find activities for times when they are otherwise bored, rather than expecting active information seeking.

Most importantly though, when we think about young people’s positive activity information needs – we need to also be thinking about the wider ‘activity need’. The drive to promote positive activities can come from a belief that engaging in activities can support young people to grow, develop, have fun and thrive. We know that, for many young people, having long-term engagement with activities with trusted adults is important for developing resilience and skills for thriving. Trying a variety of activities in different contexts also helps young people to develop social skills and to explore diverse interests. So an application which uses Plings to encourage one-off engagement with a narrow set of activities might be providing information – but in a broader sense it may not meet young people’s need for information that supports positive engagement with diverse activities.

Avoiding the standard model
Once we are sure why we are working to improve positive activity information to young people then we can look at how we do it. Many information systems are implicitly built on the following model:


This standard model assumes that there are young people out there looking for activities. And when they find information – they start attending the activities.
How many online services do you know where this is effectively the underlying model? How realistic is it?

A full-journey model of information to action
Young people’s information seeking behaviors are far more diverse. We can distinguish at least two starting points:

• Active motivated information seeking – a young person is motivated to seek out information and has a sense of where to start the search.
• Passive ‘non-directed information need’ – a young person may benefit from information – but may not be actively looking for it; or may not, as in the second quote above, know where to look – and so hasn’t started any sort of search.

Our active information seekers will hopefully go on to search and successfully find details of an activity: although we know that often young people’s search skills, and the availability and quality of information can frustrate this search process, with it leading to a dead end. For our young people with non-directed information needs we hope that they will discover information – perhaps through posters and leaflets or advertising for an activity – or some other form of stumbling upon information. Alternatively, non-directed information seekers may discover somewhere they can actively search for information, and may gain the motivation to go out and look for activities to get involved in.

Presuming both the active and passive information seekers do discover an activity – their journey does not end there. First, from activity information, a young person needs to form an intention to attend an activity. This is often a stumbling point. I might want to go to an activity, but be scared of going to new places where I won’t know anyone. Or I may now know that activities are available, but have low self-esteem and believe that activities are ‘not for people like me’. What sorts of information and interaction can help young people to form the intention to get involved in an activity?

Again, the journey doesn’t stop here: from the intention to attend – young people may need to get organised. Which bus routes is the activity on? How much does it cost? Do I need a parental consent form? Do I have to register in advance? Or can I just turn up? Planning and getting organized to attend an activity for the first time could provide as many opportunities for personal development and learning as participating in the activity itself: with young people encountering many information needs along the way.

If the organization all goes well then we hope young people move on to attendance – turning up and taking part for the first time. Even here the information needs remain. Going to an activity for the first time there can be many things that everyone else seems to know, but the newcomer doesn’t. How does the group work? Who do you talk to about registering for more sessions or when the holiday breaks are? What’s happening next week? Is there a mailing list for getting updates when sessions are moved or cancelled?

Getting the information right when young people attend; and thinking about the interactivity that information services can offer at this point; can all help build towards the final goal of the information journey – ongoing participation in positive activities. If young people have had a bad experience of one activity – that could make them hesitate about participating in other activities in future: but if there are good feedback systems, and good ways of helping celebrate positive experiences, and address negative experiences, then perhaps ongoing participation can be better supported.

The model below sets out the six-stage journey from Information to Action that is described above (click for full size version).
 No single Plings application is likely to work at all stages of this journey – but we should be able to think about where in this eco-system Plings tools sit.
What do you think?
This is a draft framework: what’s missing? Is it useful? How can we simplify it?

At the 2nd Plings Developer Day on Friday (still chance to grab a last minute place!) we will be joined for a fascinating short talk from Matt Trubow around some of the ins and outs of Augmented Reality.  Not heard of it?  Well, this short video illustrating some of the current uses might help:

Imagine a world where information can come alive through mobile device, printed postcards or even at bus stops! Whilst this may sound fanciful, Matt will show us that this has already arrived…

360 Youth Centres?
On a similar tact, we have been talking recently to Dave at Sphereworks about the practice of “interactive panoramic virtual tours” that they have perfected. We’re sure you’ll have seen it before – here is a sample from the Velodrome in Manchester:

So – what does this have to do with positive activities?

