Museums, Archives and Galleries may not at first strike you as the cutting edge of children and young people's participation. But look again. And be inspired! We have much to learn about vision, values and leadership, as well of course about inspiring approaches like sleepovers with the dinosaurs!

This video from Nottingham explores the importance of building in the voice and influence of children and young people across services and organisations. There are a range of tools available to help with this. Two I make a lot of use of are the PowerPoint called Building Standards and the pamphlet that goes with it which are attached below.

A group of disabled young people from the North East of England recently visited Brussels as part of the EY2010 European Year for Combating

Open Data is a big thing right now. The last government, and the current government, have been committed to making non-personal information held by government open and accessible to citizens. 

Open government data could be:

One of the big changes in political dialogue since the coalition government came to power has been the emphasis on ideas of the 'big society'. The big society is not a fixed policy programme, but is a loose collection of ideas - including ideas about localism and citizens taking on roles that previously may have been carried our or co-ordinated by the state. 

Amidst a difficult and challenging week for most of us we want to make sure we don't lose any ground in our efforts to promote the human rights of children and young people. We are delighted, therefore, to be able to announce that Dr.

Our proposed seminar at De Montfort University on Tuesday 26 October has been postponed, but we are still building toward the large national event in Sheffield on 19 April 2011. For further information contact felicity.shenton@durham.gov.uk.

I was at an event with local authority participation workers recently where many workers expressed frustration that they had been told not to consult with young people on public spending cuts because of the risk of a conflict of interest.

Bill Badham got everyone to their feet at the start of the CROA conference - asking participants to move around the room and vote with their feet to answer four key questions. Participants could stand by one of four faces:

:D The delighted face - We're doing well on this issue.

:) The happy face - We're doing OK;

:| The unhappy face - We're not doing so well on this

:( The very unhappy face - We're not doing well on this at all.

See the interview with RightSpace here: http://www.rightspace.org.uk/content/harrison-carter-young-people-and-research