Posts Tagged ‘Digital Divide’

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,
Posted in Digital Inclusion | 9 Comments »

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Digital Inclusion | 5 Comments »

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in Digital Inclusion, Knowledge Society | 2 Comments »

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in Digital Inclusion | 1 Comment »

Rural Digital Economy is a Real Digital Economy

Friday, February 5th, 2010

I noticed somebody on Twitter earlier this week suggest that if people needed broadband and hadn’t got access to it then they should move. If we take this view we depopulate rural areas so that there is no economic infrastructure at all and we sound the death knell for rural communities. It shows a total lack of understanding of what the digital economy means and a level of ignorance about the impact of digital exclusion that defies belief.

Earlier this week my local council announced that it was seeking European funding for wireless infrastructure in the rural “not spots” in the County. I believe that this is the wrong approach, not that I don’t understand the motivation because rural businesses get to the point where anything will do, but I still believe it’s wrong.

There are, I believe, three elements to the proposal which are fundamentally flawed.

The first is the intention to use European funding – State Aid. State Aid requires four basic conditions to be met. The first is that there must be a clear market failure; the second is that any intervention must not distort the market; the third is that any solution cannot be technology specific and the final one is that the eventual solution must be open to the market. I know that State Aid has been granted for some major infrastructure projects in the past, but this is not a major infrastructure project, this is for the provision of very specific services in a very specific area and the two are not the same.

Let us take these one at a time. Firstly, I believe that there is a market failure. However, this is open to challenge in that the incumbent supplier could claim that it was willing to provide services eventually. Now, I know, just as everybody knows, that this is NOT broadband as we all understand it, but in state aid terms, it is and so, should the incumbent be sufficiently threatened by the market failure proposal they could, in my view, challenge it successfully. This argument also undermines the second condition in which the incumbent could argue that a state aided solution would prevent them from making sufficient return on their investment and make it unlikely that any other provider could enter the market. However unlikely this seems it would weaken the ex-ante case for state aid approval. Thirdly, the application for state aid could only specify the provision for broadband services, it cannot specify a wireless or any other solution so to say that one is applying for European funding for a wireless mesh network is nonsense. Finally, the solution must be available for the wider market, in other words you can only provide the infrastructure you must then get service providers to offer services. The kinds of services that can operate over a basic infrastructure such as might get state aid approval limits the revenue potential for any provider with the result that the sustainability of the network is at risk.

The second is the political impact of doing a project that meets the immediate need. The problem with accepting anything is that it ticks somebody else’s box. It means that rural areas have something and so they can be forgotten for a while longer. I experienced this in the mid 2000’s when there was a state aid application for the provision of broadband services to rural not spots in the West Midlands. The resulting service was satellite based, under capacity, under sold and didn’t deliver a true broadband service. The motivation fitted the criteria we see now; anything will do as long as it’s something. What was worse was that it enabled  regional bodies to say that there was 100% broadband availability in the region, it ticked a box. The agenda moved on and today there are still poorly served villages and not spots in various parts of the county.

The third is to do with sustainability. A basic internet service will deliver just that, basic internet. The potential for value added services such as VOIP, video conferencing, or IPTV are limited. Whilst I believe firmly that business is the key driver for new broadband services it is residences and entertainment that are the sustaining forces.

My final point is that much as I recognise the desperate need for good broadband services in rural areas I fail to see why rural communities should have to accept a second best solution to their urban counterparts. If we accept that it’s okay to provide 20% of the English population with second rate infrastructure because they are unprofitable, irrespective of the potential for social and economic injustice then surely we are all missing the point, just like the individual who suggested that we all move.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: ,
Posted in Infrastructure | 13 Comments »

A Holy Trinity

Saturday, December 12th, 2009
The Care Wrap

The Care Wrap

 

 On Friday Martha Lane-Fox Tweeted: “RT NewStatesman xmas issue: @Marthalanefox has agreed to be our celebrity subscriber of the week : HELP, not feeling v funny or inspired!”

Along with I have no idea how many others I put forward my suggestions: access to the knowledge society as a fundamental right not as a privilege and the imperative of including the most excluded as a principle of social justice and pragmatic sense. It’s easy for me. I’m not subject to a deadline, nor am I in the public eye and having to watch everything I say I just felt that the inspiration for what needed to be said was all around the digital inclusion champion.

