*The Debatewise Blog
The Global Youth Panel
For anyone not on the mailing list there may be some confusion about what exactly we’re doing for Copenhagen. Let’s clear that up.We wanted to capitalise on the success of the WODC but couldn’t run another event until 2010. I’d always thought we should do something for the COP-15 conference but nothing seemed quite right. Then a couple of interventions from people we share an office with made everything fall into place.
Our office in East London is a little hub of social entrepreneurs, many of whom work on environmental projects. The first hint of the idea came when Jane Burston from Carbon Retirement told us about her work with a group of people put together by the British Council. They’d developed a set of principles they believed Copenhagen should focus on, we thought we’d take these principles and get a wider group of people to debate them. Then Dan Lewer, also from Carbon Retirement, came up with the idea of using this group to vote on wider issues related to the conference and bang, we’ve got something exciting
From then on it’s all gone pretty quickly. I got in touch with the British Council who really liked the proposal and agreed to help fund it. We started contacting our list of people from the WODC and got a good early response, so were confident we could get our target of 1,000 panel members. And then the really good thing, the really, really, good thing, happened.
I first saw the Google Wave video the day after the I/O conference. I didn’t watch the entire thing (sorry Steph) but the first hour excited me so much I’d grab people passing my desk and babble somewhat incoherently about how amazing the whole thing was.
I knew Wave would be ideal for debate. The collaboration aspects are top-notch, the playback feature helps people learn how the arguments were formed, the contextual spellchecker and translation tools help people argue with other people who speak a different language and the extensibility means you can add whatever you want that isn't already there.
Clearly Wave was the tool for this project, but you could only use it if you were invited and getting one invite was hard enough. So how on earth was I going to get 1,000? A happy moment of serendipity let me know the Wave team were going to present in London. Even better, Steph and Lars – the two people in the huge long video – were doing the presentation. This was my chance.
I really prepared for it too. I wrote down everything I wanted to say and rehearsed it so it didn’t sound rehearsed. Before the meeting I went home, shaved, put on a suit, got there nice and early, made sure to drink just the right amount of beer (to strike that balance between confident and cocky), spent ages wondering when to speak up (during the Q&A or after) and was fairly quivery when I did.
Not that I needed to be. Steph got the concept straightaway and agreed so easily to my request I almost didn’t believe it had happened. In fact, it was only when she emailed confirmation a week later that I truly got excited.
It’s a such a big deal for us for a number of different reasons. It will help us get panel members, it’s a better way for them to collaborate, the fact we’re running one of the largest real-world demos of Wave means we can get some publicity for what we’re doing and we might be able to provide Google with a use case for Wave which would be great marketing for us. All of which means this could be the thing that puts us on the map.
Since then there have been lots of other developments which have been hugely exciting, not least the volunteering by some really skilled people to help us build the extensions we need. But this is already a long post and those guys deserve a bit more bigging up, so I’ll save that for another day.