Northern Ireland’s wimps

Sunday, 30 December 2007 | posted by Ben
Politics

 

Hey all,

 

Hard to believe a week has passed since my last entry. I swear the weeks are going quickly by, we'll be in London before we know it.

 

Continuing on with Armin's excellent political exposé into Switzerland I'd like to talk about an initiative I got involved with back in 2004 which was all about putting young people into touch with politicians and in particular Northern Ireland politicians.

 

In the summer of '04 Public Achievement asked me and nine others to come up with a site which would put Northern Ireland's youth back in touch with our local politicians. Together we came up with the name "wimps" (where is my public servant) and the site would allow people to put in their postcode or address and it would return a list of politicians and contact details. The young person could then email the politician through the site and receive replies as well. The idea was to use new technology to help create relationships between politicians and young peoples by giving a voice and opportunity to those young people to speak out and up.

 

It was very popular and from the site traffic it was clear we had hit onto a real desire of Northern Ireland's youth. The site expanded a lot since my initial involvement with a completely new group of young wimps leading it. One of their big focuses is video, so the core of the search engine for politicians is there, but now there are video interviews with them, pieces on alcohol, drugs, apartheid, and loads of other content that our youth put up. It is really excellent example of youth involvement and technology enabling them. I'd encourage you to have a look at it at www.wimps.org.uk, you can use bt9 7ay as a example postcode, and if the wimps idea is something you'd think would work in your country give the wimps team at shout via their got an idea page!

 

Ben