*The Debatewise Blog
Global Youth Panel - weekly update No. 1
PanellistsRecruitment for the panel is going really well. We’ve now got over 600 people from 96 different countries. We’ve also got 84 confirmed country coordinators and another 5 almost definite. Our target was 100 for today so we're just short, but still 90 people recruited to do this work in two weeks of effort is pretty good I reckon.
Development
We have a team of 6 volunteers in London who are putting together the development plan for our debating gadgets and robots. We also have a team of around 14 developers in other parts of the world who’ll start the actual building work once they’ve been fully spec’d – hopefully Tuesday.
The plan is to have these complete by the end of November, which will give us a week for testing. This week will also be used to create the screencasts and other guides to help people get used to the environment. We’ll ask panellists to familiarise themselves with Wave
in general prior to that.
PR
The biggest next job is trying to get as much PR as possible for the panel. We know the people on it will be greatly motivated by seeing their efforts in print and by messages of encouragement from climate change leaders. We've already got a provisional promise of support from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and hope to get many more.
We’ve just recruited another two interns to help us with our marketing efforts. Their job will be to reach out to other web sites and publications around the world and encourage them to write about the panel or put our voting results widget on their site. With the sheer
range of panellists, with the subject they’ll be debating and with the thing they’ll be debating in we feel confident we’ve got a story to tell.