This week has been a good week for events.

On Saturday 4 July, I was up bright an early to help volunteer at 2morro09, a youth participation festival that took place on London’s Southbank 

Around 500 young people took part in the event, with interactive workshops on topics such as film making, using your mac, storytelling and debates on the public perception of youth.  A lovely healthy lunch was provided by Leon, and the event concluded with an after party with live music and interactive fun.  You can read about what happened at the event here

What I loved about this event was the real ‘festival’ atmosphere.  Young people attending were able to dip in and out of sessions and create their own agenda.  They could watch live music on the terrace, visit the Big V bus, or just chill in the sun (when it came out!) on the south bank. 

On Monday 6 July it was time to “Reboot Britain”, with an event held at the 2 Savoy Place in central London.

Reboot Britain was a conference around how the digital technology in our networked world can help to generate social change and to rebuild our democratic structures.

In partnership with NESTA and the creators of 2008’s 2gether festival, Reboot Britain was an opportunity to hear from inspirational individuals such as lecturer and ‘travelling geek’ Harold Rheingold, the RSA’s Matthew Taylor, and Craig Newman of Craigslist fame (to name but a few), learn about practical community projects such as Talk About Local and Birmingham’s Social Media Surgeries, as well as collaborate in participative workshops such as the launch of the new collaboration tool Social by Social. 

Issues discussed on the day tended to focus around the subjects of engaging wider communities in using social tools and how we bridge the digital divide.  There was also quite a bit of discussion around young people and use of digital technologies (I think it was Harold Rheingold who said something along the lines that “YouTube would never have been successful if it wasn’t for 16 year olds”) so in some respects it seemed a shame that young people had a separate event in 2morro09,  - I think it would have been good to get their perspective.  The conference finished with a drinks and networking at the RSA, and you can find out more about what happened at the event here  and here on Twitter

And tomorrow, I look forward to participating in Connected Generation – an ‘un-conference’ that will bring together practitioners, researchers, innovators and policy makers to explore youth engagement in a digital age.  (We blogged a little about this event a few weeks ago here)

Part of the focus of the Chain Reaction event 2009 will be on youth empowerment, and as per 2008, we will be working with young people to plan and deliver part of the event agenda.  

However, this year we will also work with a group of young people to develop the core journalistic skills and social technology skills to enable them to form the social reporting team at Chain Reaction event 2009, and subsequent events and activities.  (M0re info on this intiative will be coming soon!) So I’m really looking forward to tomorrows event to find out about what others are doing in the fields of digital technology and youth engagement.

There are no more tickets for Connected Generation available unfortunately, but I’m sure there will be plenty of information available during and after the event.  If you are on Twitter you can follow the activity from this event with the hashtag #cgen09