HuWY (Hub Websites for Youth Participation) is an EU sponsored pilot project in the field of electronic participation (eParticipation) for young people. It deals with issues of Internet governance and aims to ensure that the views of an important user group – 16 to 24 year olds – are taken into consideration by policy makers. HuWY is one of 21 pilot projects currently funded by the European Commission’s eParticipation Preparatory Action. In addition to Germany, there are three other European countries participating in HuWY: Estonia, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

HuWY applies an innovative approach to online discussions: While most online consultation and discussion processes take place on central internet platforms, participants of HuWY will be given as much freedom as possible in the way they organize their debates on the webspaces of their choice (e.g. sites of participating youth organizations, theme groups within social networks such as Facebook). Thus, users can define and create the technical infrastructure, as well as the context of the online discussions, to suit themselves. The results of these distributed discussions are eventually brought together on the four national Hub websites and one European Hub. Policy makers participating in the project will pick up the views presented on the hubs, comment on them, and possibly introduce them into the actual policy process. By collating the four countries‘ discussion results on a European Hub, policy makers on the EU-level are involved as well. Thus, HuWY contributes to the creation of a European public sphere.

Objectives and Implementation
HuWY aims to encourage and support young people to actively develop and present their views and ideas about policies related to the governance of the Internet. Due to its decentralized approach, the young people participating in the project chose the issues and topics to be discussed according to their own interests, hopes and experiences. Possible topics might include:

• Anonymity, Identity und data protection
• Copyright, DRM and file-sharing
• Cybercrime

On the national Hub websites, the participants will be provided with substantial but easily accessible background material dealing with the broad range of Internet governance issues, as well as on the institutions in charge of its regulation at a local, national and EU level.

In order to prepare the youth groups for the actual HuWY-discussion phase and to clarify questions regarding content, procedures and technology, several workshops for youth group representatives in all four pilot countries will be held. In addition, the HuWY partners will provide support to the involved youth groups via email and phone during the whole project.

In order to supplement the project partners‘ scientific expertise in the field of Internet and eParticipation and correspond to the target group’s perspective, experienced organizations such as Youth Work Ireland or Jugendpresse Deutschland e.V. will provide advice to the project in terms of topic, content, promotion and technology.

The rationale of this pilot project is to generate practical experience with the application of the distributed online-discussion model, and to provide insights into its strengths and weaknesses. Based on the observed participation patterns of the youth groups involved, the way the communication applications are used and the degree and quality of policy-maker involvement, lessons can be drawn on how to further improve this innovative concept and how to apply it to other issue areas and contexts.

The findings generated in this pilot project also feed into the more basic question of how Internet based political participation processes should be designed in order to foster effective eParticipation on national and European levels and to establish compatible interfaces with representative-democratic procedures and institutions.

Project consortium
In addition to Fraunhofer ISI, the scientific-technical core team of HuWY is composed of five experienced international partners:

• International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC), Edinburgh Napier University, UK (project coordinator)
• Queens University of Belfast , UK
• Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT), Republic of Ireland
• University of Tartu, Estonia
• DogDigital , Glasgow, UK

In addition, a number of policy-makers and youth organizations are involved as partners in order to provide advice to the project on a continuous basis.

HuWY invites all youth groups, associations and initiatives interested in the political field related to the Internet and want to actively support the idea of eParticipation to take part in the online discussions.

For further information and contacts see http://www.huwy.eu

Status:
Start: 02/2009, End: 01/2011

Client:
European Commission

Partners:

• International Teledemocracy Centre (ITC), Edinburgh Napier University, UK
• Queens University of Belfast, UK
• Letterkenny Institute of Technology (LYIT), Ireland
• University of Tartu, Estonia
• DogDigital, Glasgow, UK

Taylor-Smith, E.; Lindner, R. (2010): “Social Networking Tools Supporting Constructive Involvement throughout the Policy-Cycle”, in: Prosser, A.; Parycek, P. (eds.): EDEM 2010 – Conference on Electronic Democracy 2010. Proceedings of EDEM 2010, May 6-7, 2010, Krems a.d. Donau, S.331-338.

Taylor-Smith, E.; Lindner, R. (2009): “Using Social Networking Tools to Promote E-Participation Initiatives”, in: Prosser, A.; Parycek, P. (eds.): EDEM 2009 – Conference on Electronic Democracy 2009. Proceedings of EDEM 2009, September 7-8, 2009, Vienna, S. 115-130.