Portfolio: Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council online
August 26th, 2009 | Published in Civic and Community Engagement, Portfolio, Social Technology, Web development & online services
Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council Website
The Commonwealth Youth Exchange Council (CYEC) supports youth-led reciprocal exchanges between the UK and Commonwealth Countries – as well as co-organising a wide range of global youth work and Commonwealth youth projects. We recently developed a Drupal based website for CYEC, and will be creating a resource pack to support exchange groups and CYEC projects to promote their own work online using free and low cost social media tools.
Youth-led design process
CYEC are committed to youth-led ways of working – so it was only natural that our development of the CYEC website should take place in partnership with CYEC’s Youth Action Group – young people and young-adults who are getting involved in the governance of the organisation. We ran a series of 1/2 day design sessions with the Youth Action Group to identify the right structure and content for the site – and used a content-jam approach to rapidly and collaboratively write most of the copy for the site.
For the visual design of the site we turned to Joff Williams of Think Pigment – providing a spec based upon the ideas of the Youth Action Group, and consulting with the Youth Action Group on the draft design as it developed.
Flexible project spaces
Over 30 CYEC exchanges take place each year – and CYEC wanted to be able to provide each exchange with space on their website. However, we recognised that not every exchange would want to add content directly to the CYEC site, so developed flexible project spaces for the site which can either be added to directly, or which can pull in content automatically from an exchange group’s own Blog or online photo gallery.
Not only does bringing together information on exchanges on the CYEC site help showcase the projects that CYEC supports, but it also creates a library of information linked to exchange themes and countries, which future exchange groups can look over when planning their exchanges.
The project spaces on the CYEC site can also be used to provide information and interactive features around the global youth work projects, and Commonwealth Youth Fora which CYEC supports.
A social media youth exchange toolkit
The next phase of getting CYEC online involves creating a social media toolkit to be given to each exchange group funded by CYEC. The toolkit will include details of how exchange groups can use social media tools to raise awareness of their exchanges and the issues that they explore.