Saturday 13 December 2008

Is the Australian Youth Forum website a total failure?

On 2 October 2008 with much fanfare the Rudd Government and the Federal Minister for Youth, Kate Ellis, launched the Australian Youth Forum and associated website.

The website is an online forum for, well, for youth and the young have responded dramatically according to government:

There has been such a great response to the initial topics and some really good suggestions have been made.

Here is how this "great response" played out.
It's first discussion topic Bullying the forum attracted 40 comments over 59 days, as of the morning of 12 December and not all of these were from young people.
The second discussion topic Body Image is doing a little better with 45 comments in 59 days.
There is no third, fourth or fifth topic listed on the website.

Of course there are slightly more people reading this site, with Bullying posts receiving 181 votes and Body Image 142 votes.

However there is no way of knowing if it was the young actually reading and voting.
As a Baby Boomer my anonymous vote was happily registered by the online forum.
As would be the vote of any ministerial staffer.

Now I know that in its $8 million funding announcement government also included funding for the non-government Australian Youth Affairs Coalition and some future local conferences, but this still represents as lot of money for 85 short opinion posts on a specially created website.

Each post keystroke probably represented hundreds of dollars.

With so many of Australia's two million-odd young people able to access the Internet, this poor showing over two months gives pause for thought.
Wasn't the Youth Forum website a product of that Rudd brain fever, the 2020 Summit?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Friend,
this is a nice blog.All information are good.i like to express your way of information.
I am also interested in latest news, sometimes i posted on
Website Development India