Global Youth Panel - weekly update No. 3
This week we have mostly...Panelists
The panelists have started to come online and we’ve come up with a good way to get them Waving. We’ll ask people to collaborate as a country and form their top three tips for using Wave. Tips we’ll obviously share with everyone else. This will get them delving deep
into the environment, researching, working together and pulling for each other. We’ll get them playing Soduku too, obviously.
Some people have struggled with the invite process and we’ve encountered language difficulties helping people understand the delay in invite being sent and invite being received. This, of course, has allowed us to see where gaps in our expertise lie; gaps Eve - our
newest intern - and her language studying friends will hopefully help fill.
Best news of all came from Cambodia. Michael (surname unknown) has got about 30 kids ready to go, held practice debates, found an IT person to help and got the Phnom Post to cover the story (http://bit.ly/4N3fMa). What’s more, these kids were, in his words
“some of the poorest, most destitute families in Cambodia” and until a few years ago were working in the rubbish-dump in Phnom Penh. These are the kinds of people we’ll be giving a voice.
Development
Development is moving slowly and we’re a bit behind schedule. I have great confidence in the team though and their focus on getting the core solid is absolutely right. We simply couldn’t get other people to work effectively until that’s done first.
The possibility of this extra help got greater with the news that James, our man in America, runs the Wave subreddit on Reddit.com. Their community is 1,200 strong and even if only 10 of them wanted to help we’d get lots done.
Fundamentally, the core is all we really need to make the experience easy for our panelists. Everything else is nice to have, not essential. And all that nice stuff can come later if we need it to; our project will continue for two months into the new year. Plenty of time for developers to really add value.
PR
The first part of the Independent integration is ready for testing (http://independent.debatewise.org/). Debates here will not be created in Wave but rather on Debatewise. The idea is to allow Independent readers to debate exactly the same motions as the panel so we can
compare the arguments formed by Brits to those the rest of the world comes up with.
Messages of support have come from William Kininmonth, who headed Australia’s National Climate Centre, Richard S. Courtney, one of 15 scientists invited to give a briefing on climate change at the US Congress, Bulu Imam, a leading Indian climate change activist and one of the world’s most eminent climate change sceptics Dr Timothy Ball. More are being sought.
My favourite comes from Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon, who said: "The Global Youth Panel may be the most innovative project associated with the Copenhagen conference -- and likely the one with the most long-lasting impact.” A quote I think overstates things a tad but is one we’re using far and wide nonetheless.