Networked Participation

start

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:11:06 +0000

Networked Participation

This is the Wiki of the LGIU Youth Participation & Social Network Sites Action Learning Set.

Wiki Index

Youth Engagement & Social Media Guide - building upon the early draft guide originally developed on this wiki.
Session Reports - Slides & notes from meetings of the Action Learning Set…
Resource Index - All the things we've already created and are working on…

SNS & Commissioning

Editing pages

(Update: As of 13/09/09 this wiki is closed for editing. See the Youth Engagement & Social Media (YES) wiki for future developments.)

You can use this area of the network to draft collaborative documents.

Just hit the edit button above and then create a link to a new page. You can then start writing on the new page you have created.

If you've not used a Wiki before - then check out this introduction, or this one page guide.

Whenever you make a change, all previous versions of the page are stored - so you can't permanently mess anything up - so just dive in.

guide:start

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:06:40 +0000

LATEST UPDATE

This guide is now being developed at http://www.practicalparticipation.co.uk/yes/.

The text below is kept as an archive only.

Guide to Youth Engagement & Social Media

This guide sets out to provide practical information, advice and resources to support youth-facing organisations to engage with Social Media.

Starting out

Getting Started - about this guide.
Understanding the landscape - web 2.0, social media, social networks: what are they all about?
Making the case - the benefits of using social media for youth engagement in different contexts.

Four steps to social media engagement

In Youth Work and Social Networking (2008) Davies and Cranston identified four stages to working with social networks in a youth work context. These four stages provide a good practical pattern for any organisation exploring social media for youth engagement. Each section below includes practical guidance and resources.

Survey - identify existing use of social media, and identify the opportunities for using social media.
Safety - building on safe and sound foundations.
Staff and Skills - identify who should engage and how.
Strategy - choosing the right approach.

Toolbox

ToDo list

Add examples and resources to making_your_case
Add critical questions to safety section
Complete application form for Shepherding Change app

Comments

guide:safety:notes

Tim Davies — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:17:47 +0000

Principles for safety

Draft ideas

Understand spaces, but don't invade spaces;

Set or negotiate limits

guide:safety

Tim Davies — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:14:33 +0000

Safety

Why Safety?

The wellbeing of children and young people should always be a prime concern of organisations exploring youth engagement. Being safe is a key aspect of well being.

The importance of designing and carrying out social media engagement with the safety of young people in mind is important because:

The law recognises that young people require specific protections, and places specific obligations on authorities and institutions working with young people to prioritise the safety and well being of the young person.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child expresses the specific rights of young people to be protected, to have special provision made for their developmental needs, and to participate in decisions that affect them.

Most young people experience their teenage years as a period of dynamic biological and social change during which issues of personal identity and peer-group relationships can be of heightened importance and during which many young people are, by 'adult standards', less risk-averse.

(Source: Safe and Effective Social Network Site Applications, Davies 2008)

It is also important for organisations to ensure that they adequately support their staff to stay safe in their use of social media.

Aspects of Safety

Promoting the safety and wellbeing of young people online has many aspects. No single approach can suffice on it's own. Consider:

Creating a safe environment - through the design of online platforms and interfaces, and through the policies and conduct of adults and young people in those spaces;

Promoting information literacy - so that young people can make their own informed decisions about their online activities and so they can navigate online environments and experiences safely.

Promoting young people's resiliency. Encountering and navigating risks is part of growing up. Equipping young people with the stills to respond to risks, so that they do not lead to lasting harm, is a key part of promoting safety.

Being vigilant and ready to respond to potential harms. Remembering that many online risks have their roots in offline issues. In some cases the right responses will be personal and social developmental interventions - in other cases you may need to contact the specialist agencies listed later in this document.

The EU Kids Online project emphasises that, increased opportunity for young people online, leads to increased risk - but that, conversely strategies to reduce risk, often restrict young people's online opportunities - and potentially their capacity to respond to risk in future. The EU Kids Online research also found growing indications that the provision of positive online content (which would include youth engagement opportunities online) “directly benefits [young peoples] development and reduces online risks by encouraging valuable and valued activities.”.

At the launch of the EU Kids Online I Report (PDF) Dr Tanya Byron outlined the importance of balance in our response to risk, stating: “We cannot and must-not build an environment for children to develop within which is built around what we see through the eyes of the most vulnerable child”. Our goal should not be to remove all possible risk from online engagement - but should be to ensure that vulnerable young people do not come to harm.

