Comments on: How digitally included is our digital inclusion champion?

By: David K Babb

David K Babb — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:06:07 +0000

She now has a feed!

Courtesy of me…..and Feed43. Pity they couldn’t stretch to do it themselves

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:56:34 +0000

You could credit the lady with setting out a clear objective of seeing what it takes to get 6m people connected who may neither have the inclination nor the means to do so.

You could be shallow and put a web site with all the published research on the matter, and links to every public body claiming to ‘do’ or have a digital inclusion ‘activity’ or point to a company with a digital inclusion champion. It is not hard to find those with good intentions. It is trickier to get to actual numbers and results.

Getting an elderly neighbour going on chat (IM) to stay connected means you open your wifi connection and fix them up with an old pc to get going, – a breech of your BT contract.

Ex-cons (at the local church) seem to have good sources to acquire kit, but need a more regular connectivity. Whether they are looking for work, ebay trading or looking at porn is none of our business, but our surveillance mad government could easily justify a ‘turnkey’ sevice if you are cynical about re-offend rates and the need to collect evidence.

The lady needs a plan but at least she is not pretending to have one, and if one does appear, it will be told through the individual stories by the people themselves and what it means to them, one by one if needs be!

By: Nick Booth

Nick Booth — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:32:40 +0000

Thanks for mentioning the social media surgeries. The reason I’m here and commenting is you linked to me, which meant I knew you were talking about me.

Certainly blogging isn’t what we mean by (digital) social inclusion, but being able to be more than a passive consumer of content fits on my hierarchy of inclusion.

So using the conversational tools that exists on the web (including the trackback/pingack which brought me to this blog post) would be a good start for any team keen to embrace issues connected with digital inclusion.

By: Jon Bounds

Jon Bounds — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 12:59:26 +0000

Of course “blogging” isn’t the main thrust of digital inclusion — although I’ve yet to see anyone “official” attempt to define the term properly (I’ve had a go – http://wesharestuff.org/blog/2009/08/24/is-this-digital-inclusion/ ) — and it does depend on who MLF is supposed to be championing to (if she’s championing to politicians then blogging wouldn’t be a huge part of it, if to the main stream media, then… hmmm… I don’t know who it is).

I’d expect a digital inclusion champion to be blogging a lot as well, I’d expect them to be doing it almost ostentatiously themselves — proving that it’s easy and doesn’t take significant time. Which a quick chat to anyone who does it would prove (and yes that’s one of the main things we find ourselves reassuring people of at the Social Media Surgeries).

Looking at the @Marthalanefox twitter feed – it does seem a “blog” is promised for September (http://twitter.com/Marthalanefox/status/3404267844) but given the amount of time the appointment took to announce one would expect something more substantial to be up and running already. Time isn’t an excuse, and although speed isn’t necessarily a virtue, slowness isnt’ a good message.