HUWY – Supports Young People To Influence Policies Related to the Internet
http://huwy.eu/

HUWY (Hub Websites for Youth Participation) was an eParticipation Preparatory Action project, which piloted a distributed (networked) discussion. The pilot ran in Estonia, Germany, Ireland and the UK. HUWY aimed to find good ways to support groups of young people to discuss what changes are needed to the Internet and its regulation and, further, to encourage policy-makers to interact with young people’s ideas. Young people in each country chose topics (e.g. Cyberbullying, Privacy) to focus the project, also specifying an “open thread” about their experiences, relevant to the Internet. The eParticipation innovation of the HUWY project is a new method to bring people into policy-making: distributed discussion. A family of “hub websites” support a networked discussion. Hubs contain information about the project, well-structured background materials about chosen topics, the results of young people’s discussions and feedback from policy-makers. There is one hub website for each of the pilot countries, with localised information and language. This is the central node for that country. Young people hold discussions on their own websites (organisational or social) or in offline settings. These discussions post their results on their country’s hub. The four country hubs are linked by an EU hub huwy.eu and is a global entry point for the project and the place to summarise results for EU policy-makers. This has been added to Research Resources Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.