Posts Tagged ‘Digital Inclusion Conference’

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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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.

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What Should Be In A Digital Inclusion Conference?

Monday, September 21st, 2009

I first wrote about this way back in May 2009 in response to the Digital Inclusion Conference 2009. which I thought was pretty good as conferences go. Given the discussion on Twitter on 21st September I thought it would be a good time to bring some of it back to the top of the blog list.

I will declare myself guilty to being self opinionated and state that I have touted these ideas as suitable for Digital Inclusion 2010. I apologise if I’ve bored you with some of this before.

I am proposing that there should be rules for next year’s conference. In no particular order:-

Rule number one – Just because you had a good experience doesn’t mean you have the answer. Present the experience, not the solution.

Rule number two – No PowerPoint slides with tick boxes.

Rule number three – there should be no exceptions proving the rule. We should celebrate success but not at the expense of ignoring the hard to do pile.

Rule number four – remember that the biggest consumers of public services are those people whose lives are most chaotic.

I suggest a twin track conference one for LSPs and Commissioners and one for practitioners. There should be active engagement of the third sector with special rates for them to attend and targeted items on one day so that they don’t have the expense of a two day event. I also suggest a slightly different format with an opportunity for fringe events and small, privately sponsored workshops so that individual projects can present their work to interested audiences.

There were a couple of emergent themes that I think should underpin the “out of the box” approach needed next time:

Innovation: We all know Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Do we really understand what it is to be innovative? The recent Vienna Report has a great sound bite “I2 Inclusive technical innovation and Innovative Inclusive Policies”. Where do innovative ideas come from and what is the journey that they go on? Do we understand innovation or do we oversimplify? Is there a place for horizon scanning?

Entitlement: What is people’s entitlement and do the VCS have a role in this?

Scalability, Duplication versus Replication: How do you break string without scissors? What is the best way, local up or down to local, how do you scale small ideas?

Empowerment: Doing it with not doing it to. Is there a difference between activism and empowerment? What is the role of locally created content? People can be supported to be producers.

Value: Lord Reith’s approach was giving the people what they need, not what they want. What is the role of Value chains in social inclusion? How do you add value in a knowledge society? What is the value chain? How do you create value? How do we connect advocacy to information? Is this adding value? What is the real value of partnership? Is the holy trinity of service design VCS/CVS + LA/LSP + empowered citizens?

Disability: What is the disabled experience? CLG have published a number of profiles on Adults with Learning difficulties and people who use mental health services. How do we bring these to life? What’s it like to be on the other side of the glass?

Access: Is Access still an issue? Should infrastructure be part of the debate? Should we talk about rural in a separate context?

The 2009 conference was, primarily, an event for Ministers. It was an opportunity to understand that Digital Inclusion is a real issue, that there are quantifiable benefits to come from a digitally included society, and that there is some Ministerial credit to be had by being actively engaged with the digital inclusion agenda. The conference was also about celebrating success. I’m all for that and there was a lot of success to celebrate and quite right too. However, try as they might, nobody got any closer to the real nub of the matter – the final third, or the final 29%. The “too hard to do” pile didn’t seem to get any smaller and the “yes we can” pile grew not one jot. That said, the best ideas often come from the most surprising places, the workshops threw up some hope for us all so recommendation that the workshops stay.

Which brings us to the future; what should happen next? When Matthew Taylor closed the conference with an invitation for next year I had a concern that another two days of celebrating success over the 71% (or will it be 75%) of engaged citizens would be re-played. This must not happen and so I have a couple of suggestions. Next year’s conference must concentrate on the things we cannot do, that we find hard, that we need to approach differently. I propose that we have the first half day to celebrate the achievements, it’s important to do that. For the remainder of the conference we should focus on the “too hard to do” pile and we should start the process of thinking well outside of the box. It’s time we left our comfort zone.

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Digital Inclusion 2009, What About 2010?

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

I have developed a view that the National Digital Inclusion conference was, primarily, an event for Ministers. It was an opportunity to understand that Digital Inclusion is a real issue, that there are quantifiable benefits to come from a digitally included society, and that there is some Ministerial credit to be had by being actively engaged with the digital inclusion agenda.

The conference was also about celebrating success. I’m all for that and there was a lot of success to celebrate and quite right too. However, try as they might, nobody got any closer to the real nub of the matter – the final third, or the final 29%. The “too hard to do” pile didn’t seem to get any smaller and the “yes we can” pile grew not one jot.

That said, the best ideas often come from the most surprising places, the workshops threw up some hope for us all. There were interesting presentations from all though Jayne Nickalls was at somewhat of a disadvantage in that her client group is seen as government departments rather than the people receiving the services on offer. Stephen Hilton gave an interesting description of the kind of journey a local authority goes through in finding ways to engage with its citizens and the peaks and pitfalls along the way. Chris Batt was able to pull us back into the realms of new ideas by reminding us of what had been written a while ago but was still relevant and David Banes gave a convincing demonstration of how technology can aggregate the thoughts of a group into a single, thought provoking presentation. Jeff McWhinney from Significant reminded us all in an excellent presentation that there need be no barriers and with one person to sign our responses and one to speak his signs gave us an interesting insight not only into the benefits that ICTs can bring but also into the real difficulties that people with disabilities can face. He gave me one of the best sound bites (sign bites?) of the conference – “Deaf people are on the other side of the glass”.

What came out of this workshop? Well, for me, two things. Firstly, the idea of disaggregation of function from the core to the place where it is easily accessed by the target group. Secondly a reminder that personalisation is the key and ubiquity, when it finally arrives, will promote the capability for personalisation. Ubiquity will work better in a disaggregated world.