Risks & Issues

The EU Kids Go Online (2008) project provides a matrix model for thinking about risks to young people online (also adopted in the Byron Review). Whilst far from comprehensive, it can provide a useful frame for considering young people’s exposure to risks online.

Motivation:	Commercial	Aggressive	Sexual	Values
Childs role:
Content (child as recipient)	Advertising, Exploitation of personal information	Violent web content	Problematic sexual web content	Biased information, racism, blasphemy, health ‘advice’
Contact (child as participant)	More sophisticated exploitation, children being tracked by advertising	Being harassed, stalked, bullied	Being groomed, arranging for offline contacts	Being supplied with misinformation
Conduct (child as actor)	Illegal downloads, sending offensive messages to peers	Cyber bullying someone else	Publishing porn	Providing misinformation

The Interim Report of the Youth Work and Social Networking project explores in depth the literature on risks specifically related to online social networking.

The opportunities and risks of social media go hand in hand. It is important then to identify the risks and take steps to ensure they are mitigated, or that young people are able to navigate the risks safely.

Social media sites can make it easier for anyone to publish content. This includes offensive, hateful or bullying content. This content can spread quickly and be tricky to remove.

People may use the publishing potential of social media sites to share personal and private information, or to publish content which could impact upon their future education, career or relationship prospects.

Social media and social network sites can act as 'amplifiers' of off-line activities. Whilst this can have significant positive effects it can also increase the harm caused by bullying, and exacerbate other personal and social development challenges young people are facing.

Social media spaces can provide predatory adults with information and communications channels that can be use in grooming and sexual solicitation.

Social media platforms often work on a 'trade data for service' model and there is a risk that third parties will abuse user supplied data.

Organisations also need to consider how they comply with laws, guidelines and terms and conditions that relate to their planned social media engagement with young people. For example:

Data protection legislation;

Laws on moderation and content publishing;

Age restriction on the use of certain social media services;

Guidelines on consent for photos, videos and participation of young people;

Guidance on official civil servant or elected politicians participation in social media spaces;

Responses

There are a number of key agencies you should be aware of and who exist to deal with serious concerns about the safety of young people online.

The table below outlines who to contact when you have concerns about the safety of a young person online.

Emergency Call

If you suspect a young person is in immediate danger or you need an immediate response you should phone 999.

Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP)

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) are a police agency with powers to investigate concerns about grooming or sexual abuse of young people online. Professionals and young people can report concerns to CEOP via the 'Report Abuse' button on their website. http://www.ceop.gov.uk

Internet Watch Foundation (IWF)

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) respond to reports of obscene and illegal content on the internet. You can report content to the IWF and they will work with Internet Service Providers to ensure the content is removed or access to it is blocked. http://www.iwf.org.uk

Service Providers

Responsible website providers will have clear processes for dealing with reports of abuse including inappropriate content or bullying. For concerns which do not involve illegal content or conduct, look for the 'report abuse' feature on the website in question. Most social network sites only check content when alerted to it by users.

Record it, talk to your manager & know your policies

You should raise any other concerns with your senior manager or the appropriate child protection/e-safety co-ordinator within your organisation.

Whatever actions you take you should make a record of them, and you should discuss them with your manager.

Make sure you are aware of the general child protection and reporting guidelines for your organisation. These will apply for online work with young people as well as for face-to-face work. Your organisation may also have a specific e-safety policy which you should make sure you are familiar with.

Risk assessment

It is good practice to complete a risk assessment of any proposed use of social media for engagement with young people.

ToDo: add a model risk assessment here

Key questions

The following questions are prompts for things you should consider when choosing different strategies for online engagement.

If you are working face-to-face with a group of young people

ensure that the material is age appropriate to your audience
Empower users through tools and technology i.e. ensure they set their privacy settings
ensure that participants under 18 can not be traced through site/activity
Provide easy to use mechanisms to report inappropriate activity

If you are creating content that involves young people

If you are planning to interact with young people online

If you are using a third party social media platform

If you are building your own social media platform

Downloads

The draft document 'Safe & Effective Engagement with Social Network Sites for Youth Professionals' (PDF) provides an overview summary of the information on this page as a five-page handout for staff training and development.

