OnGea! Online Gear Enhancing Youth Work Erasmus Project

Project Title

OnGea! Online Gear Enhancing Youth Work

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy) ; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

“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.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 269983,75 Eur

Project Coordinator

ROOTS & ROUTES COLOGNE EV & Country: DE

Project Partners

• STICHTING ROOTS & ROUTES
• SYNERGEIO MOUSIKOU THEATROU ASTIKIMI KERDOSKOPIKI ETAIREIA
• Viesoji istaiga Kauno ivairiu tautu kulturu centras
• Associació Rutes i Origens
• FEDERATIA SHARE CLUJ-NAPOCA
• ROOTS & ROUTES International
• SZUBJEKTIV ERTEKEKEK ALAPITVANY