Archive for the ‘Digital Inclusion’ Category

My Digital Inclusion Manifesto

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Introduction.

This is my manifesto for Digital Inclusion. It’s not  “The” manifesto it’s “A” manifesto for  discussion, critique, adaptation, for  additions or from which to delete as people see fit. Not all the words in it are mine some are things I have read or heard. Digital Inclusion is a broad church. I have always found the definition of digital inclusion in the Digital Inclusion Action Plan as a useful starting point: “The use of technology, either directly or indirectly, to improve the life chances of citizens”. While a cynical view would be that this was intended as a political catch-all it does encompass all of those activities where digital technology can, and does, make a difference. The last two years have stood witness to an ebb and flow of initiatives and policies to a point where digital inclusion is now high on the political agenda. I have argued for and against the different views of what constitutes digital inclusion in particular I have often argued against those who would claim to have the answer. I thought it was time I put forward my thoughts as a digital inclusion manifesto.

1.       Technology alone will not solve the problems of your community, let alone the country.

The potential benefit of digital technology for individuals, groups and communities is self evident. It offers a chance to access services and information; it provides a channel for self expression and access to knowledge. It provides a mechanism for collaboration and sharing. All of this has no value without the physical engagement of the individual in the community. There will always be a need for leaflets, posters, knocking on doors and meeting people in the street.

2.       Apps are an important tool but they are not the answer to anything.

Transparency is paramount, open access to government data is one route to transparency. Tim O’Reilly’s Apps for America made me aware of the huge potential for Government data in the public realm to inform individuals and to inform service delivery. Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg’s work on “The Power of Information” highlighted the intrinsic value that lay in government held data that was, until recently, locked away for no real reason other than it was held by the government. All of that is changing now and changing for the better.

Those who create Apps provide an important function by making that data accessible and mobile. When the enthusiasts point to Apps as the answer to the problem of informing people they forget all of the other elements that enable people to participate by being informed, they also forget that the world view that informs a particular App makes that App a mediated channel, not an intrinsically open one.

3.       Skills are “key” to digital inclusion but they are not the starting point.

Whether we like it or not, People will start from where they are; the strategy should be to meet the needs of the individual and then backfill the rest. While a focus on skills is important we should not lose sight of community potential. John Field is not widely acknowledged as a champion of digital inclusion but his mantra says that: Learning communities have social capital, social capital makes innovation possible.

When we focus on skills alone we lose sight of the empowerment which digital inclusion enables. The focus on skills marginalises the digital potential highlighted by Eric Von Hippel for innovation. The holy trinity of service design is commissioners, providers and users. We should adopt a mindset which places inclusion at the core and intelligence at the edge. That link between the edge and the core is part of the potential for digital inclusion. Invention requires an individual spark, innovation requires a community mind.

4.       Without infrastructure digital inclusion is a pointless exercise.

In the United Kingdom we do not have a market in telecommunications. We have a supplier of significant market power who supplies in a regulated environment. Both the market and regulation have failed. We also have a consumer base that is largely naive. There is still a wry smile for those who declare ignorance of the Internet and all things technical. The result of this is a society whose comfort zone is an industrial lifestyle with a digital veneer.

This has wide implications; the curse of city regions, the impact of rural deprivation but most importantly the loss to the wider community and the economy of the participation of all members of society. The stakeholder group is constrained by access to infrastructure and this is condoned by Government so that the myth of the market can be sustained.

5.  There are those who see digital as a means to cut costs and as a source of information not as a route to inclusion and empowerment.

The biggest users of government services are the most vulnerable group in the community. Those who suffer multiple deprivations have their own networks that meet their needs; the network is the first layer of the care wrap. In a crisis nobody uses the internet but they do phone a friend: focus on the friends. Working towards universal digital inclusion it is often easy to forget that the third sector creates a pathway to get to hard to reach clients. Within those complex networks we should remember that brokers are the most important members of society; they see the parts and create the whole.

There is a digital inclusion imperative resulting from a high level determination to see people on line to access information and services. In meeting that imperative, let us not lose sight of the potential for the biggest stakeholders to be empowered.

6. We have to get serious about identity.

Being who we say we are has never been more important despite this we persist in placing a value on the anonymity provided by the Internet. While we hide a true identity and believe that the portability of popular applications will provide all that we need the truth is that a political view from an anonymous person counts for little and an anonymous person cannot access a service that they need.