Please contact tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk if you are planning to use or distribute this document.

Observations and notes

notes

playground:playground

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:49:48 +0000

PlayGround

guide:worksheet:making_your_case

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:01:36 +0000

« Back to Making the case

Worksheet: putting together a case for social media use

Often you will need to prepare a case to show why using social media in your organisation is important. In the making the case section of this guide we have considers a wide range of different reasons for using social media in youth engagement. However, your case will be specific to your organisation.

Elements

How you make your case will depend on the normal practice in your organisation. Howevever, you might like to consider the following elements:

The Proposition

Explaining social media

What you want to do. How will you explain your plans in a way that is accessible to someone without much experience of social media?

The way that you want to do it How will you use your existing professional skills and values in the social media space?

The Pull

Demand from young people

Going to where young people are. What relevant evidence can you show about the online behaviours of the young people you work with, or are trying to reach?

Demand from young people Do you have evidence from the young people you work with showing how they want to engage with your information, opportunities or service;

The Push

Drivers from above

A need to engage. How can social media help you meet your aims, objectives and targets?

Efficient and effective. How could social media play a role in making your work more efficient, targeted and effective?

Government or organisational policy - Are there policy drivers for using social media? For example, the Communities in Control empowerment white paper called for greater use of social media tools in engagement. Your local community strategies or organisational strategies may also make mention of social media.

The Potential

Taking it further

Increased reach. How could social media help you extend your existing work?

New opportunities. How could social media help you deliver new services that you've not yet been able to provide?

The Practicalities

All things considered

Safe and Sound. Can you show that you have given though to the policies, guidance, training and resources needed to put your use of social media on safe and sound foundations?

In partnership with young people. Can you show how you will involve young people as partners in all stages of developing your use of social media?

Evaluation. How will you evaluate and bench mark your social media engagement?

Examples

Add examples here of documents making the case for social media use

Outline of a youth work business case for getting access to social media websites.

Resources

Add links to presentations and other documents here

guide:worksheet:outline_of_a_youth_work_business_case - created

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:01:16 +0000

Getting Access to Social Media

Often youth services will find their access from the office to social media websites is filtered or blocked. You can usually request that your IT department change these filters.

Check with your IT Department the process required to get access. Often it will simply involve sending an e-mail to the relevant staff member, or sometimes completing a form and getting approval from your line manager.

But you may need to explain why this is needed. Remember that your IT department may not understand in detail what the Youth Service is - or why social media tools can be important to your work.

The following are elements you may want to include in your request to the IT department.

What is the youth service

Times of work

Who we work with

Where we fit (organisational structure)

Why Youthwork needs access

We can only protect young people if we have access

Extending our reach

Saving funds

What we're doing to prevent abuse

We are drafting a policy on safe and effective use of SNS in the youth service

We have complete a risk assessment

participation_toolbox

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:42:27 +0000

Latest

See the Guide Toolbox

Participation Toolbox

The Participation Toolbox will include useful resources for social-network enabled youth participation.

Rating Tools - tools for rating services

Mapping Tools - tools for working with maps for participation

Survey Tools - tools for running online surveys

Getting Access - making the case

See more toolbox entries

Technical Toolkits

A quick draft list of toolkits that may prove useful.

Gigya Socialise provides tools for authenticating users against Facebook or MySpace and posting messages back to their walls / friends-lists.

JS Kit provide social-network aware Comment and Rating widgets.

Daikon Apps can be used to build Facebook Apps with no need to coding.

guide:survey

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:12:28 +0000

Survey

Before you get started in your plan for Youth Engagement with Social Media - get social. Check out what is already going on in your area of work; find out what your organisations is already doing with social media; and think about how you are doing to involve young people in planning and delivering your social media engagement.

Checking what is out there

Explore your organisation

Engaging with young people

guide:making_the_case

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:11:34 +0000

Making the case

It is important to work out why you want to use social media in your work. This 'chapter' explores a range of reasons you might use in building your case for using social media.

You can use the 'Making Your Case' worksheet to put together your own case for using social media in your organisation.

Social Media

Why use social media in your youth engagement work? As the next section explores, the exact reasons for using social media for youth engagement will depend on exactly what form of youth engagement your work involves. However, there are a lot of general aspects of social media which make it very appealing for just about any youth engagement organisation:

Reaching young people

Young people in Britain have grown up in a connected world of internet access, mobile phones and interactivity. Their experience has often been of rich multi-platform media - and over recent years, or interactive online social media. From watching video on YouTube, to spending hours connected to Social Network Sites like Bebo and Facebook, most young people engage with social media on a daily basis.

