Youthprivacy.ca redesign
A creative brief and invitation to collaborate
The youthprivacy.ca website was launched by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) in 2008 as a key element of the OPC’s public education work related to digital privacy and young people.
We would like to redesign the website in order to better present existing and new content, highlight resources and work being done elsewhere on the topic, and allow for easier in-house updates and design changes to the site.
A collaborative effort
We would like the process of rebuilding this website to be open and transparent. We feel that there is a much larger community of public servants and private citizens with the experience, the expertise and the skill sets to make this a useful and highly collaborative exercise.
After all, why build communities of practice if we only continue to build projects within silos and concealed behind departmental garden walls?
We are inviting input from people with interest and expertise from both within government (specifically #w2p and #ux communities of practice, and those with experience reaching out to young people and engaging in public education and social marketing) and external to government (non-profit sector, educators and librarians, young people themselves).
Much of the process will be run on GCpedia to facilitate contribution among Government of Canada employees. For folks external to government without access to GCpedia, we’ll provide some updates on this page.
We’re planning a launch meeting before the end of June to hash out some initial ideas – if you’re interested in helping us out, please let us know and we’ll add you to the invite list.
Timing
We would like to launch the redesigned youthprivacy.ca in September 2010, at the same time we launch our 3rd annual video contest.
Target audiences and goals
Visitors to the site fall into two groups: young people (many of them directed to the site after seeing a presentation by OPC staff), and adults who work with children and young people – educators, parents, librarians.
The ultimate goal of the site is to provoke and facilitate behaviour change by providing people with the resources to make informed choices about their online privacy. We also hope to promote and support engagement and interaction around the issue of digital privacy among visitors to the site.
We also hope to create a place where young Canadians (and others) can expect to find up-to-date and relevant information about the issues of privacy, identity, data protection and digital citizenship.
Vibe, aura, mantra, spirit, guiding principles, what you will
This isn’t supposed to be another corporate place marker, a reference point for spokespeople and DPRs to hang their hat on. There is a real need among Canadians for some basic advice on how to shape their lives online. But we don’t need to provide all that advice. We just need to show you where to find it, and help you provide directions to others.
What does this mean? It means a tool instead of a site. It means user-based design, instead of a look. It means flexible content, presentation and formatting. It’s for a linear thinker as well as a multi-tasker. It’s for your mom and your niece.
Initial ideas
The website is intended to support and complement OPC’s other public education initiatives aimed at young people. OPC will be launching its 3rd video contest in the fall of 2010 to coincide with the start of the new school year. In the past, the website has been used to present information and provide inspiration on the subject matter for students intending to produce videos for the contest; house contest materials like entry forms and regulations; and showcase winning videos. The new site should do a better job of this – for instance, at the launch of the contest, we’d like to configure the site so that the video contest is front and centre – past winners, rules and regulations, and entry forms should be easy to find.
OPC staff give presentations to students, educators, parent councils and others interested, outlining privacy risks associated with online activity, and solutions to mitigating those risks. The presentations are highly popular, and we would like to leverage their popularity by offering nuggets from these presentations on the revamped website in a compelling way to spur discussion and interest in the issue. For example of what this could look like, take a look at this interactive infographic on privacy and Facebook.
The original content on youthprivacy.ca is still, for the most part, relevant. We’d like to add to it, to cover new and emerging issues (i.e. geolocation, targeted advertising). More importantly, we would like our content to be better presented and arranged within an architecture that makes it easier to find, share, and distribute.
Many great resources relevant to online privacy and young people already exist online – from position papers and white papers to public opinion research to videos and games. We do not wish to duplicate efforts. Instead, we see ourselves as awareness builders of digital privacy, and believe we can direct site visitors to the best of these resources, and provide some context around them.
Much like bookstores offer up recommendations from their staff, youthprivacy.ca could feature recommended resources from different OPC staff – and preferably outside experts, advocates and representatives.
This approach would highlight the field expertise and interests of individual staff and provide them with an opportunity to showcase interesting videos, think pieces, and related ephemera they come across in their day-to-day work. This is an approach we are also experimenting with to a lesser degree on our main blog.
Interested in helping us out? Have questions or comments?
Send us an email. Find us on Twitter. Leave a comment on our blog. Or get in touch with us some other way.
