Kristin | SPR/thinkers and doers

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"Wouldn't it be great if young people could find out about jobs or skill-building, mentoring & learning opportunities, entrepreneurship, and, say, rock-and-roll-camp for girls - through a single RSS feed? And what if the feed was customizable - so that said young people (or parents/guardians/mentors) could subscribe to an organization (that hosts such activities), a venue (near home, for example), or a specific firm where said young people might really, really want to work?"

The problem

Portland (Oregon) offers lots of youth activities relating to employment, training, skill-building, mentoring, entrepreneurship, etc. but there is no simple way to learn about them, sort them, or share them because they are provided by some 60+ youth-serving organizations who do not share information about their activities in a single, searchable platform. (We're guessing this problem is not unique to us...)

As a result:

• Young people have a hard time finding the right activities for them.
• Parents, guardians, and mentors have a hard time finding the right activities for their kids.
• Teachers/youth serving orgs have a hard time referring young people to the right activities (plus, they spend a lot of time/resources marketing their activities separately - effectively competing with one another). Moreover, because there is no collective map, these well-intentioned and intrepid souls have a hard time seeing gaps/redundancies in service provision that would prompt a shift in strategy.
• There is too little collaboration among youth-serving organizations and agencies (and too little effort altogether on jobs, rather than job-related activities).

Too many good people are working very hard to create great opportunities and experiences for young people that young people never find out about.

#wecanandweshoulddobetter

The idea

https://twitter.com/#!/kristinwolff

https://github.com/calagator/calagator/https://github.com/calagator/calagator/

A Shared Calendar of Youth Activities & Jobs, Available via RSS (w/ custom subscriptions by venue, organization, type of event, etc.)

Using the code from this Portland tech community calendar (Calagator.org), we created TheStreamPDX at a one-day Hackathon in last summer: www.thestreampdx.com. For a recap, read this.

The idea is an integrated calendar for the 60+ youth-serving orgs in Portland that would allow parents, kids, teachers, and youth service providers themselves to subscribe to a feed by venue, type of activity, etc. and be notified (via text or smart phone) about these activities as they are scheduled. We also created a "jobs" tab, the point of which was to enable a shared jobs board for orgs in the youth job-matching business that would be accompanied by a list of the top employers for youth by number (those with the largest numbers of young people working for them) - and by preference/experience (of young people - keep reading).

We suggested a survey of young people, the results of which would inform lists like "Best employers to work for if you are a young person" (the same could be done with programs).

Finally, we talked about instituting a badge system that would enable young people to accumulate "credit" for participating in programs that could be displayed on their FB, LinkedIn or other profiles. A way of credentialing their activities - maybe even enablishing peer mentoring/networking. For more info about badges, click here.

We ran into three major problems:

1. Only one of the 60+ calendars we found was Google calendar with an RSS that allowed us to import it into the application. (This organization was the Native American Youth and Family Center - go NAYA!). This means there's a whole lot of capacity building to do with youth service providers about why open calendars matter. It also explains why, if you click "venue" in TheStreamPDX, all the additions are 8 months old - we had to hand-enter data so there would be content when we demonstrated it. (The app worked really well - we won an award on the basis of voting among parents, young people, and service-providers).

2. There are a few major contracting entities who ultimately fund many of the youth-serving organizations in the City - they will need to be engaged/involved in order to put incentives/capacity building into the contracts to make such an application work. We are encouragin such engagement now, but realize it's significant undertaking - for contractors and providers. For some, it means re-thinking their roles. This leads to #3.

3. These organizations, too, are large-ish and often government agencies or foundations. They are not accustomed to open-source ways of sharing/working and have a hard time believing that an application that is so great (and it is!) could have been built in a weekend by hackers (we have been using it for years in the tech community - that is the proof of concept).

4. Finally, to be fair, many of the civic app/open gov efforts have been run out of the Mayor's office and have been around sharing data - these are fantastic! But the work of actually solving community problems is much harder and involves a very complex mix of stakeholders, many of whom are overworked, underpaid, volunteer, and under tremendous pressure. It's going to take us some time to implement what are obvious solutions.

We' d love another proof of concept. So please, please STEAL THE CODE! CREATE A SHARED CALENDAR FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND THEIR CHAMPIONS IN YOUR COMMUNITY!!!

https://github.com/calagator/calagator/

*Thanks heaps to Tech Community, especially Audrey Eschright (Calagator's intrepid coordinator, co-developer & champion); Amber Case (who organized the Hackathon); and my Hackathon teammates: Dave Shanley, Kyle Drake, Lokkju Brennr, Patrick Arlt & Roy Martin, all of whom ate impressive quantities of pizza while sharing thier genius in developing TheStreamPDX. Cheers, @kristinwolff

What we need

We are working on implementation here in Portland, but more proofs of concept would help. PLEASE STEAL THIS CODE AND WORK ON SIMILAR SOLUTIONS WHERE YOU ARE!!!

Tags

youth, young people, jobs, skills, activities, calendar, RSS, feed, subscription, customer, asset map, collaboration, youth empowerment, badges, credentials, learning, work, mentoring, entrepreneurship, app, shared, text, smartphone

A "What's Going On?" Info Stream of Youth Activities/Job Opportunities w/ Custom RSS Subscriptions