The time young people are spending online is fast overtaking time spent watching TV, and many conventional forms of communication are loosing out to online communication ref.

Using social media for youth engagement can help organisations:

Reach young people where young people already are - spending hours a day connected to social media and social networking platform. Too often engagement opportunities are based on expecting young people to come to us, when we should go to where young people are.

Be found - as many young people turn to search engines to find or confirm information. If you're not online and easy to find, you're probably missing many opportunities for youth engagement.

Communicate with young people in familiar settings - using the same forms of media young people are comfortable interacting with. Social media tools make it easy to create rich multi-media communication that makes ideas and opportunities accessible to young people.

Meet changing expectations - as older methods of communication loose ground in a social media-rich environment. Young people will expect media they can interact with.

Take advantage of networks to spread information and engagement opportunities - creating content and opportunities that young people can easily share with their friends through social media and social networking tools.

Flexible and far-reaching communication

There is no one place where you can reach all young people. Any engagement will need to consist of multiple approaches. However, with sensitively chosen social media tools you can reach out to a far wider range of groups - increasing your impact.

Building blocks of social media such as RSS can be used to automatically spread your content out to a wide range of online spaces.

Publish once, use everywhere. - With social media tools you can take your content and engagement opportunities to a whole range of different digital spaces. And you can still easily generate printed and other off-line materials. It's easier start with online content and move it offline than it is to work the other way around.

Reach the long-tail - remixing and linking content and engagement opportunities into different niche communities and online spaces used by young people.

Empowering young people - to take your content and engagement opportunities and to remix and share them on their own terms - reaching new groups.

Cost savings and efficiency

Whilst getting started with social media can involve an investment of time to learn new tools and ways of working, social media has the potential to offer significant cost and efficiency savings.

With social media tools you have the potential to reach a greater number of young people with fewer resources. And by increasing the flow of information between your organisation and young people you can target your work more effectively and efficiently.

Cut the cost of travel - instead of bringing groups together for a few meetings a year you can keep in touch with young people online and can facilitate rich group work across a wide geographic area.

Listen and respond - targeting information and engagement opportunities to where they are needed most and the right times.

Network better with your partners - using social media not just to engage with young people, but to engage with other organisations - increasing your collective impact and avoiding duplication of work.

Remix media - taking advantage of the wealth of public domain and creative commons resources online that you are free to use and adapt instead of always creating your own resources and materials from scratch.

NI14 - Reducing avoidable contact. National Indicator 14 is a performance measure for local authorities designed to reduce avoidable contact such as phone calls to find out if an activity is still running, or to chase up the response to a request to the local authority. Taking services online and into social media spaces can help authorities meet NI14.

Creating a safe & pro-social internet

The internet is created by the people who participate in it. In the same way your organisation is involved in creating a better world for young people offline, so should organisations working with and for young people be involved in creating a positive online world.

Contribute positive content - to make sure young people have opportunities to engage with positive, developmentally appropriate information, resources and engagement opportunities in their time online.

The web is safer when responsible adults are engaged and involved.

The EU Kids Online project funded by the EU Safer Internet Programme argues that “there are growing indications that [positive online content] provision, if valued by children, directly benefits their development and reduced online risk by encouraging valuable and valued activities.”

Youth Engagement

Social Media can be used in many different ways. There is no all-purpose set of reasons for using social media. Rather, the reasons you will want to explore the use of social media, and the approaches you will want to take to using it, will depend on the focus and aims of your work.

When we talk of Youth Engagement it is important to distinguish between:

Engagement as communicating with young people;

Engagement as the involvement of young people in organised positive activities;

and

Engagement as the participation of young people in decision making and creating change;

Below you will find a number of elements you may want to consider when putting together a case for using social media in your engagement with young people - depending on your youth engagement focus. Here we look mainly at the opportunities social media provides. We will return to look at potential risks and making sure any use of social media is built on safe and sound foundations in a later section.

Communicating with young people

Many organisations have a role to provide information, advice and guidance to young people - either on a single issue, or on a wide range of different issues. Social media can be a key communication tool for such organisations.

