About us
Purpose
Prewired is a charity based in Edinburgh, Scotland, established to:
- encourage young people to become active participants in creatively using and building digital technologies;
- provide a supportive environment in which young people can work collaboratively with their peers and with more experienced mentors to develop their digital skills and undertake individual and team projects; and
- support mentors in building on their existing strengths and in acquiring new skills by working with young people, and in demonstrating how they have developed personally and how they have made a positive impact.
As our world has become increasingly technology-oriented, understanding how the software that powers our daily lives is created is now crucial for everyone. Becoming an empowered digital citizen allows people to navigate their rights and responsibilities and make informed decisions about the products and services they use, or provide to others. We think technology can help us towards a better world, but only if future generations understand both the opportunities and risks it brings and the impact it can have.
Governance
Prewired has been a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation since September 2017, registered as SC047780. Its structure and organisation are detailed in the đź“„Prewired SCIO Constitution. It is governed by a Board of Trustees, which currently has the following members:
| Name | Position |
|---|---|
| Rikki Guy | Chairperson & Data Protection Officer |
| Christina Ovezik | Treasurer |
| India Thomson | Secretary |
| Athina Frantzana | Child Protection & EDI Officer |
| Rayo Verweij | Projects Officer |
| Cameron Gray | Trustee |
| Charlotte Holland | Trustee |
| Claire Wheelan | Trustee |
Trustees have to abide by our đź“„Code of Conduct for Trustees.
Annual Reports
Prewired has submitted an annual report to OSCR each year since registering as a charity.
| File | Date |
|---|---|
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2017-2018 | October 2018 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2018-2019 | October 2019 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2019-2020 | August 2020 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2020-2021 | September 2021 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2021-2022 | November 2022 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2022-2023 | December 2023 |
| 📄Trustees’ Annual Report 2023-2024 | March 2025 |
History
The University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics first provided a local centre for the Young Rewired State annual week-long Festival of Code in 2012. In 2013, we entered three teams into the final competition of the Festival of Code and although they didn’t win any prizes, they did brilliantly well. This experience, and the enthusiasm, knowledge, and ideas of the participants, inspired our founders—Ewan Klein, Freda O’Byrne, Amy Guy, Kit Barnes, and Stuart Anderson—to pursue longer-term means of encouraging young people to engage with programming and related activities in Edinburgh.
Thus, Prewired (pre-Young Rewired State, get it?) was born, with these objectives:
- opening the eyes of young people to the possibilities presented by programming;
- supporting young people in experimenting with the technologies that seem interesting to them;
- guiding young people to resources for self-teaching, and towards best practices;
- providing an environment in which young people can safely engage with like-minded peers to work on projects of their own design, and can safely gain access to volunteering by adults from academia and industry; and
- encouraging idea generation, team building, and pooling technical skills in preparation for higher education and the world of work.
The Prewired launch was held on the morning of 16th October 2013, in the University of Edinburgh’s Informatics Forum. 38 young people between the ages of 4 and 18 attended, while 15 volunteers—university students, staff and local industry professionals—came along to help. Following on from the launch, we held Prewired on a biweekly basis on Wednesday evenings in one of the School of Informatics computing labs in Appleton Tower. Despite minimal advertising, a devoted cohort of young people attended during 2013-14 on a regular basis, often accompanied by a parent, with numbers consistently in the 30–40 range.
In spring 2014, Prewired became affiliated with CoderDojo (now CodeClub), part of a global collaboration that provides free coding clubs for young people. This year, Prewired also participated in the FIRST LEGO League for the first time, with our team Zwired.
In January 2015, faced with the imminent unavailability of Appleton Tower lab space due to refurbishment works, Prewired moved location to CodeBase, a UK-leading tech incubator based in central Edinburgh, and due to the high level of demand from participants, began offering sessions on weekly basis. One benefit of the move was that staff from tech companies housed in CodeBase also started to offer volunteering support and since the move, our collective of volunteers has grown well beyond the University of Edinburgh.
A more detailed overview of the first few years of Prewired’s running can be read in the 📄First Prewired Report from May 2015.
Young Rewired State unfortunately ceased to exist in 2016, so from that year, we started to provide our own alternative: the Prewired Summer Hack. For a full week, attendees worked in teams on a challenge often set by local organisations, such as Shelter Scotland, Civic Digits, or Skyscanner. Reports on each Summer Hack can be found in our news archive. In September 2017, Prewired’s move to independence was complete, when we registered as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation.
For several years, Prewired’s weekly sessions and Summer Hacks at CodeBase thrived, until the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to close down. In response, we moved our sessions online, organising through Discord. In 2021, we secured funding from Creative Informatics to launch an online-only initiative, Prewired++. As part of Prewired++, we hosted a special online version of the Summer Hack: the Emporium of Digital Delights, which ran for a series of three 12-day coding sprints.
Thankfully, in 2022, we were able to resume our in-person weekly sessions. Starting out small, with a few volunteers and attendees, much had to be rebuilt, but by 2023, we were back to full capacity and able to celebrate our 10-year anniversary looking back with pride. In that same year, we once again managed to run a hackathon - the first of our new Summer Make-a-Thons, which now run every year. In 2024, supported by a grant from Digital Xtra, we also returned to the FIRST LEGO League—and were immediately successful when one of our teams, Plastic Pollution Solution, won the prize for Best Innovation Project at the Edinburgh competition!