We’re interested in how this could be applied to practice of promoting positive activities. Would, for example, being able to see in and around a youth/sports/community centre be of use? We can understand the practical and risk issues that would need to be considered, but this could become another helpful resource for people when considering a place to go and/or a thing to do.

Sounds expensive?
At face value, any such expenditure may also sound excessive. However, we have to consider that such interventions may have a lot longer shelf life than “traditional” ways of promoting activities – such as printed media or outdoor advertising. In addition, we can also see that the initial process of building an AR file or 360 photo can then be redistributed and disseminated very cheaply/free…

What next?
Well, we can hopefully learn some more from Matt at #plingsio. And – we’d love to hear from anyone who is interested, or has even tried, something like 360degree photos in their youth offer..

The boredometer minisite

Hot on the heels of the minisite for the pling-o-matic tool, the team at Neontribe have been busy pulling together a some pages for all things Boredometer.

Boredometer is an app that lives in both Facebook and Bebo, but we thought it important to get some info together on the app for all users into an independent site.  Alongside the key info for both those want to use Boredometer in their social network profile or even Page (for local authorities), there are a couple of interesting new additions to this site:

1 – Register for a BAT Code
As you may know, there is an administration side to Boredmeter (the Boredometer Administration Tool (BAT)) that allows local authorities to utilise Boredometer from within a Facebook Page.  To do this, you need to apply for a BAT code – and we’ve included a handy little form for people to start this process.

The wall of boredom

2 – The wall of boredom!
Neontribe have also include a neat little feature that aggregates and anonymises the Boredometers from across the country, giving us a unique insight into the levels of boredom right now!  Yes, we accept this isn’t scientific proof, but it starts to illustrate some of the interesting side developments that could take place…

So – enjoy another micro mini plings-related site!  If you need to point anyone towards this then the address is http://www.boredometer.org.uk/.

As ever, please let us know if there needs to be any changes or additions.

Go to www.pling-o-matic.com

We’ve popped up a mini website where you can find information about the pling-o-matic – our tool for turning Family Information Directory (FIDy) records into plings.  It’ll give you a basic understanding of how the pling-o-matic works alongside some details about how to get started with using it.

You’ll find it at pling-o-matic.com

For those of you that are intrigued by what’s under the hood there’s a lot more technical information to be found on the plings wiki pages.

There’s also a page up on the plings.net goodies section which features pling-o-matic alongside some other fun stuff related to plings!

To see what pling-o-matic has generated from your local authorities Positive Activity records take a look at our Plings > FIDy beta site. From the 6th of July we’ll be publishing all this data on our live site (unless we’ve agreed otherwise).

If there’s no data for your Local Authority don’t worry, this is because some of the vital information we need is missing from your FIDy records. To help you we’ve developed an interface where you can easily add the missing information we need to upload your records to plings, for more information please watch this space.

If you’ve got any comments queries or you just need someone to talk to don’t hesitate to drop us a line

Download as PDF

The Rewired State team are at it again: showing that not only are there ways to do government technology differently, but managing to combine innovative youth engagement and summer activities with ‘coding a better country’.

Plings supported a group of young people to go down to the last ‘Young Rewired State’ weekend in London, but this year the organisers hope that Young Rewired State events will take place across the country.

As they explain:

This year we are going to be running a slightly different event that is essentially a hack week for young developers across the country to go and build visualisations, digital and/or non-digital products using government data, alongside working devs in businesses across the UK. These would be presented back to government at the end of the week, either in person, or by live stream from wherever you are based.

It is open to anyone aged 15 to 18 (although certain businesses may not be able to take the under-16s) who can work with data, coding or design.