Rich media matters - using audio, video, images and maps - whether to make content accessible to young people with limited literacy, or to make a message more tangible through visuals and sounds.

Social media storytelling; young people often highlight the importance of hearing about an issue from someone who really understands it and has first-hand experience of what they are talking about. Social media offers opportunities to share first-hand stories in ways that can have a big impact.

Crowd-source or co-create content - working with young people to use social media tools in creating accessible content which communicates your message.

Two-way communication. Social media is not just about cheaper and easier broadcasting. It's about interactivity too - whether that's interactivity to help young people engage with and remember your message, or whether it's conversation and opportunities for young people to engage directly with your service.

Communication on young people's terms. Social media spaces are spaces in which young people can be empowered to control their own communication. This can shift the balance of power from normal communication settings where adults may be in control - and it can lead to far better dialogue and engagement.

Networked communication. Communicating through social media creates a potential for your messages and engagement opportunities to spread quickly through young people's social networks.

Involvement in positive activities

Supporting the involvement of young people in positive activities is a key part of the mission of many organisations, and can be a statutory duty for local authorities.

Social media has a wide range of applications when it comes to positive activities.

Promote positive activities - making young people aware of activities that are taking place and giving them an insight into what to expect if they were to come along and take part. Getting activity information online makes it easy to find in search. Taking activity information into social network sites increases the chance young people may discover it. Creating rich social media online about an activity increases the change that young people might get interested and come to take part.

Communicate with group members - providing cheap and effective ways of keeping in touch with existing participants in an activity or members of a group - to let them know about upcoming events and opportunities and to deepen their engagement with the activity/group.

Creating opportunities for reflection, learning and development. By creating social media content young people gain the opportunity to reflect upon their activities, their development and upon their own learning. Creating social media content and interacting with social media spaces can be a positive activity in itself. With encouragement young people can use social media spaces to turn interests into life-long passions, hobbies or even careers ref.

Celebrate young people's achievements - getting positive stories out about young peoples activities.

Participation in decision making

All organisations or groups working with or for young people should consider how young people are involved in their decision making. The downloads section of the Hear by Right website includes briefings and guides that explain the importance of youth participation in depth.

Social media is an important tool in youth participation because:

Young people have a right to be listened to and to express their views in the media of their choice UNCRC Article 12 & 13

Listening to young people improves services - and young people are talking about their lives and the services they use online already

Being involved in decision making supports young people's personal and social development

Good youth participation is part of a strong local democracy

Social media tools can be used:

As a stimulus for group discussion. For example, using videos from YouTube, or using an online map during a face-to-face session to help young people explore a local issue.

For listening to existing conversations - tracking topics which matter to young people and starting conversations based on young people's concerns - rather than on organisational agendas.

As a feedback channel - making it easy for young people to add comments and to provide feedback on services.

As a conversation space - where young people from a wide geographic area can come together to discuss and issue through text and rich media.

As a collaboration space - where young people can work together with each other, and with adults - on shared projects.

As a bridge on young people's 'pathways of participation' - helping young people to keep in touch with an organisation and to move from one-off involvement to more in depth and long-term involvement with an organisation if they wish.

To provide feedback on what's changed. Young people are often consulted, but never informed of what has changed as a result of their input. Social media tools offer new ways to give young people feedback about their engagement.

To empower young people to campaign - and to directly make a difference on the issues that matter to them.

You can read more about different aspects of participation with Social Media and multi-media tools in the Participation Works guide 'How to use multimedia tools to engage children and young people in decision making'.

guide:toolbox:ning

Tim Davies — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:55:24 +0000

Ning

Information

Ning is a platform for building your own Social Network Site.

What is it?

Ning is a white label social network site. Using Ning you can set up your own Social Network in minutes - with profiles, blogs, forums, video and photo sharing and many other add-on applications.

You can set up a Ning network for free, but in youth engagement projects you will usually want to remove the advertising from the network - which costs around £30/month.

Your own network?

It is important to think carefully about whether having your own social network is the right approach. Projects often work on a 'build it and they will come' approach - but you should always ask yourself 'Why would anyone want to join my network?'. And make sure you give a really honest answer.

Networks built on Ning often work well either if they are providing an online platform for a group which is already in existence, and who do not find that networking through existing tools like Facebook or Bebo meets their needs or there is a particular niche group who are not well served by mainstream networks.