In a time when the Neteratti have been debating the future of content accessed through pay walls the notion of an egalitarian knowledge society has seemed a long way away. I’ve never quite understood why it is that the proponents of a knowledge economy do not call for a knowledge society. There appears to be a deep seated belief that the knowledge economy can operate on the same model as the industrial economy and that the laws of scarcity and value will still apply. The truth is that individuals have the ability to add value to knowledge and it is from there that collaboration derives it economic and social power.

It’s very rare that I agree with Andrea Dimaio who writes a regular blog for Gartner on government. I have, on occasions, let off steam in response to some of the things he says but it’s just a rage against the storm. Last week he wrote about the short comings of President Obama’s Open Government Directive on transparency in government and highlighted that the citizen backchannel was missing from the plan. In his piece “US Open Government Directive is Disappointing”   he points out that the mechanism for agencies to listen to citizens is not only missing from the plan, it’s positively discouraged. How can government services learn if they aren’t listening?

Early in December I did a presentation to a Local Strategic Partnership on Digital Inclusion and its impact on the delivery of services to people who experience both social and digital exclusion. After the presentation I helped facilitate a short workshop so that participants could put forward points of view and a broad consensus of ideas could be taken forward and developed into potential project ideas. Everything was so disconnected. It was the same place, with the same clients and, broadly speaking, shared objectives; to improve lives and life chances, but there was no communication. This isn’t unusual, it happens and even when communications are in place it’s at such a strategic level that it still doesn’t join up the operational opportunities that could make a difference. This is not to say that it’s not happening somewhere, it just isn’t happening everywhere.

The context here is the biggest users of public sector provided services whether they’re provided direct or whether they’re commissioned from private sector companies, not for profits or voluntary sector providers. These are individuals experiencing long term worklessness, victims of domestic violence, children at risk, people not in education, employment or training, homeless individuals, addicts, ex-offenders, single parents under eighteen and older people, people with disabilities, adults with learning difficulties, adults using mental health services and let’s not forget carers – young and old. I’m  not talking about people who write to Members of Parliament or people who are concerned about street lights not working I’m probably not even talking about people who are likely to vote. I’m talking about a huge group of people who use public sector services more than any of us reading this blog.

Let us be clear. It’s not as if people in this group have the same choices. They cannot choose, they have to take what they are given. As the biggest users of public services they are also the greatest cost to the public sector both in terms of the amount of resource they need and in terms of their capacity to contribute; let alone the question of social equity or the value that people who are excluded might bring if they were included. So, it is in everybody’s interest to enable people in this group, to build capacity amongst the members of this group and to improve their lives and their life chances; which is what digital inclusion is supposed to help to do.

These groups of individuals experiencing difficulties are not, as some might think, disempowered. They have very potent personal networks which help them to survive and to meet many of their needs. These networks also help them to deal with officialdom, organise benefits and solve day to day problems of child care, debt, care and so on. Not all of them, not every individual or family but many of them. The network of friends and trusted agents is powerful and provides a lifeline. That’s why friends and trusted agents are the first layer of care around the individual. Then there are the neighbourhood groups, the voluntary organisations, the national charities and then the statutory bodies. They all form a care wrap around those individuals and families who experience the greatest levels of deprivation and the greatest levels of difficulty in our society.

All of these people have a story to tell. Stories about the way they experience the services that they receive and the ways in which they access those stories. This leads to what I call the holy trinity of service design. The local partnerships who commission services, the third sector who deliver some of those services and have the knowledge of the communities in which they work and finally, empowered communities who have the confidence and the channels to tell their stories.

trinity

Paul Webster from NAVCA highlighted this after the DDI09 conference stating that carers and trusted agents were a route to engagement and also a pathway to digital inclusion – YES. By enabling the individual and listening to their story we can improve the services we deliver and let individuals find their way to add value to the knowledge in society. As Leadbeater would say, we can do with and not do to.

This brings me back to something else Martha Lane-Fox said earlier this week

“@cyberdoyle i think govt shld be worrying abt making sure everyone has internet skills + access to proper quality 2mb 1st + superfast 2nd”

I have to say, I disagreed. Next Generation Access should not be predicated on a universal service offering and an individual’s right to participate in the knowledge society. The two things are not related, well, at least they shouldn’t be. The right of the individual to participate should be fundamental; the infrastructure to support that participation should be incidental. With that thought I think that the digital inclusion champion will have lots to tell the readers of the New Statesman and I look forward to reading the result.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Knowledge Society, Public Services, Social Capital | 2 Comments »

Who are the Neteratti?

