So, 24 hours until NYA2008 begins.  How am I feeling?  Well I’m just beginning to get excited after a day of not really caring much.  I guess that happens when you’ve been working on something for a while and it eventually comes around!

This event is a bit of an technology experiment.  We’re using multiple platforms to enable people to read, write, tweet, comment and generally say stuff about the topics up for discussion and it would be great if you wanted to get involved in that.

You can see the topics we’ll be talking about and when through the links in the blog.  The blog should be pretty interesting with a range of people sharing their thoughts.  Your comments would be very welcome!

Hopefully you will be able to see some of the comments and questions on the twitter feed.  Feel free to follow NYA2008 on twitter too and send us some messages!

Finally, there will be photos on the NYA2008 flickr group or search for nya2008 tags.

So, I’m off to pack soon.  My sessions are about as done as they are getting for now.  I’m hoping they will evolve with the conversation over the weekend too.

So what does one need to make all this happen?  Well, a laptop, a camera and a phone.  Seriously, that’s all.  You could even do without the camera if your phone has a decent camera.

Where has the time gone!?!?!  I’ve known about NYA2008 for ages and been working on it for months and I’m still not done!  How come?

I got the programme information today and it looks amazing!  Some really good stuff happening about mental health and the human library sounds fascinating.

My sessions?  Well, Authenticity, Information, Privacy and Participation are our headings for an adventure in Social Media.  Sound interesting?  I hope so.

I’ll be blogging as we go along and posting on the wiki.  If you’re not coming you can follow the back-channel chat (or just backchat) on twitter.  Follow us over the weekend, or say hi!, using NYA2008 in your tweet.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about last night’s thoughts and I think my obsession with this event is about making a difference and seeing the value it has.  If not then it really is an obsession and I need help!

Now, no more of this procrastination.  Back to work!!!

It’s 4 days until the Church of Scotland’s National Youth Assembly in Dundee.

If you follow my blog or my twitter feed you will probably have noticed that this event seems to have taken up lots of my attention over the past couple of months.  I wanted to try to write about why that might be because it’s not like me to get so obsessed with a project.

We have history

Lots of history.  Yout Assembly has defined some pretty important points in my life.

I was a delegate/participant/sent to the first of the modern Youth Assemblies in 1994.  I was still at University and my dad was on the presbytery committee that got the job of sending someone.  He didn’t look much further than the other side of the dinner table.  I went, I liked it, I got picked to present a report from that Youth Assembly to the General Assembly.

I got a job with the Church of Scotland and became part of the team that delivered the event and spent a year talking Guilds into raising money to support it.

I was even put in charge of running one.  2001 at West Park in Dundee.  Possible still the highlight of my career so far.

All good so far, but then for a number of reasons I wasn’t at or was only partly involved in the next few.  I felt disconnected from the whole process but in many ways I think that was a good thing.  Distance gives perspective.  At least that’s what I thought.

Then I was invited to speak at the celebration of the 10th NYA a couple of years ago and thought that was the end of that.

I’m Back

I was surprised to be asked to this year’s NYA.  As I said, I thought I was done with it.  But apparently not.  I’m leading a team (that in itself is worth a post) who will deliver and resource ( I hope) a series of discussions on Social Media.  We’ve not been able to meet in real life as a team so we’ve used a wiki to plan and I’ll be doing the delivering and the whole team will be doing the resourcing of the conversations.

So what’s big deal?

I seem to care.  More than I think I should.  And I don’t know why. I’ve set up the event wiki and a planning wiki, a flickr group and some other stuff.  I’ve made suggestions about the event way beyond what I would do normally as an invited guest.  I’m not sure why.

One of my frustrations with FURY Assembly (the URC’s version) is that I don’t feel that the skills of the CYDOs (that’s me and my colleagues) are used effectively.  I think NYA is better at providing an informed and really challenging environment.  Not that I’m trying to big up myself.  I’m pretty terrified of this task and maybe that’s why I’ve given it so much attention.  Social Media is something that interests me but I’m not an expert.  I’m an enthusiast.  I see all kinds of possibilities and pitfalls and I think I get some of the challenges for the church but that needs translating for an audience of young adults.

