I'm rapidly trying to get the Enfusion Network website ready to go live in the next few weeks. The first Enfusion Network online conversation is due on Friday, and if I can, then I'd like to have the site ready for sign-ups by then.

In getting all this up and running I'm trying to get the right mix of tools to help support a community of youth participation practioners and consultants to:

• Connect

• Share Knowledge

• Share Questions, Reflections and Sollutions

The idea of The Enfusion Network as a community is really important to me. In my experience so much good participation work goes on and so many good resources are out there - but so little time and space is available for reflection, sharing ideas and making sense of all that material.

That is why I've tried to bring together areas of The Enfusion Network site to help participation practioners and consultants find one another and communicate (the profiles), to share news of what they have been up to (the blogs and the project spaces (coming soon..)) and to make sense of the wide range of resources out there (the resource library).

I've tried to mix structured 'categories', and a 'folksonomy' tagging system together in the site - so that we can develop a shared vocabulary for talking about our field, and so that individual members of the network can post and make sense of content that falls beyond the more obvious boundaries and well trodden paths of engagement and participation.

Thanks to Sarah's and Tom's ideas and input I'm working hard on preparing a wiki like space to further allow us to capture our knowledge outside the formal categories of a resource directory...

The site, as it launches, will only be a starting point - ready for evolution and change. As I seek to play the role of technology steward [1] [2] for the network (co-stewards welcome) I realise that I don't really know what shape the community is going to take - and so the technology and the community will be co-creators of each other...

I'm looking forward to the journey :)

Sarah has just posted a really interesting resource (the Youth Infusion 'Are You Ready for Youth Engagement' Tool) which opens with some of the questions organisations might want to ask themselves before embarking on a yourney of exploring participation.

What struck me is that Sarah's 6 questions (well, there are six bullet points... there are a few more questions in reality...) cover a lot of ground. Here are the question (in bold) and a bit of my own commentary exploring what I think the questions dig into...

1. Why you want to engage youth in your organization? Why now?
   Exploring motivations... we need to know why an organisation wants to engage with young people... Is it because of edict from above? An identification of need? A recognition of a trend? A belief in the right of young people to be involved?

2. How important is youth engagement to meeting your organization’s stated mission and objectives?
   Exploring whether the organisation understands youth engagement as a core activity, or an optional extra. Will support for youth engagement dry up when budgets get tight?

3. What forms of youth participation/youth engagement have been tried in the past? What has worked? What has not worked? Why?
   Exploring the history... what obstacles do you need to be aware of a consultant? What assets and experience already exists in the organisation that could help a process of developing youth engagement.
   

4. How do you envision young people working with your organization? What would
   successful youth engagement look like?
   Exploring expectations, visions and understandings... getting someone to describe their idea of what participation would look like can give really useful insight into how they understand the practise of engaging young people. I'm exploring the use of questions that illicit a narrative response more and more in what I do...
   

5. What do you see as the major barriers to youth engagement within your organization? Are there any legal barriers to youth serving in a governance capacity?
   Exploring possible pit-falls. Being aware of obstacles in advance...
   

6. Who will need to buy-in to the youth engagement concept and plan before it can be
   adopted?
   Exploring challenges and how to overcome them. Mapping out key people in the organisation whose support is needed.

Question 1,3 and 4 seem to me to be quite broad questions, exploring Motivation, Vision and History. To my mind questions 2, 5 and 6 come across a little to narrow for an assessment of readiness for a participation process - being more geared towards mapping some of the particulars of a process of organisational change...

Bringing youth engagement and participation into an organisations mission plan, mapping and overcoming barriers to engagement, challenging and working practical and legal obstacles to young people in governance and gaining the buy in of key staff and partners are all part of the journey into participation. Being aware that these will be stages on the journey is neccessary to be ready for the journey - but I worry a little that these questions could invite obstacles...

I'd be really interested to hear from Sarah how these questions work in practise to launch a participative process. The tool they come in is billed a 'Self Assessment' although I wonder if they might be more practically used in a first interview with a potential client organisation.

Overall however, I think Sarah's questions provide a really interesting starting point...