City of Whittlesea launch new Youth Website

The City of Whittlesea today launched a new youth portal, forming an key role in the organisation's youth strategy.

A large municipality in a growth area on the urban fringe of greater Melbourne, the City of Whittlesea prides itself as being a technology innovator.  The council has facilitated, hosted and participated in the Municipal Association of Victoria's Information Technology Conference in recent years and has piloted and taken the key role in several successful e-government projects.

Whittlesea has made their first step into the realm of Web 2.0 (something very new to local government) with the new Youth Portal - "Whittlesea Youth".  The portal is intended to instill a sense of community amongst young people in the area.

Vicki Cooper, the council's Youth Services Manager says, "We had an existing website project running, then some of the people involved pulled out of the project.  Having been impressed by the Wyndham Youth website, we contacted Datalink to help redesign our own.  They saw plenty of potential for council youth websites and agreed to create a youth portal so that our financial investment was minimized but we could still achieve our project aims."    

The Youth website was developed using Datalink's Youth Portal system, which is powered by Freestyler, an industry leading and Web 2.0 enabled content management system.  "One of the key features we wanted was a system to manage the content, both for us and the young people to contribute to.  Our department has very specific needs in terms of information and communication technologies.  The fact that the solution could be hosted externally with minimum risks for the IT department and the unique look meant it could offer information for a much different audience to the council’s corporate site", says Cooper. 

One of the features of the project was the involvement of local youth, as key stakeholders, various representatives expressed a keen desire to play a key role in the website development.  As part of the methodology, Datalink engaged the the council's youth reference committee by participating in a series of focus groups.  Of the process, Vicki Cooper says, "Young people were very happy to contribute and we are pleased with the result".  "The project was not without challenges", as Vicki Cooper explains "though Datalink were able to help us keep the project on track".

The council intends to activate some of the social networking features, such as the online discussion forums, blogs and as more people use the site, “there is obviously a lot more that we’d like to do, but we’ll take it step by step as more resources become available”.

The website, which can be accessed at www.youthwhittlesea.com is set to be publicised through local channels in the coming weeks.