We have to get serious about identity. The underpinning work on identity is there, we don’t have to invent it but we do have to embrace it so that it reflects our needs. The alternative is that, at some point, it will be imposed and we may sacrifice not just anonymity but also freedom.

7.       Helping people to find a voice is worthless unless somebody is prepared to listen.

The power of social media to represent the voices in a community seem to have been an argument for digital inclusion since social media rose to prominence. I often read pieces which mourn the fact that nobody who makes decisions listens. At the same time I hear elected members saying, I’m using social media, follow me, and I’ll listen.

We have lost sight of what government is. Government is a statutory function with political oversight carried out in the name of the Queen. As UK citizens we are subjected to it, at all levels, it is carried out for the benefit of the country not the individual.

It doesn’t have to be that way but we need to stop raging against the storm and participating through the structures with a view to changing them. What digital inclusion brings is the potential for organising, collaborating and giving a platform for the emergent stories in a way that they can begin to influence the way we receive services and the potential for us to take control of those services and deliver them for ourselves. When people have a “voice” don’t be surprised if they shout loudly: harness the power.

8.       Content has a value, distribution is cheap. We should pay for the content and not the channel.

The word “content” is overused and overhyped. We have arrived in an unfamiliar place where everything on line is “content”. The result of being in that place is that we believe content to be free. Everything on line isn’t content. Content should have a value proposition which encompasses creativity, academic excellence and authorship. A billion U Tube videos do not equate to content.

The unfamiliar place is a foggy place where it’s hard to see. The forces in support of content are not the content providers, they are the publishers with all of their accompanying marketing and access channels. They seek to protect not the content but their distribution rights. They thrive on the arguments about content and they seek to sustain a business model that has long been out of date.

Clinging to the old business models simply delays the inevitable: monopolies and protectionism result in entropy.

9.       Digital Inclusion needs a champion.

By identifying a champion the government has found someone to represents digital inclusion to the rest of the world. Someone who will walk the halls of Westminster to coax and cajole members of parliament. A person who will profile the work of local government and make local politicians aware. Without a champion digital inclusion would not have the profile it does now.

Of course, being a champion is a thankless task, a classic case of pleasing some of the people all of the time and all of the people none of the time. Therefore, we who work in the digital inclusion space should  expect to be missed out of the roll of honour some of the time, we should understand the duplication and the obsessive focus on national initiatives. We should be glad, however, the work that goes on at the local level is recognised for what it is.

10.   You do not need to own the solution.

The inability of citizens to communicate with political and officer members of government bodies at all levels through a channel of choice a social media platform has to be one that sees voices  raised in anguish most often. Local authorities put in place technical barriers, they put in place regulatory barriers and then they put in place their own solution.

Not many people use local authority social media solutions. They are viewed with suspicion. We now have The Council Blog, The Council Tweet, The Council Facebook page but we are not interested. We want free and open access to the people for whom we pay to deliver services and to regulate that delivery.

The confusion in the minds of voters, officers and members alike has created a place where services are delivered to us by them. We have lost sight of “for” and “with” and we are no longer clear about what is statutory and what is there because it is worthwhile. Things that are worthwhile do not need to be delivered to us, they should be delivered for us and with us. Digital Inclusion holds the potential to empower individuals and communities in such a way that they can deliver services with the local authority for themselves.

            Conclusion.

You cannot have a knowledge economy without a knowledge society. Being digital, if we are focussing on including people in a digital world, the world should reflect this. People are being positioned to receive services in a digital way, this is not the same as being digital where people also participate, create and give. The industrial society is struggling to make the transition to a knowledge society and yet the knowledge economy is presented as being so important but corporate structure are much more comfortable if people work and behave in an industrial way even though they are using digital tools. Digital inclusion is part of a social transition which is evolutionary which is being hampered by social, political and commercial interests who do not know how to adapt to a digital society.

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Cesi n’est pas une pipe

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010 (NDI 10) was a better conference than last year. This was in part due to the involvement of larger numbers of individuals and groups that are engaged in delivery and in part due to the organisation of the event which was much more open than last year. Martha Lane Fox gave a presentation that was a rallying call: keep it simple and don’t become a self perpetuating industry, halve the size of the conference year on year as the need is met. Despite everything, NDI 10 still failed to achieve its potential.

