Google’s second Interactivism event was held in London on 17th and 18th February 2012. Google and FutureGov joined forces with the RSA and Livity to deliver Interactivism: Young People’s Hack Weekend. This time, teams were challenged to come up with innovative ways of using the web to help young people get into the job they want, or onto the training or education that will help them get there in the future.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, for us, a hack is an event where computer developers, designers and people with ideas come together to build real, working prototypes (or models) of their ideas in a short amount of time.
Before the hack weekend, the RSA hosted a roundtable discussion with young people and policy influencers to help frame the challenge. This informed a framework document that you can read here. Ideas were submitted here on Simpl and a short list of 10 ideas (click here to see which ten) were selected to be developed during the two day event. The event was held in Ravensbourne, a digital media and design university sector college, and the teams consisted of people with ideas, student developers, Googlers, young people with experience of being out of work and education, designers and social innovators (you can see the full list on the Eventbrite page here.) All of our teams produced some excellent prototypes during the two days and two winning ideas were selected. If you would like to help any of our teams develop their ideas further, please get in touch through the Simpl ideas page.
Details of the first Interactivism event: Interactivism - Accessibility Hack Weekend, where participants were challenged to make the web more accesible for older people, can be found here.
You can read all of the reports from Interactivism on the Simpl blog and can keen up to date with any future Interactivism events by following us on Twitter @Simplco.
All information collected for the Interactivism competition will be held by FutureGov, Google and RSA only. All ideas submitted for the competition remain the sole property of the idea originator unless otherwise stated by the idea originator. Idea originators must be prepared to work with Google should their idea be chosen to be given further support following the Interactivism event.
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future ideas posted to Simpl.
2Youth Opportunities - The Power of Crowdsourcing We find ourselves in pressing times, with major reductions in the provision of information services including the scrapping of connexions and the Local Youth Services Directory.
However, times like this are also perfect for those keen to change the way things are done! To use our initiative and utilise the ambition and commitment of 1000s of youth workers, employers and youth empowers across London and many more across the country who remain committed to ensuring opportunities are made available to as many young people as possible.
0YourPosition YourPosition enables young people to locate places that have current job positions available, these are sent as a notification alert on their mobile device. As soon as the user enters into a certain location, the app searches for vacancies over a certain mileage of radius from their current position. As well as sending vacancy alerts it also rates them in urgency or importance, for example it would be of a bigger brighter alert if the application date was near or after setting up the app with your dream job specification it will also search for aspects of your spec that will relate to sending urgent attention alerts that are related exactly to the users needs.
0Your Nxt Step To inspire and inform young people about different employment opportunities through video interviews with people in the workplace available via apps and website.
0Whatsinmycommunity.com – delivering social cohesion and e-learning We believe that what is needed is an accessible education programme that allows people from all different backgrounds from all different academic achievements to obtain work/life skills relevant to the job market.
We envisage taking a radical approach to education and creation of job opportunities, by creating an interactive virtual 3D college on www.whatsinmycommunity.com to deliver necessary life skills and training qualifications to all sectors of the community.
9Valuable internships found easy We propose a social search platform for internships, which helps finding paid and valuable learning opportunities easily. It is social, because interns can make pay-level and quality of learning experiences transparent by adding such information to the platform.
0Tutor map A graphical user interface similar to Google Maps, where every marker advertises an education opportunity (free and paid courses, tutors, etc).
Users are able to post on the site and tag a geographical location with the post.
There would be two primary uses for the site:
-Posting courses on ANY subject (as long as they are not illegal)
-Browsing for courses
People who post courses are supposed to teach these courses to anyone who request to learn from them. They will become teachers on whatever subject they choose. Examples include: painting, playing an instrument, cooking, etc. Incentives may be requested by people who post, but may not necessarily be monetary.
This would increase the array of skills available for learning in any community and increase social interaction within it, further increasing a sense of community and belonging.
0TraIn TraIn is a cascade of training and trainers, assisting young people and NEETs needing to develop soft-skills to be more employable using young people to train their peers.
0The Thing Tank A mobile application and online platform, ‘The Thing Tank’ will help young people not in employment, education or training to easily record, collate and present ‘things’ they’ve done to create a narrative of relevant experience.
The process is supported by a youth worker (and in many cases by peers) and experiences will contribute to agreed challenges which can form part of an accredited youth qualification.
All ‘things’ or experiences will also be automatically synced into an online multi-media CV template.
‘Things’ can be recorded in a variety of ways (by photo, video, text, audio) and can even submitted by others.
Young people also gain important social media and multi-media skills while sharing and learning with their peer group.
This will all result in increased employability and chances of access to further education.
2 Youth Opportunities - The Power of Crowdsourcing 
