Last November, the VEP project performed a series of activities within the 1st PowerWeek on Blogging.
The blogging topic was chosen in order to make the event attractive to young citizens and students, and also to connect the blogging topic with individual rights issues, a more political approach.
This PowerWeek, held between the 12th and the 20th of November, was organized in a 4-phases process:
- The warm-up. The users, students from Flanders, Sweden and Catalonia registered in the PowerWeek portal and were presented with the VEP project, the PowerWeek event, the topics to be discussed and the tools to be used.
- Discussion jamming 1. The students were involved in several discussions into different topics around blogging within the DiscussionJam system (being developed at UPC). Out of these discussions, two issues were selected to be discussed further in the next phase:
- the Quality of Blogs
- Protection of people’s integrity and safety
- Discussion jamming 2. The participants kept on discussing locally on the selected issues and in parallel were preparing their intervention on the MegaConference, the final event of the PowerWeek.
- MegaConference. A high-quality videoconference was held simultaneously between the three countries (in Catalonia, the venue was the Citilab, in Cornellà de Llobregat). In each of the countries, two speeches were given, presenting the conclusions of the participants within each of the issues. After the three presentations on each of the issues, a mobile voting poll was held among the participants to decide which of them was better.
This first trial had an overall participation of 40 students from the three countries. However, for next events, we want to engage more and more people, and also count with MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) participation, so the activities will become even more interesting.
If anybody is willing to participate, don’t hesitate to contact us!
Tags: blogging, discussionjam, participation, powerweek