The Rewired State team are looking for organisation who could host groups of young people (between 2 and 7 young people) to work on projects 2nd to 6th August. Host organisations could be business, but could equally be ‘developer friendly’ youth projects or local authority departments – able to support young people with a bit of technical know how, but mostly just to keep everything running smoothly..

Young Developers at 2Morro Festival (c) Samuel Cho

Substance are looking to support and/or to host a Young Rewired State event in Manchester and are talking to people who might be interested to help get that set up, but if you think you might also be able to host a Young Rewired State event, or you just know some young people who might be interested in taking part, head over to the Rewired State blog to find out more…

And developers over 18 (or under 18s who can’t give up a full week in the Summer) need not feel left out, as we’re also hosting our very own developer day in a couple of weeks time. Find out more and sign-up at http://plingsio.eventbrite.com/

Download as PDF

Here at Radiowaves we’re very excited by this new development with Plings. Radiowaves is a safe social media network for schools and youth organisations. We provide a platform for young people to publish their videos and podcasts and connect safely with young people and organisations nationally. We’ve been working with the Plings team (and their api) so that all Plings events can now be delivered directly to pupils anywhere in the country through their Radiowaves page.

It’s a complex task made very simple. When pupils login they can quickly find events nearby, send an invite to their firends and easily find out who else wants to go. They also have the option to send themselves a free SMS reminder at a time of their choosing, just so they don’t forget, not that we know any teenagers who would. All this happens within the safe school’s learning environment on Radiowaves.

As well as getting all the practical information contained in the ‘Pling’ they can also give feedback on an event and see what others think through ‘Likes’ and comments. Both of these can be done before and after the event and will form a useful bank of information for the event organiser.

The system is currently being Beta tested at St Ambrose Barlow school in Salford, if you know a school or youth organisation that you think would like to be involved in this first release just direct them to www.radiowaves.co.uk/join and ask them to put ‘Plings‘ in promo code field on the sign up form.

Youth Luton has both a directory and events listing

Via our Summer of Plings initiative, we’ve been talking to lots of local authorities with great youth offers for the summer holidays.

One such authority is Luton Borough Council.  Data on activities is amassing on their Youth Luton website, and so we have started to feed this into Plings.  One method has been through “scraping” the structured data presented in the webpages – which we will explain in detail separately.  In the meantime, we though it would be useful to put a few questions to Claire Knights from Luton Borough Council around her role.

What is your job and role at Luton Borough Council?

I’m the Web Editor for Luton Borough Council’s youth service website.  My role is to publish information on the range of services, activities and clubs available to young people aged 10-19 via our website and Facebook and Twitter pages.  I’m also involved in promotion and marketing for the website.

How do you try and collect the information on positive activities from providers?

At the moment I’m focusing on collating activities provided by the local authority such as museums, theatres, libraries and sports and community centres.  This is a huge task in itself and I find myself having to chase people up on a regular basis, asking for their new programmes.  Hopefully this will change as the website becomes more established and gains a reputation as an effective way to reach young people.

I have recently added a form to the website allowing anyone to submit details of their activity and have already had a couple of responses.

What messages do you get from young people about the best ways to promote it?

In March I went to meeting of Luton’s youth parliament to get their opinion on the website.  It was very interesting to hear their comments and they gave a number of suggestions on the best way to promote the site.  They suggested putting leaflets in youth clubs and schools and hand out merchandise such as mouse mats, mugs and pens.  They also said that adverts that mentioned money were likely to catch their eye!

Interestingly, the young people were not keen on the idea of receiving promotional messages via SMS as they said they already received too many – although they said they would read a promotional email as long as it didn’t look like a spam message.

We noticed that you used Twitter quite a bit – how do you think it is working?

I’ve been experimenting with using Twitter for about seven months now.  One of the things that quickly became apparent is that very few young people use Twitter, with Facebook being their social network of choice.  In spite of this, I think it still has the potential to be a useful tool.