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Let me say at the start that I have never owned a Linn hifi. Nor have I, for that matter ever owned a Naim, Accoustic Research, Roksan or any other esoteric brand of equipment. I do own a Quad / Kef combination but it’s quite old and it’s currently in boxes because my current home is just not that big and the Other Half is just not that understanding. I do love music, all sorts of music, Jazz: folk rock, classical, rock and roll. I love it all, and I love it live from the Nantwich Jazz Festival to what’s on at the pub I just love it.

Now, I hear you say, what’s all this got to do with digital anything?

There was a brief item on the BBC News web site this week about CD player production ending at Linn. They have recognised that the future lies in streamed digital media and they are focussing their efforts on Studio Master Quality material for download. If you’ve ever heard a high end Linn system (they can cost up to £100,000) you will understand what they mean by Studio Master Quality. I’ve often bemoaned the success of the iPod. I’ve often bemoaned the success of a lot of MP3. It’s not that it isn’t good, it’s very good but we have sacrificed a lot of quality in our pursuit of cheap, easy to access music. Compressed dynamics, loss of spatial information, over hanging bass lines, screeching vocals that waft about the sound stage, in short, we’ve given up on real quality. I know that’s a Grumpy Old Man thing and it’s the music that counts, but if you’ve never heard a full spec Linn in all of its glory recreating a 3D sound stage with as near to full dynamic range as you can get, then you probably won’t know what I’m on about anyway. Back to my point; the Studio Master Quality material, like video, will use up a lot of bandwidth. People have stopped buying CDs because they can get music cheaply through existing bandwidth and its okay because they’re not concerned about the quality. Music is, almost, disposable. Here today, gone tomorrow and to some extent we’ve lost out emotional attachment to it – it’s become like static – we hear, we like, we buy (or steal, because the Internet is free, isn’t it) and then we throw it away. If we want Studio Quality Material, we will have to have bandwidth which means that it will only be available to people with bandwidth. Storage is cheap; bandwidth is only for those in the Cities.

Now, I hear you say, where’s he going with this? Surely not a rural rant.

Well, I could, but no, this is more about selective markets. I was very grateful for the excellent commentary that came out of the My Public Services Conference on Thursday. I couldn’t go, way too much on, but it was almost as good as being there. What came across strongly, to me at least, was the message that WE are the future of government services. That’s true but nobody seemed to pick up on the point that WE are a very select little group. On the global scale of things we are a self selecting Neteratti, well educated, committed, digitally literate, middle class select little group. We are no different to the people who can afford to buy a full spec Lynn and enjoy the experience.

What was that? Grow the group?

Well yes we could grow the group but that’s not the point. There was a very good piece this week by Stephen Collins from the Centre for Policy Development in Australia.  called “Culture in the New Order “. His view resonated with my own views about the necessity of culture change in government organisations.

  • a lack of a cohesive “whole of government” approach at any level of government
  • a view of accountability that inadequately rewards those responsible for success and innovation
  • inadequate trust and permission models across public sector management
  • a change to openness as a default, including removing reticence to participate or obfuscation of participation
  • a negative-only perception of risk

One of the things that people tend to ignore is that government organisations are not designed to be transformational. They are designed to be process oriented, reliable, auditable and while they serve all of us they are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable people in our society. With that as your key driver you don’t suddenly start transforming things just because a load of middle class Neteratti start shouting about it. The implication of this is that the core functions of local government will not change quickly or significantly over a short timescale. What will happen is that certain functions will move outside of government, and we see this happening already, and it will move into the realm of the Neteratti.

Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Yes and no.

