VOLCO, Commenced 1999

A virtual planet in cyberspace by and for children www.volco.org

VOLCO is an evolving Virtual Online Co-Operative environment, a planet in cyberspace being constructed by children and young people communicating via the Internet and making links across geographic and cultural divides. It is one of the latest in a line of web projects developed by Loraine Leeson since the late 1990's.

The project builds on a range of communications opportunities offered by the Internet and combines the ideas of hundreds of young people into the making of an emergent planet. It taps into the energy of popular net culture and facilitates co-operative relationships between participants of different backgrounds and life experiences. Participants create and upload their own visual and written materials, enabling a new, virtual society to emerge out of their combined imaginations. Designed around principles of conflict resolution, VOLCO makes use of digital technology to support young people in communicating across their differences to create this new online society. Inventing VOLCO children explore new, imaginative and co-operative ways of creating a better life on their own planet.

The web site already incorporates the ideas of over 1000 children, and is still growing, achieving its widespread use through linking with subjects in the school curriculum. Leeson now trains teachers and youth leaders to run it for themselves, and children have taken part from London, North Carolina, Berlin, Chicago, and the Shetland Isles.

 

CASCADE, Commenced 2002

Visit www.YPG2RD.org to see the latest Cascade project

Cascade is an approach to supporting young people in addressing the changing environment of Thames Gateway, one of the largest regeneration zones in Europe that extends the development of the London Docklands eastward to the North Sea. Cascade builds on lessons learned through the Docklands Community Poster Project of the 1980's and uses these to facilitate local young people in the expression of their views on issues arising from the re-development programmes. It brings the voices of this age group into the public domain, focused around topics through which they imaginatively construct and represent the lives and potential futures of themselves and their communities.

Themes have included the regeneration of Barking, Essex (2002-3), the bid for a London Olympics (2003-5), and the production of a Young Person's Guide to the Royal Docks, an online resource by and for young people launched at the Museum in Docklands in March 2007. In planning stage is a new project that will involve hundreds of teenagers in researching and documenting their neighbourhoods to create an online resource promoting their own view of East London for visitors to the 2012 Olympics.

Taking a many-layered collaborative approach, Cascade involves three levels of education through which students are able to provide mentoring support for each other. The further involvement of local institutions and arts and media professionals enable a two-way 'cascade' of skills whereby technical and organisational know-how and in-depth local knowledge become combined to the benefit of all. This sharing of experience takes place in both predictable and unexpected ways, and produces work that none could have otherwise attempted.

Recent collaborative partners: Royal Docks Community School, NewVIc Sixth Form College, University of East London, Museum in Docklands and Docklands Light Railway.