Designed for Good: Community Well-Being Oriented Online Databases for Youth - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 292

The sense of empowerment and in turn the well-being of youth comes from the
ability of computers and other information and communications technologies to
provide better access to information, anonymity and the ability to include their
views in decision making [ 21 ]. Moreover, networked computers empower people
around the world as never before to disregard the limitations of geography and time,
find one another and gather together in groups based on a wide range of cultural and
sub cultural interests and social affiliations [ 49 ]. It is empowering for youth to know
that they are in control of the information that they are receiving and a key part of
this is their awareness of the tools and paths that are open to them in achieving
changes to policies that affect them. A survey conducted by Valaitis [ 86 ] about
youths creating and implementing their own web sites, found that they felt that
technology empowered them in three ways: sharing their views and information
with the community, obtaining others' opinions and gaining access to influential
people. Furthermore, she also found that youth felt more confident, better prepared
and more knowledgeable when expressing themselves to the wider community.
These three elements of youth web spaces - information, community and collabo-
ration - will be discussed in the next section.

12.2.1 Information

Enhancing youth knowledge about how issues in the media and changes to govern-
ment policy at the local, national and international levels affect them is crucial to
their understanding of themselves. The exponential growth of the web and the
increasing availability of collaborative tools and services on the Internet have
facilitated innovated knowledge creation/dissemination infrastructures, such as
electronic libraries, digital journals, resource discovery environments, distributed
co-authoring systems and virtual scientific communities [ 16 ]. The transformation of
such a rich information base is vital for youth. Transformation of this information
may include filtering, aggregation or visualisation. This transformation can facili-
tate the explanation to the youth community of issues impacting upon them. This in
turn is an important step towards ensuring that youth understand how local, regional
and international issues impact upon them and, as a result, ensure the well-being
and empowerment of youth through knowledge acquisition [ 16 ].

12.2.2 Community

It is important to acknowledge the role of youth in participating in their own well-
being. Not only are they capable of providing support for each other, but also, as
previously mentioned, they are more aware of what their concerns and issues are
and thus their participation needs to be encouraged in all spheres of society and in
decision-making processes at the national, regional and international levels.