The trouble is, as I see it, the Neteratti are a selective little group, privileged like the full spec Linn owners.  Their literacy is like the city’s bandwidth and their knowledge is the Studio Quality Master Material. There were a couple of other things this week that caught my eye. One was a Guardian Article “The Dark Side of the Internet” by Andy Beckett,   which was an excellent précis of Freenet and the implications of its wider use. I noted that someone in the Twitter stream commented that if the Government’s Digital Economy Bill goes through unchanged – and it will – more of us will become Freenet users.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

The non statutory government functions in the hands of a small select group navigating its way around the Internet unseen, non accountable and as for the rest? Excluded? Baileyhillmedia signposted an article by Joe Marchese “Why Facebook Applications will soon be History”. In it he wrote about the use of Facebook Connect APIs to enable applications to run outside of Facebook but using the Facebook Identity. Similar plans are in play for MySpace ID, and Google’s Friend Connect. In a sense it’s not unlike the E-Bay API which enables you to buy on E-Bay when you’re really buying from somebody’s on line catalogue. Brian Solis wrote about this a couple of weeks ago  the impact of portable identity on marketing. In short, when we access services we will do so in an invisible way. For many that might sound like a good thing: Seamless access to services using portable identity and delivered in a personalised, martini fashion.  I believe we run the risk that the people who control those services will also be invisible. For me it’s Gibsonesque! I’ve used that term twice this week and that’s what brought me to this place I suppose. William Gibson wrote a series of books in the 70’s which predicted the Internet of today: Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, Johnny Mnemonic, The Difference Engine. In his books there was always a ghost in the machine that was the real control, insidious, hidden and self interested. When we shout loudly “WE are the future of government” I think we might take a little time out to understand who WE are and who isn’t there who ought to be and perhaps spend some time getting everybody there so that Gibson’s prophesy doesn’t become self fulfilling.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Digital Inclusion – Scratching the Itch!

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I’m grateful to John Fisher, CEO of Citizens On Line, for a conversation we had about supply and demand, digital inclusion and the way that it’s supply led. I’ve been looking at the American experience; the whole social media idea appears to be far more embedded there than here. That may be just an impression but I think it stems from the social media phenomenon being driven by consumers. The desire to influence products and product quality has taken hold so that the social media environment is a way of talking publicly about a product or service experience. This means that in America, politics is getting wise to a consumer driven experience and is getting engaged with consumers. Here in the UK politics is driving the initiative and trying to get consumers engaged.

The consequence is that the supply side has overcapacity. We are awash with initiatives and yet 29% of people in the UK still do not engage with “digital”. At the same time, politics seeks not only to drive the initiative but also to control the dialogue. This is partly because of the nature of local authorities that tend to be hierarchical and inward looking. This means that messages flow down and outwards, not in and upwards.

If it’s not supply led, then what is a “Core offer” for digital inclusion? Lyndsay Grant of NESTA (Grant, 2008) highlights the generally accepted benefits of digital inclusion, improved access to learning and skills, and subsequently to employment and also to provide a citizen voice. We need, she says, new modes of learning and access to make a voice heard and an understanding that projects work best in the locality for which they are designed – we cannot change the world. Her view is that a user centred approach in the design of learning is appropriate, it is socially just, powerless people have power when they are involved in the process and to enable this articulation learners must be supported by means of scaffolding.

I find this way of thinking attractive. I do not believe that a knowledge economy is possible without a knowledge society.

On the same theme of design a piece by Robert Fabricant takes a slightly different view of user centric design:

“We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences? But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem?” (Fabricant, 2009)

Fabricant argues that a User Centric Design process will emphasise the benefits of an experience, such as ‘convenience’ rather than more meaningful sources of social value. I take this to be alluding to the situation we see when people are asked how they would like to access Local Authority Services. The majority will say, by telephone! Thus the “Death Star” is born and “one stop shop” call centres spring up all over the country. No matter how good the scripts and no matter how well trained the staff, what sort of social value is created and what sort of user experience do we have?

In short, Fabricant argues, user behaviour is always subject to influence. While Fabricant is speaking in the context of design generally it strikes me that his principles can, and should, apply equally to the design of services. His idea is that design should be for social systems, not individual needs because: “it is within cooperative systems that personal fulfilment has the best chance of intersecting with broader social values. “

“Social innovation in the age of networks is a process of change where new ideas are generated by actors directly involved in the problem to be solved.” While participatory design can be used as a technique within a standard UCD process, social media technologies are allowing it to play a more transformative role.” (Fabricant, 2009)

Lean thinking has gained a lot of traction in local government, particularly in process re-engineering for call centre delivery. Lean originated out of Japanese manufacturing and by a process of iteration, involving the people who actually did the work, it developed very efficient processes. The problem with Lean thinking is that it tends to emphasise the supply side experience.

