Power shifts wiki:About

“Power Shifts – Reflecting Europe´s Energy” is a project by the European Youth Parliament and the Schwarzkopf Foundation in cooperation with the RWE Foundation. Throughout Europe it enables young people to monitor, inform themselves and debate about European energy policy. The project will focus on the diversity and interdependency of energy policy on the European level, while France, Poland and Germany will serve as national example cases.

Project Outline

Three focus countries, France, Poland and Germany will each host an international youth forum in the project timeline from 2015 until 2017 involving over 100 young participants from all over Europe. In 2015 the Academic Power Shifts Forum in Lyon, France, hosted 120 participants from 26 European countries for seven days. Warsaw, Poland will follow in October 2016 and the German conference will be organised in summer 2017.

The forum participants are supported by eight young experts, the Steering Group. This is a small working group that focuses on five topic dimensions in order to break down the complex topic of energy for the forum participants. The group will accompany the academic forums until 2017 and provide the analytical preparation for the discussions. Their concluding product will be a policy summary, which is to set the basis of the discussions during the final event in Brussels.

The Power Shifts Wiki

This website was created by the Steering Group in the framework of the Power Shifts project. Together with the Officials' teams of the international youth forums the content is created in order to serve as a resource for all forum participants and the interested public.

350 pages have been developed in this wiki and 2,163 edits have been made.

Aims

The primary goal of the wiki is to ensure an in-depth understanding of basic matters related to energy in the EU for all participants at the Power Shifts events. It does not aim to copy existing texts and articles from Wikipedia, but rather tries to condense information and knowledge in order to make it accessible for youngsters in our network. In a first step this applies to the official members of the team who deepen their knowledge of energy and its impact on Europe while creating the content. Secondly the wiki will be a key tool for delegates at the Power Shifts events in guiding their preparation and maximising the relevance of take-away knowledge.

Characteristics

With the audience in mind -students aged 18-24- the key guiding principles for all content of the wiki are conciseness and simplicity. The content needs to be relevant and useful (focussed on user needs), usable (quick to scan, understand and act on) and consistent (recognisable as coming from a single source) at all times.

Users

The Power Shifts wiki is thought to replace or complement to a large extent the classic preparation kit for delegates of the Power Shifts Forums in Warsaw 2016 and in Heidelberg, Germany 2017. The authorship of the content of the wiki therefore lies in the hands of the chairpersons and the board of the respective sessions. The Steering Group will complement and support the creation of content and of the Wiki structure.

It remains to be seen whether delegates will dynamically interact with the wiki, e.g. by requesting articles, content clarifications or by editing themselves. In Warsaw delegates will be able to add content via the chairs.

34 editors exist in the wiki, 7 of whom are active at the moment.