There were emerging gaps that became apparent on day one that by day two were seemingly impossible to cross. On one side the clear Government message that digital inclusion was about efficiency and being able to deliver services to the most vulnerable in society to help tackle disadvantage. On the other side the dedication of the groups and individuals who help the different sections of the communities in which they operate to become digitally engaged. Between the two, there was me,  with a distinct feeling that I was in the wrong place. I wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t where I thought I ought to be.

Finally, I had a Grumpy Old Man moment. It was brief and, I confess, to the point but on reflection it symbolised the space between us. The session on Digital Participation was looking for promises. What simple thing could we promise to deliver that would have an impact on digital inclusion. The suggestion was that we make the registration of school place preferences a compulsory on line exercise and then support parents through the school to do this. This would be such a rewarding experience that parents who were previously disengaged would see the potential and become digitally included.

I had a number of problems with this suggestion. Firstly, it fails to recognise that the school community is the community of the school, it is not the wider community. Secondly, it positions the school as the mediator between an individual and a government service.  Is this why we have schools?  What symbolised the gulf between us most was the unspoken declaration that we could not find a compelling enough reason for individuals and groups to want to use digital channels and so we had decided to resort to compulsion by statute. If the great digitally unwashed couldn’t understand then we would force them, using their children’s education as the blunt instrument, to become digitally clean.

The tipping point was when the Chair of the panel smiled and one by one the members of the panel thought that it was a good idea, one of them, and I won’t name names, even used the word “great”. Whether it was serendipity, or kismet or whether I willed it to happen, the microphone came to me next – and the rest is history.

What happened to empowerment, communities in control, transparency, the use of technology to improve the life chances of citizens? These are the reasons I felt that I was in the wrong place. It was digital inclusion, but not as we know it. It was as if the argument had to be reduced to its most fundamental constituents. Why was this? Was it because we were all considered too simple to understand the wider benefits of digital inclusion? Has the government changed its mind? Is it no longer interested in the use of technology to empower individuals and communities? Has it come down to this: get poor people and old people on line, any way we can, so that we can reduce the cost of delivering services to them?

I believe in the potential for digital technology to contribute to improving life chances. Empowerment enables a voice, that voice can tell life stories and those stories can inform service design. Empowerment can create the conditions for collaboration and through collaboration communities can innovate and deliver some of the services that can no longer be delivered by government. Access to data through technology has the potential to make the function of government transparent and serves to improve the quality of our democracy. It is in these ways that we improve life chances, not by making it cheaper for government to deliver services as they always have.

I know that digital inclusion is not a magic bullet but equally I do not believe that digital inclusion is a means of doing the same thing but doing it for less cost. I know that there needs to be a starting point, I do not believe that the coercion of citizens into participating in centralised service delivery is the right one. People have disengaged, they have done so for a reason; they have created networks of support that reflect their beliefs and meet their needs more appropriately. Re-engaging them with a wider community through digital channels alone will not work. By simply constructing a digital facade over the thing from which people disengaged in the first place we will not create an inclusive society.

NDI 10 seemed to have lost sight of its long term vision, it missed an opportunity to restate that vision and chose instead to focus on a series of promises that will not bridge the gap but will maintain the divide. Will NDI 11 be a smaller conference as Martha Lane Fox suggested? Yes it will, It’s unlikely that I will be there, and I suspect that next year, once again, I will not be alone.

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Plus ca Change, Plus ca Meme Chose

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

In a truly digital society there is no reason why any digitally included person should not participate in society, or in the economy. Yet, because we organise ourselves on an industrial basis those who cannot join the mass movement to centres of production on a daily basis are excluded from the economy and relegated to a dependency on the state. This represents a social failing on an unimaginable scale and at the same time a waste of talent which represents a cost to society and the economy.

The organisation of society on an industrial basis in a digital world means that innovation has become associated with centres of excellence fuelled by the idea of agglomeration of  like minded individuals in a creative environment. This ignores the potential for individuals adding value from a distance, the contribution of niche experts and the knowledge of communities that are peripheral to the core. It is not enough that we focus large resources on the centre we also take resources away from the periphery in order to feed the monster that is the city region. The periphery becomes devalued and its denizens come to accept second best as the best that they can expect. Excluded by default because they are perceived as being economically unviable and because their potential contribution is undervalued.

In a truly digital world neither of these things should be the case. Digital inclusion enables both economic participation, innovation and social justice. Despite the obvious society persists in promoting a dependency culture for those individuals and communities who are not able to participate because of this industrial age mentality. The desire to cling to the industrial power base can be seen in the attempts to control the channels of distribution of digital content in the name of digital rights and protecting the rights of the producer. We are prepared to sacrifice social freedoms in the name of an outdated economic model.

