QA supports ‘Young Rewired State’

What we do at QA is all about work – about getting young people into great jobs. Real people – here are some of their stories.

Young Rewired State was started in 2009 some six months after the inaugural National Hack the Government Day. It began with 50 young coders aged between 15 and 18, hacking for a weekend in the Google office in London. The only rule was that whatever they made had to use one government data set - whether that be from the newly minted data.gov.uk or scraped from some other .gov.uk site. 

It was started because we could see developers everywhere getting excited about government starting to open its data, but no one under the age of 25 seemed to be engaging. We thought we would try to call out for socially conscious young coders and give them an exciting host venue and a challenge, with prizes, to see if we could light the fire in their bellies. It worked, and in its second year it was run as a week long event in three centres across the UK and in 2011 we hope to fill 20 centres with young developers and continue to build on the strength and enthusiasm from the last few years.

Young Rewired State is now more than an annual event, it is a network of coders aged 18 or under and it is growing and giving these young people experiences, mentoring and opportunities never before seen amongst this community.