UK Youth Online unConference

A couple of producers from the Parliament website attended the day long conference at the Department for Innovation, University and Skills. The focus was on how social media can be used to communicate with younger adults. The event was attended by Youth Workers, staff from a number of government departments and self confessed geeks!

As you may know we are currently experimenting with a  number of social networking tools: Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Flickr. The aim of attending this conference was to see how younger adults are actually using these tools to access services and information.

Lots of themes were discussed including: digital exclusion; the myths surrounding the dangers of young people using social networking sites; how youth workers are utilising social media to communicate with their clients; social networking trends amongst young people; tools for creating social media content. Apart from the formal sessions there were plenty of opportunities to network with others who are working day to day with young people and those trying to provide vital services to them.

The conference generated a lot of great ideas which will help inform our continued work with social media.

Twitter – 200 updates and beyond

Twitter. It feels like more and more public sector organisations and people are getting on board.

Parliament did its first tweet back in June 2007, took a hiatus while looking for an official nod, then really got going almost exactly a year later. Symmetry.

On the occasion of our 200th update, we asked for some follower feedback. You can see the full response in our @ukparliament replies. Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond.

It was largely positive, with most people saying we had the number of updates right. And some asking for more. Obviously, when Parliament is in session we could flood Twitter with updates – on everything from new reports getting published, to the start of debates, right down to ‘… has just stood up to talk’. But it doesn’t feel like the majority of our followers want that level of detail. And if they do, maybe we should create a separate feed for it, like a Hansard reporter one?

We probably don’t have the resources to do a Twitter feed(s) tracking everything that happens in Parliament. But with the start of the new session (6 October) we’ll be updating more often, and looking to mix up the formula a little more.

Of course, all our committee reports, research papers, Bills and more are listed on the website, and so much of the business is available on live video feeds. If you’ve got the time and the interest, there’s nothing to stop you running your own Twitter feed on what Parliament’s doing… And why not?

Welcome to our production blog!

Hello. This is a blog from the Web Centre team working in the Houses of Parliament.

Aside from keeping the site up and running and doing daily updates, our team spends its time working on developing the website.

We want to tell you about what we’re doing and why.