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 index 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 here 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 suffering 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 happens 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.

Tags: Citizen, Digital Divide, Intervention

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Digital Inclusion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.