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Hello one and all, First please let me introduce myself. I'm the Autistic Liberal, an amateur blogger. I write with a strongly liberal world view about politics, focussing on issues with a large ethical element. I am also a young man with a formal diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome, living in England. As an autism sufferer, I'm a vulnerable member of the community. I'm also aware that politics is a subject that inspires very strong feelings, with an extreme minority of people resorting to harassment or even violence. For these reasons, I always write anonymously and hope you will understand my decision to do so. I'm looking for help with two issues: 1) I am looking for new readers for my blog: https://autisticliberal.wordpress.com/ Those of you on Twitter can also follow me @autistliberal (not a typo - the more obvious URL was already taken) for updates on new articles. 2) I've heard rumours of numerous amateur autism magazines - publications written by autistic people, for autistic people (or anyone else with an interest in autism). If such publications do exist, I'd like to offer to write them a politics column. With this in mind, can people please share any names of such publications you know of, with a contact e-mail address if possible. I would be happy for the publishers of any magazine I'd be writing for to know my real name, but wouldn't want it made public. Thanks in advance.

Bit of a different theme I guess, but thought I would start a topic here. Currently, my university is choosing which charity to support in the next academic year, one of the shortlisted charities is Autism NI, and I've been organising the election campaign, in order to get as many people to vote as possible. There is 8 shortlisted charities, and the 4 that get the most votes are chosen as the supported charities. I was just wondering if anyone has any previous experience of something like this, and have any advice or tips for me? I've never been great at public speaking, but I am very good at writing online blogs and pieces and explaining things to people, but in person this is a struggle for me, Also, if anyone on here attends Queen's University, fancy voting?! (Worth a try I guess)

Glasgow City Council has a long running and influential Working Group on Autism. I am one of the diagnosed representatives. We are looking for people who want to find out more about being a Rep, or being part of the focus group that guides the Reps. You can find out more via email, or face-to-face at a small meeting held in Glasgow. This involves Attending formal meetings (up to 20 people) every two months. Collecting views and information from the community on a variety of topics including health provision, education, criminal justice, housing, diagnosis, support, social work.... everything that the City Council does! Preparing papers and speaking to them. Speaking as part of the discussion on things you haven't prepared. Listening and processing what other people say. Transmitting the discussion and decisions back to the community. You can also be a less formal Rep who comes and observes, perhaps speaking on a topic of special importance to you. We are trying to develop training materials and remove barriers to access, using the valuable experience of current and former Reps. Through the Autism Resource Centre we are hoping to run a focus group which meets before each Council meeting so that people can find out what is happening, have their say, and talk to their Reps. This is where you can find out what happened in the last meeting as well. You can also contribute by email or the Aspirational board. Please send me a message here if you would like further information. I can try to answer any questions you have. We welcome your ideas about how to carry this forward. PLEASE NOTE: You can only be one of these Reps, and only contribute to the informal meetings, if you live in the Glasgow City Council area. Expressing an interest doesn't oblige you to take on anything