In a digital world communities are empowered. The old political model is being challenged, communities are demanding transparency and a voice that is heard. Despite this, the state seeks to maintain a dependency model in which digital inclusion is a means to create efficiencies and to provide access to services to those that most need them. In a truly digital world the demand for services could be less. What is more, valued communities not communities marginalised by geographical distance from the core, could take over many of the services that the state seeks to cut. Instead the desire to maintain the dependency culture to retain a hierarchy which dispenses services instead of enabling community activism denies the potential that a truly digital society can bring.

It is against this backdrop of social and economic myopia that I have concerns about our approaches to digital inclusion. I fear that Digital Inclusion has become a parochial activity where we have lost sight of the potential for being digital to unleash the creative human spirit and to break down the barriers between people. A world where creativity is the accepted norm. Instead we have to create lines of demarcation between the Netaratti and the digitally unwashed so that we might hand down the benefits of digital inclusion whilst we ourselves remain a digital veneer on the industrial society. Who in the modern world needs to ask “What does digital inclusion mean?”  when they should be asking what are the consequences for society of digital exclusion.

Unless we see digital inclusion in terms other than an industrial society then the fears of Jaron Lanier will be perpetuated. Lanier describes a spiritual failure where we redirect ideas of hope away from people and towards gadgets; a behavioural failure in which we promote anonymity and crowd behaviour and he describes an economic failure which is obsessed with the idea of free. Before we accuse Lanier of overstating the case remember that 2009 became the year of the social media guru, the i-phone was described as the gadget that everybody would have and “we” were described as the new government. The Neteratti are a small, well educated, middle class group and while intentions may be good I think it is time to re-examine the values that underpin the digital inclusion movement. Otherwise we may be seeking to include only to perpetuate the industrial status quo rather than to create a digital society in which each and every individual can fulfil their potential.

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Silver Bullets

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

lone ranger

Silver bullets have a place in the popular consciousness; a silver bullet used to despatch the bad guys for the Lone Ranger, silver bullets are also useful if you need to dispense with a werewolf and silver bullets probably make great jewellery.  In “Systems Thinking, Systems Practise” Peter Checkland revisits the idea of Weltanschauung or world view. The idea being that before you think about a system make sure you understand your world view and that of the people with whom you are working. Working somewhere between Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) and Service Delivery Organisations (SDO) can give you an interesting view of the world.

The Digital Inclusion Action Plan  defines digital inclusion as “The best use of digital technology, either directly or indirectly, to improve the lives and life chances of all citizens and the places in which they live”.  With this in mind the irony of Jenni Russell’s Comment piece in the Sunday Times 24/01/2010   wasn’t lost on me.  It described an archetype of a family suffering multiple deprivation then offered a view based on the comments of a social worker that ICT wasn’t helping, in fact it was making the situation worse by tying the Social Worker to the IT system rather than letting them do the job that they’re trained to do. The implication was that the family suffered because of the use of ICT. Where does this leave digital inclusion as a strategy? Jenni Russell identifies the indirect use of digital technology in this context as, at the very least, unhelpful and the direct use of ICT to help tackle social deprivation not worth considering at all. 

While I had to miss both ukgovcamp10  and diunconf in Birmingham I found the discussions that came from both interesting and informative. The discussions continued even three days later which is a testament to the success of both events. What did start to come across, especially post event, was that people naturally enough talk about their experience which is not necessarily a shared experience. This has been noticeable recently following  the announcement of different national initiatives: The £30m for UK Online Centres to get another 1m people on line caused a few caustic comments not least from the older commentators in IDF50 South of the Thames. The laptops for children also raised an eyebrow or two, mine included, on both sides of the argument regarding value for money and ideas of doing “to” and not “with”. Most recently there was some uncomfortable shuffling about when a piece was published on Silver Surfers being well off  . People are focussed on their area of interest, not on the whole, just as in Jenni Russell’s Comment piece.

