*The Debatewise Blog
Global Youth Panel - weekly update No. 2
This week we have mostly...Panellists
We’ve hit our target of 1,000 panellists. More than 500 have signed up on our list and our 97 country coordinators have recruited an average of five people each. In fact, some of them have got significantly more; our Ecuadorian CC has found a grand total of 30
different debaters. The total number of countries represented has now reached 120, about two-thirds of all countries in the world. We think we’ve got just about all the major ones covered now.
We’ve allowed the CCs to go over ten because we know some people will drop out when it comes to debating time and some will only want to participate in certain debates. Therefore, the excess gives us a useful buffer which we hope will ultimately allow us to say 1,000
people voted on x. Or as close as possible anyway.
The CCs seem to have their Wave invites now. We’re introducing them to the environment and asking them to perform small tasks so they get used to the way Wave works. We’re also using it for some of the important collaboration jobs prior to debating kick-off.
Next stage is to get the panellists using and becoming familiar with Wave and we’re trying to think up the best games for them to play that would allow them to have a Wave moment or two. Sudoku anyone?
Development
As a non-techie I’m delighted and reassured by the great minds we have working on the project. Peter Chamberlin is the lead developer, ably assisted by Daniel Bartlett, Aleski Gorny and Greg Plumbly in London. The North American side of things is headed by James Wilson.
Daniel has put together the database schema and data store model, Aleski is building the core robots, Peter and Greg the gadgets. Once these fundamental bits are done we’ll farm out work to the other developers who’ve expressed an interest in the project. All our
gadgets and robots will be open sourced in the hope other Wavers might benefit from and improve them.
We’re also creating an API for the data itself so that publications, sites and/or individuals will be able to take the voting totals, points or debates and mash them up as they see fit. The debates will be published on Debatewise and on The Independent and we hope a number of other places too.
PR
In order to ensure people know about the project and the API we’ve spent this week researching and reaching out to climate change experts, politicians and celebrities. We are seeking messages of support and/or help mentoring the debaters.
We’ve got three new interns on this task, making five in total. One with contacts in Africa, a Brazilian who’ll obviously look after Portugal as well and someone with conversational Chinese. On top of this we’ve started asking our CCs for help and have created a few
different templated emails for them to send out directly.
This task was always going to be more involved and the results were always going to come in more slowly. We will continue to focus it from now until the conference ends on the 18th. We will also pick it up again when the second part of the project starts in mid Jan. We've got a couple of responses in so far and I think this will pick up speed the closer we get to the 7th and as the conference is going on.