Åsa Torstensson, Hans Rosling, Joakim Jardenberg, Dennis Pamlin and Detlef Eckert. All were interviewed by the IT upper secondary school’s reporters during the Visby Agenda conference and the videos have now been posted on Youtube. The pupils’ fast and insightful reporting resulted in over 700 tweets on the subject on Twitter.

Pupils from the IT upper secondary school covered the Visby Agenda conference and served as the public face for interested parties following the conference on the Internet. The school’s slogan, ‘We love IT’, had been changed for the occasion to ‘We cover IT’ and a ‘media deck’ was created on the school’s website where photos from Flickr, video clips from Youtube and tweets from Twitter were gathered.

Privacy issues

Felix Nordfeldt from the IT upper secondary school in Uppsala, says that they were given more time than the other journalists to interview Minister for Communications Åsa Torstensson, but that they still did not manage to ask all their questions.

“Let’s put it like this: we didn’t finish the discussion, we had a lot more to say about privacy issues, for example,” says Felix.

Felix thinks that the issues of privacy and copyright on the Internet concern a great many young people today.

“It’s a question of how we are to gain access to culture and information in the future. There’s a lot of talk about the information and knowledge society, but we want to know whether that society is going to be built with the help of ‘freeware’ and Internet access, or whether it’s going to be restricted instead,” adds Felix.

IT minister needed

Anna Dahl, who attends the IT upper secondary school in Sundbyberg, describes the Visby Agenda as an opportunity to meet knowledgeable people from other countries and to get to know them. However, she is a bit sceptical about the format of the conference.

“There weren’t that many discussions. The speakers held monologues, someone would ask a question and then it just overran.”

Anna stresses that conferences like Visby Agenda are nonetheless needed to show that IT issues today are much too big and important to just be dealt with as a subsidiary issue to other policy areas.

“Sweden has a Minister for Communications with lots of different areas of responsibility; but we could actually do with a minister who concentrates just on IT. The same applies to the EU,” concludes Anna.