What does living with multiple deprivation and social exclusion look like, is the archtype that Jenni Russell described good enough? What role does digital play in redressing the balance? If we try to visualise the extent and depth of social and digital exclusion we can start to get a feel for the potential range of situations as visualised statistically. I’ll look at the same situation in a rural area, but consider that separately because it raises other issues, around sparcity, poor infrastructure provision and access to services, that as a rule don’t apply in the urban setting. The DigiTeam has put together a digital inclusion indDI Index explainedex by taking figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) on Deprivation (IMD) at the Local Super Output Area level (LSOA) and mapping these against an index of digital exclusion based on features such as access, take up and usage. By plotting the indices along an x/y axis it is possible to create a high level picture of the pattern of digital exclusion in a local government area. The higher the index of multiple deprivation the higher the level of social exclusion, the higher the digital exclusion index the greater the level of exclusion. An index of x=1 and y=1 would indicate a high level of digital and social exclusion. An index of x=-1 and y=-1 would indicate a high level of social and digital inclusion.

 Using the mapping devised by the Digiteam a high level view of digital exclusion can be represented as follows: in a large urban borough which statistically has moderate levels of deprivation and digital exclusion we can visualise an indices of exclusion where each symbol represents a community in Local Super Output Area. Symbols in the positive quadrant are areas of social and digital exclusion. There are all sorts of value judgments and assumptions here: does access to infrastructure make a group more digitally included? Should we talk in terms of more or less deprivation or is it justified to talk about moderate levels of deprivation; is there an acceptable level of deprivation?  How statistically valid is the analysis? All of these assumptions should be questioned but this is trying to illustrate a point hless prosp lb - circledere about how people view their particular area of digital inclusion work.

 If we enclose as many points of social and digital exclusion as we can, by making a very big assumption we can guess where a digital inclusion initiative might have an impact. Let’s take a silver surfers club, a social media surgery or a first steps back to learning group. Where might the impact boundry lie in the large urban borough with some social exclusion and some digital exclusion?

We could claim to be potentially providing access to digital experience to a dozen or so communities and hitting areas which evidence deprivation. If we are successful we open channels for self expression, we build confidence and we may even move people from first steps to next steps and we start them on the ladder to accessing skills and potentially better paid jobs and so on. This is great, it’s how it’s supposed to work.

In the next visualisation the blue dots in the lower left quadrant represents communities where there is little or no statistical evidence of social exclusion and high levels of digital inclusion. The borough with “moderate levels” of exclusion both digitally and socially is shown in red. The green symbols show an urban city which has communities sufcombined index with circlefering multiple deprivation and extremes of social exclusion and digital exclusion.

Using the same intervention discussed earlier, I’ve positioned the impact boundary roughly around the same communities that show the same statistical profile as the communities in the large urban borough. The intervention may work for those communities in the same way with the same potential benefits. However, the same initiative with the same (ish) communities doesn’t hit the majority of communities showing evidence of social and digital exclusion – where exclusion, both social and digital is deeper it needs a different world view.

We all have a lot of ownership in the projects that we do, rightly so, but I sometimes hear messages about the “answer” to digital inclusion. Project A worked in this deprived area of city B, let’s fund this project in city C and we’ll solve the digital exclusion issues and begin to address social exclusion. What this does is ignore the people who the project doesn’t hit and it ignores the other contributory features of any intervention: the community networks, the local movers and shakers and let’s not forget serendipity, that stroke of good fortune that put the right people in the right place at the right time. The failure to take a holistic view of successful interventions, to understand the world view of both the delivery partners and the beneficiaries means that we miss a lot of potentially important projects and we don’t join up effectively.

What happensrural counties with circle in rural areas? The following shows two rural counties in the West of England which demonstrate the impact of sparse populations on access to services.

The intervention impact shown by the circle represents the same use of resources as in the urban context described earlier. Once again, large numbers of socially and digitally excluded communities are missed by what is, to all intent and purpose, a successful intervention. What is significant here is that the digital exclusion statistics will be skewed by the poor levels of access to infrastructure. In terms of social exclusion it will be skewed by poor access to services. Under these conditions can we be confident that an initiative that was so successful in an urban area of moderate deprivation will have a similar impact here – should the world view have changed? If the answer is yes, and it is my belief that it should, then why do we persist in funding national initiatives based on a single solution and why do we fail, time and time again to acknowledge the spectrum of local factors that make a community project successful in the first place?

Politically, we are looking for a silver bullet and there will always be people who claim to have one because their world view tells them that they have. It’s time we started to understand that there is no silver bullet but there are lots of world views and being more holistic about why things succeed will help us to have a bigger impact when tackling social exclusion through digital inclusion.

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