“Ongea!” means “talk!” or “speak up!” in Kiswahili. The OnGea! project plans to create ONline GEAr to empower and enhance youth work activities; especially international youth exchanges and international networks of youth organisations.For youth work institutions, organisations and networks, presence in the digital domain has become increasingly vital during the last decade: To reach their target group, to promote and disseminate their work, to reach possible funders and to address the general public with young people's messages. For the communication with young target groups, platforms such as Facebook and apps for mobile devices such as WhatsApp have gained importance.Youth work institutions, organisations and networks aiming for an adequate online presence and useful digital communication tools have the options to either have an agency design and program a dedicated website/app tailor-made for their needs, use what's on the market/available for free or a combination of both.RRCGN's core team has been closely following the discourse of youth work and internet since 1999, compared projects/online platforms with similar goals and features and found dedicated systems programmed from scratch mostly superior to systems using a pre-built CMS framework; not only in functionality and user-friendliness, but also in cost-to-features ratio.We plan a complete re-write of the website system used for rootsnroutes.eu for a more general approach that will be made available for other youth work organisations and networks as open source. That system is planned to have an advanced multi-country and multi-lingual concept, an easily adaptable new state-of-the art visual design, interface to social media, a strong but adaptable potential to be used as an “outward bound” presentation homepage and other features as to be researched.In addition, we want to develop an open source mobile app, dedicated youth work, that enables participants of larger youth events/exchanges to keep track of the activity program, to get reminders/push messages of group meetings etc, includes a tool for participants to evaluate the event, has an open multilingual system, works offline and includes other features as to be researched.Oct - Dec ’15: - Preparation 1st seminar- development of basic concepts for website system and mobile app- research on accessibility criteria, programming standards concerning privacy and connectivity- graphic design drafts- questionnaires to associated partnersJan ’16: International idea development seminar and management meeting:- Presentation of basically new concepts for a website system and a mobile app for youth work- Presentation of prepared research and design drafts- Discussing and prioritizing ideas, checking what is feasible within the time and budget- Outcome: The partnership will agree on formal concepts, a prioritised list of features to be implemented within the available amount of time and budget and a scheduleJan - Dec ’16: First phase of programming:- Research on working guidelines, quality and formal standards- Preparation of the rough framework, implementation of high rated modules based on the results of the first seminarTranslation: All partners translate texts used by the website system and mobile app into their languages. The translation work will be reasonably bundled by the programmers and passed to the partners in a few packages at crucial points of time.Feb ’17: 2nd international seminar and management meeting:- Partners will be introduced to the first version of both website system and mobile app- Check of the current state- First feedback by partners, agreement on changes of schedule or featuresFeb ’17:- The website system will be installed as the official website for the ROOTS & ROUTES network, filled with general information and activity results during various projects- The mobile app will be used at various projects taking place in the ROOTS & ROUTES network, used by staff and participants- Feedback from all partners is collected, prioritised and bundled by RRCGN in dialog with the partners and passed to the programmersFeb ’17 - Feb ’18: Second phase of programming:- Implementation of further, lower rated modules and feedback from testing phase- RRCGN and programmers support users of website system and mobile appMarch ’18: Final international seminar and management meeting:- Official publishing of mobile app and website system source code- Introduction to new and revised features of both the website system as well as the mobile app- Check of the current state- New feedback of the partners is collected- Discussion of possibilities for further developmentDuring April to June ’18, national multiplier workshops in all partner countries will be held. There, interested people and organisations are introduced to the mobile app and website.From June ’18: further dissemination, preparing reporting.
“Ongea!” means “talk!” or “speak up!” in Kiswahili. The OnGea! project focussed on creating ONline GEAr to empower and enhance youth work activities; especially international youth exchanges and international networks of youth organisations. For youth work institutions, organisations and networks, presence in the digital domain has become increasingly vital during the last decade: To reach their target groups, to promote and disseminate their work, to reach possible funders and to address the general public with young people’s messages. For the communication with young target groups, platforms such as Facebook and Instagram and mobile apps such as WhatsApp have gained importance. In the OnGea project, 13 youth work organisations from 10 countries have joined forces to develop tools that make it easier to organise youth events such as international exchanges, to communicate with participants and to reach the public. In years of sending groups to and hosting exchanges, the OnGea consortium members have found recurring tasks and challenges related to mobilities of young people. To facilitate those tasks, three main OnGea tools were developed: 1. The OnGea Activity App – a browser-based administrational tool that allows structured exchange of participant data and activity information between sending and host organisations; including export of CSV lists for EU Mobility Tool reporting. 2. The OnGea Mobile App – a mobile app that serves as a travel companion for exchange participants (available for Android and iOS), giving them access to activity schedules and directions to activity places, and allowing the project team to send them notifications. 3. The OnGea System, based on the open source CMS Drupal, which serves as a database for the two aforementioned applications, and also allows easy creation of multilingual websites to publish results of youth events and exchange projects. The OnGea system is available on Open Source base and can be installed for free by any interested youth work organisation/network on own servers/webspace (that comply with the system’s technical requirements). We also found a webhosting partner who offers pre-installed OnGea systems for rent at reasonable pricing. The project started with an international kick-off seminar in Heek/Germany in January 2016. There, basic concepts for the OnGea system and mobile app were developed, accessibility criteria and programming standards concerning privacy and connectivity were discussed. Also, feature wishes were collected and prioritized; making clear that we would need an administrative module for sending and host organisations, which later became the OnGea Activity App. After a year of programming and prototyping, research and online-discussions the consortium met again at a second meeting in Kaunas/Lithuania in April 2017. Here, the process and the features/priorities list was reviewed and first prototypes of the mobile app and the website system were tested. In this time, the project faced heavy challenges: the main programmer left the project due to health reasons, also a second programmer needed to be replaced later. Two consortium partners needed to be replaced, too. The whole process lead to a massive delay of more than a year, and required investment of significantly more resources than originally planned, to get to a good result. Due to this, the consortium could test prototypes at various international exchanges, but not a fully working system. In June 2018, the third and final transnational project meeting took place in Rotterdam/ Netherlands. The project process was discussed and evaluated, translation process was reviewed. Since the OnGea system was still not in a steady working state, we developed alternative strategies for the Multiplier Events to come, working with a nicely designed presentation and testable prototypes for computers (browser based) and mobile devices. After that, Multiplier Events took place in the 10 project countries. They were successful and showed that there was a lot of interest for the OnGea system. In the final project months July and August 2018, programming of a first version of the OnGea system was finalised. The OnGea system has been adopted amongst others by the Generation Europe network: 30 youth work organisations from 15 countries that will implement 30 international youth exchanges in the time from autumn 2018 to autumn 2020. We are currently working further on the system, fixing bugs, improving useability and looking for additional funding to be able to implement features that didn’t make it into the first version.