Rockhaq founder and editor Michelle Dhillon spoke about the challenges of piloting the Rockhaq community at Wordcamp Sheffield on April 26 2014, and ended up inspiring some members of the audience to join Rockhaq and get writing.

Michelle’s talk, called Rules For a Teenage WordPress Community, covered many different aspects of setting up and managing a community of young people with different skills, interests and abilities. She also addressed the technical, legal and financial challenges presented throughout the pilot programme, before announcing the Rockhaq community’s imminent re-launch.

Rockhaq is a music journalism community for young people that was piloted at several East Midlands colleges during 2011-2012. The aim was to boost young people’s literacy, digital literacy, communication skills and engagement levels. Michelle only touched upon the huge impact of the pilot project, but you can hear about the stories in our student video interviews and read about our student case studies to find out more.

Several audience members asked questions at the end of the talk, and there were some unexpected approaches or tweets afterwards from groups of young people eager to join and contribute to the new music journalism community.

Michelle says: “I’m really pleased to have been invited to speak about the Rockhaq community at Wordcamp Sheffield, especially as it’s been a long time since I have spoken about Rockhaq at all! It’s great to have seen such a positive result, and many requests to join the community, from a quick 30-minute talk. We’re looking forward to reading all the new reviews and working with all our community members to push things forward.”

To find out about joining the Rockhaq community, just add your name to our waiting list and a member of the team will be in touch.

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