Promoting positive activities isn’t just about broadcasting information to young people, but also their parents – particularly at the lower end of the 10-19 age range where it is the parents, rather than the young people themselves, who are more likely to sign up for the activity.

Following people on Twitter has been useful for picking up on some events and opportunities for young people that I would otherwise have missed.  It has also been useful for networking with other professionals – my initial contact with Plings came about through Twitter!

How important do you think it is for people to also know what is going on in neighbouring boroughs to Luton?

Young people consistently tell us that they have problems with transport and getting to activities within Luton, so my guess is that they are likely to be less interested in activities outside the area unless it is a big/special event.  Perhaps this information is of more interest to parents with younger children who still provide transport for them.

If you’d like to share some of your experiences around the positive activities duty, then why not contact us to arrange a similar interview?

Thanks to those from Midlands and North East authorities that came along to the ISP pilots regional meetings over the past few days. Next week is London, Doncaster and Blackpool!

I had an interesting discussion with Jonathan from Newcastle City Council around ways that we can help people explain Plings to others. Over the years we have *tried* several ways, (and even more metaphors) but we understand that there needs to be a simple and easy message for people to carry and pass around. This is especially relevant when talking to other data or activity providers, and also senior management.

How have you explained Plings to this audience? What works? What doesn’t?

Often, we get caught in the “is Plings just a website?” discussion, which is why we made this video last year – as a way to illustrate that Plings is about information rather than end formats:

Whilst that is great, it could be that it doesn’t *quite* get the message over.

Have you any experience of showing this to people? How did it go?

What do other people do?

Jonathan mentioned that the FIDy project have this help animation which is a good resource. Certainly the idea of something that people can sit and watch to get the initial concept is where we want to go…

With voiceover?
It is also worth highlighting an approach we really like – this Technology in Plain English series that has been around for a while. Not only is it plain English, but also very effective animation!

So – what do we do?
What will help you? Is it something audiovisual, or will a very clear “one pager” help? Or some powerpoint slides?  Or all of the above and more?!

We know that for different audiences different tools will be effective, but we are keen to understand and assist those of you who are currently trying to explain to colleagues that Plings is a bit more than a website!

In the next 7 days, Neil and I have at least five things to do…

We will be visiting the local authorities that are a part of the Information & Signposting Project- our itinerary being:

• Wednesday 19th May (today!) – Nottingham
• Thursday 20th May – Gateshead
• Monday 24th May – London
• Tuesday 25th May – Doncaster
• Wednesday – 26th May – Blackpool

We look forward to catching up with people.  I’ll be tweeting our whereabouts and also experimenting with Foursquare as and when we get to places…

First June Plings Surgery confirmed…

Activities around the Humber Bridge...

Many thanks also to Hull for offering to host a Plings surgery on the 16th June.  We are starting to see a small cluster of local authorities around the Humber Bridge, which will make an interesting view with regards to data.  If you can make it, then please check out this Doodle to let us know a time that is good.

Don’t forget we are really keen to get out to meet people through June, so please contact us with regards to a possible room – from our proposed schedule:

• North West: 7th June (we will probably use the Substance office in Manchester)
• Humber: 16th June
• North East: 17th June
• Midlands: 23rd June
• London: 24th June
• South West: 28th June

Ok, back to trying to get this dongle working on the #uktrain

Lancashire have done some great work with Drupal

As the project progresses, we are increasingly thinking about how well-established open source platforms such as Drupal can help.  Drupal is a system that powers humdreds and thousands of website and web projects – it enables people to build very simply web pages, through to complex social networks.  We have already spoken to some local authorities who are exploring it, whilst Lancashire have their whole youth offer site published through a Drupal installation.

Plings + Drupal = …

In terms of the youth offer and plings, we can see several uses.  We must bear in mind that Plings data can often represent a small (yet significant) part of a typical local youth offer, and so it is interesting to understand how a platform such as Drupal can easily deal with this data, yet give people the local control and configurations they need for extra content and themes.

