Engaging Children and Young People Online - CluedupinHull.com

November 30, 2009 by Ian Cuddy · 1 Comment 

Children and young people are notoriously one of the most difficult groups for councils to engage with online.  The history of initiatives aimed at the young generation has seem a long line of well-meaning councils try, and fail, to ‘get down’ with the ‘kids’.  So how do councils engage successfully with this ‘hard to reach’ group and earn their trust?  How can they use the web to reach this audience in a way that isn’t patronising, preachy or terminally embarrassing?  Can councils be cool and fun?

Fortunately, one local authority has some answers.  Leading the way in this field is Hull City Council and its award-winning project, CluedupinHull. com.   Launched 18 months ago, CluedupinHull has proved an outstanding success. Targeting two age groups, 12 and under, and the over 13s, the site provides a trusted online source of information designed for and by children and young people in Hull - and one they actually want to use.

PSFbuzz met up with Debra Coombs, Integrated Content Manager at Hull City Council and her team to talk about CluedupinHull and the secrets of its success.   We discussed how the project was set up, how users are engaged, the issues and challenges involved, as well as what advice the team would offer to other local authorities looking to venture down this route.  See below for a video of our conversation.

Our thanks again to Debra and her colleagues Patrick O’Malley, Martin Brabazon and Gary Hass for their time.

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PSF Mobile Working and Infosecurity Events, 24 Nov

November 25, 2009 by Ian Cuddy · Leave a Comment 

On Tuesday over 100 people joined PSF on a trek to Milton Keynes for our public sector Mobile Working and Information Security forums. Slides from both happenings will be available asap, but to give you a taster Ken Eastwood, who chaired for Mobile Working, has blogged about the event and the future of the recently-rescued Nomad local government mobile working project he now leads.

Ken shares his slides here:

PSF Milton KeynesView more presentations from Ken Eastwood.

Here’s some photos of the day also courtesy of Ken:


You can view the complete #psfbuzz Twitter action here (there’s 200-plus tweets so this may take a while to load), with thanks to Steph Gray and Dave Briggs for the search hack.  And of course, many thanks again to all our sponsors, speakers and attendees for making the event such a success.

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