Our main part in Peckham Street Training (that's myself and Aileen Derieg from Furtherfield.org) has been to create an online platform for Street Training with a special focus on the Peckham group. We were interested to think about how to translate the project in physical space into online space and to connect the two. What would characterise the paths of Safety and Joy for online participants?

The Furtherfield.org ethos is to think about public space (online or physical) as something that we can change/ make an impression on/ to somehow make more human and communitarian. We do this by being active and aware about how we engage with it rather than acting as passive consumers of what is already on offer or pushed on us by commercial, corporate or other external interests. It’s something to do with attempting to make our own worlds and contexts with other people.

Therefore the online platform needs to facilitate users to: -
- be astonished/ entertained
- connect (or reconnect) with different kinds of people (ages, backgrounds, cultures) in meaningful ways
- learn through sharing and exchange of experience
- express their experiences in images, text, moving image, and audio
- think about how the website structure might change in response to active Street Trainers' needs to organise together.

In relation to safety it was very important to us that users would: -
- know how contributed files and data are valued and used,
- understand the intentions of the 'owner' of the platform (Lottie Child)
- feel that their motivations for participation are respected on their own terms i.e. that their data is not used for some purpose other than that described on the website.

With all of this in mind we set out to think about how to provide Peckham Street Trainers and others (groups and individuals) with the best platform to connect with each other (wherever they are) to share and develop new street training techniques long into the future?

In doing this work together Lottie, Aileen and I have had lots of conversations about different kinds of participation. In participatory art, audiences are activated and, through their participation, contribute to the content and meaning of the work. We are all interested in allowing for very different approaches, different views and interests; an understanding that there is not only one way to do/see things. So finding different ways of being together is also important. In the past Furtherfield has worked with collaborative processes in which lots of people become co-producers of an experience; often creating their own communication networks and tools before using them.

This project has made us think in a different way about how we make the choices we do when facilitating online participation, especially thinking more carefully about how young people communicate online.

Online, people are often moving in what appears to be public space, but is really commercially structured space, or at least, dependent on commercial providers. Think of Google, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Flickr

Often the consequences of this are not immediately apparent but they might include any of the following: -
- services are often free at entry level and then require a regular 'professional' subscription for ongoing or increased level of service, by which time users have invited their 'friends' into the network.
- users are asked to provide (often quite detailed) personal information, which proscribes the identity of the user (it promotes conformity) and is then owned by the holders of that data.
- along with web pages that contain advertisements these reinforce particular consumer-oriented contexts, values and behaviours.
- users' content (private and public) as well as metadata about users' interaction with each other, is subject to both commercial exploitation and surveillance by the state.
There is finally the more subtle effect that by using a 'social' service and inviting others to join them, by learning to use its interfaces and its interaction widgets users are promoting that service, spreading its values and priorities. For Critical perspectives on web 2.0 check out this cluster of essays.

With this in mind, and understanding that what we were planning was likely to require some commitment and energy from us and future participants, we wanted that energy to be focused on networks of participation (rather than commercial exchange- even if very subtle). For this reason the Street Training website is built using Drupal, which is free, open-source community-building software and is housed and maintained by Servus a long running non-profit organisation based in Linz, Austria, who provide "virtual and physical access for artists and cultural producers". The team at Servus runs workshops and support services for artists and community activists interested in learning about DIY technologies.

Drupal continues to be developed by a community of enthusiastic software developers (for free) in a process that often leads to great solutions to knotty problems. Because of this, as social uses of the Internet evolve over time, the growing, online Street Training community should continue to have access to many of the latest ways of interacting and sharing their files and thoughts. Although this is not cost-free in terms of the effort (of future Street Trainer website administrators) and technological dependencies (what it costs Servus to run and securely maintain the latest version of Drupal on the server), decisions about changing the online infrastructure for the project will remain in the hands of the people and cultures that produced it. Whilst this is all very old news to many tech-focused people or activists it remains opaque to mainstream culture.

The new Street Training website that we have built supports participation by providing lots of facilities that people (especially young people) take for granted, like profile info, file uploads, commenting-facilities on blogs and forums. Unlike services like Facebook and Myspace the profile information is not too structured, generic or broad (we are not requiring people to conform to ideas about what’s normal or provide personal information that will be used for marketing purposes at a later date.) People build their own individual blogs of their Street Training experience - so they can start to develop their own approaches- but they are also part of a stream of other people’s blogs. The website also connects to Flickr and Youtube channels because this is what some people are already used to using and we are not platform purists;)

The children that we worked with for Peckham Street Training had hundreds of ideas for different, unconventional ways to have fun in the streets; they were imaginative, intensely silly and hilarious and adventurous. They loved the notion that adults might have something to learn from them and were especially thrilled to see that people that they didn’t know were viewing their blog posts. It was very powerful for them to see their work and ideas documented next to those of other Street Trainers.

To see their work and the outcomes of the work in two public tours documented in blogs and image galleries please check out this link > Peckham street Training