See this video overview of Ning by the Savvy Chavvy project who build a Ning network the Gypsy and Traveller community.

When considering creating your own network with Ning, always weigh this up against using an existing Social Network Site platform. Whether you opt for using an existing Social Network Site, or creating your own with Ning - remember that effective online engagement need effective facilitation.

Getting started

Creating our own Ning network is very simple. Visit Ning.com and look for the 'Create your own social network' option.

Facilitating a network guide

The following three-page guide provides a few ideas for creating and managing a Ning network including:

Identifying the purpose of your network;
Exploring the features of Ning;
Day-to-day ideas for running your network;

Facilitating a Ning Network (PDF)

Keeping it going

Tips for Moderating a Ning Network

Use the invite feature of Ning to e-mail potential network members and to invite them to join the network.

Talk about the network and give a live demonstration of it during face to face sessions with potential network members.

Use handouts and business cards (e.g. those from moo.com) to remind people of the network address and how they can get involved. Reminders that people can keep by their computer help increase network participation

Make sure you are actively using the network and leading by example. For example: respond to questions that network members send you by e-mail by starting a discussion thread on the network forum and sending them the address. Actively blog and share your reflections about the project. Make the network the place where people can download key documents and resources - and make sure you invite comments and feedback whenever you post.

Daily tasks

Welcome new members by adding comments to their member profiles. You can see new members in the siteʼs action feed. Think about how your welcome message can invite the new members to participate.

Respond to forum posts but be careful not to always be the person talking. Strike a balance between responding to encourage discussion - and leaving space for discussion between network members to emerge.

Prune the action feed - when you are logged in you can remove items from the action feed. Try to keep it full of the most interested new posts.

Weekly tasks

Update the front page by writing your own blog posts and using the ʻfeature blog postʼ and ʻfeature forum discussionʼ options to manage what appears on the front page.

Encourage contributions. If there is a forum post or discussion that you think could benefit from a particular input try to encourage that.

Sometimes you may find extra online resources to input into a discussion, or you may chase up a network members by e-mail or phone call to encourage them to contribute to a particular debate.

Monthly Updates

Send out a network update. Not everyone on your network will have been checking back regularly.

You can use the ʻMessage membersʼ feature in the [Manage] section to alert network members to recent activity on the site.

List three or four hot forum topics and blog posts, and remind members of how they can contribute to the network. Use tinyurl.com to provide short links to forum topics on the network.

Review progress and check whether the network is working as you hoped. How could you adapt the way you are running the network to encourage more/less/different use?

Key Considerations

Consider offline engagement. Know when it's time to encourage your community to meet, or have a conference call.

Use blended facilitation - weave together online and offline discussions. Make sure that those people who are different networks are included.
- Sometimes that involves recording podcasts at face-to-face events to feed them into a network, or taking photos of flip-charts and writing up bullet points to add onto a network.
- Sometimes it involves printing out a summary of points made in an online network, or creating a PowerPoints presentation which introduces arguments from online.
- Sometimes it involves inviting supporting a few members of your online community to come to face-to-face meetings with other groups to share the ideas and conversations that have been shared online.

Taking it further

Ideas about extending your use of this tool

Integration options

Ning offers a number of options for connecting it to other online tools - and it can work as a good 'hub' for online engagement taking place in different online spaces.

Outward

A public Ning network will generate RSS feeds of forum posts and blog posts which you can integrate with other sites. If you restrict access to your network (i.e. so that content is hidden behind the member login) then the availability of RSS feeds is limited

Ning offers the ability to share videos and photos posted on the site into Facebook.

Inward

Ning includes a side-bar module for including RSS feeds onto the front page, or every page of the network.

You can easily embed widgets into most text-box areas within your Ning website.

Ning allows for approved open social applications to be added to members profile pages - creating more opportunities for integration.

Troubleshooting

Are there common problems people encounter?

The account originally used to sign up to the network is the one to which payment details need to be attached if you plan to remove ads from your network. It can be useful to make this generic 'organisational' account rather than an individual personal account, and then to join also as an individual (giving the individual account administrator rights as well).

Examples

Savvy Chavvy is an award winning network for Gypsy and Traveller young people. The LGIU Action Learning Set heard from Nat about the project at their March meeting.

Networked Participation is a network built on the Ning platform for professional youth engagement practitioners.