Featured Member of the Week: Paul Evans from Slugger O'Toole

[Ewan McIntosh]

Paul Evans splits his time between London with his company Memeserver Ltd and in Belfast where he helps organise activity around Slugger O'Toole.

He's just finished working on the second annual Slugger Awards in Belfast and is working with 4iP and Northern Ireland Screen on a fantastically exciting development project for Slugger. He also does communications, policy work and social media mentoring for a few trades unions in London, helping to develop an education-oriented online think-tank amongst other projects.

He has a very deep suspicion of anything that looks like direct democracy (and to his eye, a lot of the most high profile e-democracy projects teeter on the edge of that pit). He's always liked using the internet in a positive pro-politics way, so setting up the New Statesman New Media Awards back in the 1990s, helping with the Slugger Awards and the now-nearly-defunct Councillor.info project are all projects that he's glad to have been associated with.

Not counting the Slugger O'Toole group on 38minutes, the Digital Circle one is really useful for Paul - a source of anyone-who-is-anyone in NI.

Paul's keen to get to know Scottish politics better. He's not really connected enough in Scotland to form a group on 'Politics and new media in Scotland' but if someone else did it, he'd jump in very quickly and ask loads of dumb questions to anyone else who joined. Along with the other Slugger guys and gals he'd love to share and compare some of their NI experiences with devolved politics.