Designed for Good: Community Well-Being Oriented Online Databases for Youth - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 306

Youth regularly make use of many different communication channels such as:
chat clients, email, discussion forums, shout boxes, YouTube and VoIP [ 19 , 66 , 81 ].
A community database for youth can strengthen the youth user community by
offering as many communication channels as possible.
12.8.2 Semantic Integration Dimension
To enable the creation of mash-ups using different resources from the Internet, the
community-driven database should be a suitable platform for integrating content
from different sources. Therefore, rather than the community database becoming a
central repository for various bits of information, it would become an information
source for a “digital native” [ 65 ] where they can become a “spider in the net” rather
than trying to contain all the content in one database. The Internet and its uses
evolve faster than any single platform will ever be able to. Today, one of the more
popular ways for youth to express their virtual identity is a MySpace page,
tomorrow it could be a blog and maybe the day after it could be a video cast. A
community database for youth must enable them to say what they want to say using
the most recent technologies and to integrate their social identity in the community
database with social identities they have developed on other platforms. The facil-
ities provided by the database would focus on providing a standardised means of
linking to content in other sources rather than a means of storing content in the
community database.
12.8.3 Community Governance
A requirement that has emerged with the growing number of community-driven
platforms is the governance of the user contributions [ 12 ]. This is of special
importance in the context of youth-related databases as their well-being depends
on how well they are protected [ 60 , 93 , 94 ]. The governance should be based on:
peer control of the youth and control from adults. This requires at least two different
processes and roles for government. Many community-driven databases differenti-
ate between system administrator users (e.g., Sysops in MediaWiki) and normal
users. A community database specifically designed for youth would require a finer
differentiation of user rights and roles: for instance, youth supervisors, youth users
and adult supervisors.
12.9 Architecture
Informed by our discussions of requirements for youth-oriented community data-
bases, we propose a conceptual architecture to guide the implementation of such
databases. Primarily, the four dimensions of web interaction, social collaboration,