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DINA.INTERNATIONAL – THE NEW PLATFORM FOR INTERNATIONAL YOUTH WORK EXCHANGE AND CONGRESSES

AUTHOR: BENJAMIN HOLM – DRJA

DINA.international, a new online platform, is the result of a joint initiative between European and international youth work services and funding agencies. The two existing youth offices, three bilateral coordination offices and IJAB set up a working group in May 2020 to better coordi- nate their digitalisation activities and develop joint projects.

FUNCTIONS

The first joint project is the provision of a video and project planning platform which builds upon the experiences of the three platforms Projektwelt (German-Russian youth exchange foundation, DRJA), TRIYOU (German-Polish Youth Office, DPJW) and Tele-Tandem (Franco-German Youth Office, DFJW) and develops them further, incorporating experiences from the pandemic. The platform provides data privacy-compliant, adver - tising-free digital spaces at no cost. The idea behind the platform is to effectively support the digital activi - ties of the youth services and funding agencies, as well as of exchange programme providers and schools. To this end, it offers a whole range of tools. International youth work organisations can strengthen their net- works and improve cooperation with foreign partners, for example by analysing methods and experiences, working on certain topics together, and looking for participants, session leaders or instructors. DINA.international has been operational since Novem - ber 2020. It can be accessed via various youth service and funding agency landing pages and will eventually be rolled out to all exchange providers.

Users can create projects and groups and use the various collaborative tools at no charge for as long as they wish. The portal is currently available in eight languages.

The following tools and functions are currently activated:

» Nextcloud ( k p. 36) to safely create and share documents within projects, groups or beyond,

» Etherpads ( k p. 38) and Ethercalcs to jointly edit and work on spreadsheets,

» Rocket-Chat for group and individual chats,

» Group calendars, newsfeeds, rights administration,

» Creation of micro-websites by each project or group for PR purposes,

» Direct link to Facebook for posting news from projects and groups,

» To follow soon: videoconferencing rooms for meetings, exchanges and further training.

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Contributions from practitioners

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