Or maybe it is to do with investment.  I know how this event changed my life.  I probably wouldn’t have worked for the church if I hadn’t gone to that first Youth Assembly.  So, given the opportunity, perhaps I want to make the same kind of investment in this group of young people.

Maybe it’s about me wanting to impress my former colleagues and the new guys.  I used to do your job or something like it.  Performing in front of your peers is always pretty scary.

Maybe I should get some therapy and find out what it is about this event that gets me worked up!  But it does.  So the next week is going to be interesting, not least because I’ve still not finished my sessions.  I’m going to try to blog the process because it’s an interesting event with interesting people and I want to see what it stirs in me and if that helps me make some sense of how this thing affects me.

Oh, it’s in a 4 star hotel with a pool and gym and a spa.  Just thought I’d mention that!

Stock.xchng is a brilliant free stock photo site.  Great for high quality photos for your presentations like this…

Come to think of it, I have no idea what i’d use this photo for but I now have a strange urge to go pour a gin and tonic!

Together@MCT starts again for a new year tonight at 5.30pm at Saughtonhall Church with pizza and plans.  Together will happen every second month on the last Sunday but those are all the plans we have so far.  Tonight we hope people will help with ideas and get a little more involved in how Together happens and what it looks like.

Sometimes it takes me ages to get something to the point where I know what it is and where it’s going.  My preparation for NYA2008 has been a bit like that.

The Church of Scotland’s Youth Assembly is in 3 weeks.  It already seems to have consumed much more time than it really should have.  I’m leading a team who are facilitating 3 two hour discussion sessions about Social Media.  I think part of the problem is that the topic is too interesting for me.  I’ve found myself off on all kinds of tangents but I think the main problem is I haven’t been able to see where it’s going.  Not so much the presentations.  I think the information about Social Media is is fine.

I know what I want to say, but we started with 4 topics which have kind of merged into 2.  Now I’m not sure how to manage that!  Oh well, more thought required.  I think if we can nail the discussion points the rest will follow.

So, why is Social Media relevant to the church?  Answers please…

John has blogged his thoughts HERE.  Well worth a look as usual!

Got a PowerPoint presentation to make?  Do your audience a favour.  Buy this book and read it first.  Please.

Then visit the Presentation Zen blog frequently. Please.

I like writing.  It’s definitely one of my favourite tasks although sometimes it takes a while to get into the groove.  Deadlines seem to help with that!

I’ve spent a good part of the past week writing part of the ’spiritual’ section of the new Girls’ Brigade (Scotland) programme for Juniors (8-12) and I’ve really enjoyed it.  My sections have been on ‘Bread of Life’, ‘Water’, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Harvest for the World’ and each one of the four topics has 6 sections with a few activities.  So that’s somewhere around 72 activities!!!

They will be doing nature walks, finding our where their food comes from, discovering what communion is, painting, drawing, singing, talking, reading and acting.  Good fun I think.

looks like a brilliant idea.  The idea is simple.  Post what kind of people you want to meet up with and why.  Name a time and a venue.  People come.  It’s that simple.  Still not sure?  Watch this:

This seems to me like a tool we (the church) should be using lots to network children’s workers, youth workers, ministers, people…

I’ve been invited to head up a team delivering a debate stream (I’ll explain in a minute) at the Church of Scotland’s National Youth Assembly in September.

The debates have in the past followed a fairly traditional model where people would be given written information prior to the event, someone would present more information on the topic at the event and then participants would ask questions, discuss and decide what they think.

This year there will be four debate themes; The Media, Healthy Relationships, Sustainable Living and Future Church.  I’m involved with The Media one.  Each theme will have four sessions lasting 2 hours each to explore one aspect of their topic with around 60 young adults.

So, we’ve decided to take an adversarial approach setting our sessions up as discussions around the opposites like control v democracy.  We’re also going to concentrate mostly on ‘new media’.  Should be fun.

We’ve decided to use a wiki to both provide information beforehand and to post what we come up with during the event.  More on that nearer the time.