As with our developer day – it is worth thinking about this in the context of the two sides of the Plings API:  Output and Input

Using the Output API

Adding a Plings RSS feed to Drupal

A – Feeding Plings into a Drupal – a standard way

At one level, it is already possible to add Plings data to any Drupal site through one of the many modules that handle data feeds such as RSS.  Simply input the address of the Plings feed into this module, and then Drupal enables certain configurations around where and how it should be displayed.  Whilst this is great, attention should be paid to the backlink given to Plings, and also the routines through which data is archived – your database could swell up pretty fast!

B – Feeding Plings IN to a Drupal – a custom way

We are also interested in how a few modules snapped together can make this process easier.  Our thoughts so far are along the lines of:

• A CCK Content Type for Events, and for Organisations
• A FeedAPI Mapper (or custom module) which imports activities from the output API into CCK
• A set of useful Views for displaying activities
• A set of templates for customising the display of activities

A very quick test using Drupal

We plan to work further on documenting and testing this over the coming weeks.  Our friends at Neontribe made a very quick prototye – why not come along to our Developer Day to get involved?

Using the Input API

Another usage of Drupal could be along the lines of adding and managing Plings data.  To do this, a write API key would be needed, but we can envisage how Drupal can act as a good tool to locally administer data.  This would require the build of a Drupal ‘Input API Module‘ which:

• Hooks into the creation or update of any ‘Activity’ or ‘Organisation’ nodes;
• Updates records in Plings when the local records are updated;
• Allows the submission of updates to be controlled by the Drupal ACL system (Access Control List);

Again, we are interested to document and help build this – so please come along to our Developer Day to explore further…

The Future…

Of particular interest is the fact that the latest version of Drupal (Drupal 7) has support for the semantic web and the RDF data format.  With this in place, we can see how any Drupal site can connect to Plings remotely – as opposed to feeding data through.  Once again, we will keep a close eye on this.

Are you thinking of Drupal as the platform for your organisation youth offer?

Are you a Drupal developer interested in this field?

Why not connect at our Developer Day (we know, that’s the FOURTH time we’ve mentioned it!) – or why not think about a guest post here on our blog (which is actually in Wordpress – a whole other story!)?

There will be cakes

As you might know, we really value meeting people interested in positive activities and plings.  Whether you are a developer building an app, a Family Information Service staff member collecting data or even a local councillor interested in your ward – we find it really relevant to get people together.  So – for this reason, we’ve a few dates and events we’d like to announce, which we’d like your help with.

Developer Day – 18th June

Last year, we held a technical day for people interested in developing Plings at the Google HQ in London.  Just over a year later we think we have *lots* more things to share and talk about – and so we have booked a nice venue here in Manchester to do so.

We have just put a booking form together via Eventbrite, so please claim your place.  We may even look into t-shirts

Plus – if you are aged 19 or under and have a technical interest in Plings, then we would like to support your train travel, etc.  Please contact us to discuss – obviously you’ll need the relevant permissions too..

Summer of Plings Surgeries – throughout June

We’ve been really encouraged by the interest from local authorities in taking part in our Summer of Plings initiative.  So – Andy and I – will make a short tour around England and offer people one hour Plings surgery appointments with us..

We’d plan to be based somewhere for the day and then meet as many people locally as are interested.  We could look at your data, or even create a Facebook Fan Page for your boredometer – the agenda is down to you.  Important is that we can speak face to face.

And – this is where we need your help!  We’ve some provisional dates and regions below – if you can offer us a room for the day it would be greatly appreciated.  So long as it has some power sockets, a table or two, and is easy for people to find/locate (preferably near a #uktrain station) it’d be great.  We can bring laptops, dongles and post-its…

Our dates:

• North West: 7th June (we will probably use the Substance office in Manchester)
• North East: 16th June
• Midlands: 23rd June
• London: 24th June
• South West: 28th June

Please let us know if you can offer a room – as soon as we have the schedule we can then start booking appointments.