Designed for Good: Community Well-Being Oriented Online Databases for Youth - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 290

people have difficulty in locating resources that can help them and moreover
difficulty in integrating into society. One way to support this transition is to create
an environment that enables youth to be well supported through the provision
of information and the creation of a community-built database where youth feel
empowered to collaborate with their peers, as well as decision makers and
legislators.
There is immense interest in youth well-being from policy makers, advocates,
parents, teachers and the youth themselves. However, this interest has not success-
fully been translated into adequate support mechanisms for youth in a format which
they understand. The youth of today are part of a Net Generation [ 81 ] where
technologies, such as mobiles and, more popularly, the Internet, are part and parcel
of their everyday lives. The Net Generation uses informational, collaborative and
community-oriented systems to a level that is unprecedented. The youth of today
represent the first generation to grow up surrounded by digital technologies. They
have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games,
digital music players, video cams, cell phones and all the other toys and tools of the
digital age. This ready availability of multiple forms of media, in diverse contexts
of everyday life, means that information systems content is increasingly central to
everyday communication and is increasingly vital to the developmental needs of
youth.
Stakeholders involved in the well-being of youth have thus far failed to ade-
quately leverage Web 2.0 technologies such as the Internet in their attempt to help
youth overcome the challenges that they face and develop into well-balanced
adults.
There are few frameworks or guidelines available for the design of web spaces to
cater for the well-being of youth. While there are many web spaces that provide
entertainment for youth, there are very few that cater for the well-being of youth.
As such, there are not enough web spaces which provide youth with up-to-date and
relevant information and which allow youth to collaborate and participate in an
online community in an interactive form so that youth well-being is enabled.
Therefore, the main objective of this research is to explore, conceptualise, design
and implement a youth-oriented community database that can enhance youth well-
being.
12.2 Youth Well-being
Youth workers and policy makers, teachers, parents and researchers have high-
lighted concerns about young people's well-being and the need for improvement in
this area [ 5 , 27 ]. However, the concept of well-being has not been clearly defined,
theorised or measured [ 26 , 73 ], especially when applied to young people [ 3 ].
A recent study found that young people and youth workers agree that well-being
is multidimensional and that key dimensions include relationships, psychological
factors, health, social environments and emotions [ 92 ]. However, young people