I was fortunate to be a part of a workshop for the participants of the Digital Challenge competition led by Jonathan Drori, now a member of the action group for the Digital Champion, Martha Lane-Fox. The workshop looked at market segmentation, the creation of archetypes and the development of scenarios. It was a day well spent. There is a thought provoking presentation by Hugh Graham which looks at a process of design using emerging stories. He promotes a very similar approach to design:

Understand the context
Conduct research
Create personas
Define scenarios
Build prototypes
Iterate rapidly
Increase fidelity
Fail early and often (Graham, 2008)

The difference between this approach and the Lean method is that it develops the design through the user experience and then tests the design through a number of different user experiences. In a sense it forms the scaffolding that Grant talks about while avoiding the pitfalls that Fabricant highlights.

So what does all of this tell us about the “Core Offer” for digital inclusion. I believe that the core offer should arise from the dialogue with the final 29% not from a selection from the existing supply side, in other words, capture the emergent story rather than develop the supply side offer . What does this look like? It delivers something that people want now. It delivers through friends and trusted agents. This means that we must build the capacity of the front line services. What of the existing supply side? It has to be there, there has to be a place for people to go next, it is what it is, but I doubt that it is the Core Offer.

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags:
Posted in August 2009 | No Comments »

The Infrastructure Debate, Random Jottings

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I picked up a “Tweet” today from an academic in Boston MA called Danah Boyd who Tweets under the name of zephoria. Although they have the equivalent of our Carter Report, who’s Implementation plan was publicised in timely fashion by Chris yesterday (I would never have found it!), called the National Broadband Plan they are still thinking through how it might impact on Education. Danah Boyd put out a call for peopl’s thoughts and ideas which are being posted here but try as I might I couldn’t get them to give me access, so I thought I might put the thoughts here, and maybe develop them because they’re a bit random at the moment – some might argue that my thoughts are always random – hey ho!

Take the British experience as a benchmark (to be aspired to or to be exceeded is up to you – at least it’s not about health reform). Here, it’s called Next Generation Access, NGA for short though the arguments get blurred between people who talk about core networks, access network, economic benefit and social benefit. Lesson 1 – make sure you and the other person are talking about the same thing! There are a couple of strands to this one, the economic and the social. In economic terms it’s a battle between our two dominant service providers to keep market share. In social terms it’s about the haves and have not’s, what we call digital inclusion, which is where I work.

An early evaluation on what NGA might be worth in terms of ROI was published by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (basically a trade body that advises government) from a consultancy called Plumb – hence, the Plumb Report – you can see it here. While it has been generally ignored it does make a good attempt at putting money into the argument; worth a read but take a deep breath.

It was largely ignored because the UK Government commissioned Francesco Caio (ex- Cable & Wireless) to produce a report that basically said, leave it to the market. You can see it here.The problem with Caio is that it sidesteps the impact of geographical and social exclusion, never really confronts the impact.

The Government was partially persuaded and they produced a digital inclusion action plan:

So Stephen Carter (ex- NTL) was then commissioned to take a wider view and he came up with the much publicised Carter Report, Digital Britain. This forms the basis of UK policy for the next x number of years and has resulted in an implementation plan.

Problems and possibilities? The good stuff is that digital inclusion is embedded into government thinking. The not so good stuff is that it doesn’t communicate down to regional and local government and so there are tensions. Having worked on the first implementation of broadband into UK schools I have no doubt about the impact it has had on education generally. I know that it has widened the gap between those that have access at home and those that do not. I also know that of the 29% of British people who still do not engage with the digital agenda, and that group includes what we call NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training) and PPOs,(Persistent and Perpetual Offenders) that their disadvantage and disconnection is deepened because of their exclusion.

Just because you cannot say what NGA will “do” in education doesn’t mean that it will not “do” anything – in 2001 when we began the initial roll out of connectivity to UK schools we only had the vaguest idea of a universal good – the impact has outweighed the original possibility many times and I firmly believe that it will do so again. Not that we don’t have issues: rural exclusion, social exclusion, business competitiveness in areas of poor provision, a weak market place.

What am I saying? I’m saying that you cannot, not do this but if you can, do it equitably with a view to the benefit of every young person and you will reap the rewards a thousand fold, even if you don’t yet know what that reward is!

  • Share/Bookmark

Tags: , ,
Posted in August 2009 | No Comments »