A colleague sitting nearby said that these were old ideas and that they would never happen because there wasn’t a political will to do so. To some extent I think that he’s probably right but this doesn’t mean that we give up on them, these are ideas that have been around for a while and so have some sustaining credibility about them.

There were one or two presentations in the workshops that didn’t hit a chord with me. Robert Blackwell from Simply Digital gave a presentation on the advantages of TV over IP services. It didn’t work for me for two reasons: one, it was the second presentation on this kind of technology that I’ve seen in a week. Yes it’s good, but it’s not unique and it’s at its best in high density areas; two Robert has the unfortunate salesman like style that presents it as the answer to a maiden’s prayer – this may be unintentional – but his tick box slides worried me just as all “answers” do. Peter Cruickshank gave a presentation on e-petitions. it didn’t do it for me because the really interesting stuff was at the bottom of a couple of his slides relating to empowerment and social capital building and he skimmed over them in less than a sentence while he scrambled through the process diagrams – building capacity so that people can feel empowered and will become activists through petitioning their council is a very powerful thing and this was an opportunity lost. Finally, Swatee Deepak, and it grieves me to be even slightly critical of so much enthusiasm and achievement but on line access to volunteers is really about people who are already digitally and socially engaged. There is a place for this, which is undoubtedly great work and offers a real understanding of how to target a young audience but I didn’t see this as being about digital inclusion – more about benefits for the digitally included – sorry!

Hats off to the team that did the final workshop and pulled together all of the ideas that went into the final sesssion of the conference – the manifesto for inclusion. Finally we started to get closer to the things that need to be done to get to the final 20%.

Michael Lewis, Service Birmingham

Carolyn Hassan, Knowle West

Stephen Hilton, Dc10 and Bristol

David Banes, AbilityNet

Tom Steinberg, MySociety – his “angry young man” presentation didn’t quite do it for me but perhaps that was me.

So what’s in the Manifesto for Inclusion?

There are 4 sections and within each a number of BIG ideas:

21st Century Learning

•Social Marketing;
•Entitlement to Digital Skills;
•National Volunteer Network;
•Learning Leaders; Open debate with DIUS about innovation being brought forwards and the informal learning white paper.

Communities

•Use trusted intermediaries;
•Innovative use of broadcasst media;
•Promote awareness amongst decision makers;
•Promote multi channel access; Don’t duplicate, replicate and scale.

Health and Wellbeing

•Sousveillance – rapid, real time public information;
•Tele-health – real care, not just information about care;
•Social Capital;
•Public Resource- data and experience open sourced and shared; Appropriate technology – simple, universal access.

Engagement

•Local Authorities, raise awareness;
•Technology, free up information;
•Disability and aging population – national digital advice service;
•Ethnicity – develop local, community forums on e-engagement; disadvantaged communities; support people to produce engaging content.

WHAT! I hear you cry, this is all old stuff! Yes it is but now its mainstream stuff and that’s the big difference. This was a conference of practitioners attended by ministers and these activities that were once the preserve of activists and sector workers are now in the mainstream – I think we should celebrate that as the biggest success of all.

Which brings us to the future; what should happen next? When Matthew Taylor closed the conference with an invitation for next year I had a concern that another two days of celebrating success over the 71% (or will it be 75%) of engaged citizens would be re-played. This must not happen and so I have a couple of suggestions. Next year’s conference must concentrate on the things we cannot do, that we find hard, that we need to approach differently.

I propose that we have the first half day to celebrate the achievements, it’s important to do that. For the remainder of the conference we should focus on the “too hard to do” pile and we should start the process of thinking well outside of the box. It’s time we left our comfort zone.

I suggest a twin track conference one for LSPs and Commissioners and one for practitioners. There should be active engagement of the third sector with special rates for them to attend and targeted items on one day so that they don’t have the expense of a two day event.

I also suggest a slightly different format with an opportunity for fringe events and small, privately sponsored workshops so that individual projects can present their work to interested audiences.

There were a couple of emergent themes that I think should underpin the “out of the box” approach needed next time:

Innovation: We all know Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Do we really understand what it is to be innovative? The recent Vienna Report has a great sound bite “I2 Inclusive technical innovation and Innovative Inclusive Policies”. Where do innovative ideas come from and what is the journey that they go on? Do we understand innovation or do we oversimplify? Is there a place for horizon scanning?

Entitlement: What is people’s entitlement and do the VCS have a role in this?

Scalability, Duplication versus Replication: How do you break string without scissors? What is the best way, local up or down to local, how do you scale small ideas?

Empowerment: Doing it with not doing it to. Is there a difference between activism and empowerment? What is the role of locally created content? People can be supported to be producers.

Value: Lord Reith’s approach was giving the people what they need, not what they want. What is the role of Value chains in social inclusion? How do you add value in a knowledge society? What is the value chain? How do you create value? How do we connect advocacy to information? Is this adding value? What is the real value of partnership? Is the holy trinity of service design VCS/CVS + LA/LSP + empowered citizens?

Disability: What is the disabled experience? CLG have published a number of profiles on Adults with Learning difficulties and people who use mental health services. How do we bring these to life? What’s it like to be on the other side of the glass?

Access: Is Access still an issue? Should infrastructure be part of the debate? Should we talk about rural in a separate context?

There should be rules for next year’s conference:

Rule number one – Just because you had a good experience doesn’t mean you have the answer. Present the experience, not the solution.

Rule number two – No PowerPoint slides with tick boxes.

Rule number three – there should be no exceptions proving the rule. We should celebrate success but not at the expense of ignoring the hard to do pile.

Rule number four – remember that the biggest consumers of public services are those people whose lives are most chaotic.

And finally Esther, the conference was closed by Baroness Andrews who announced further funding for the DC10 Plus network and a working group for Registered Social Landlords. Hooray! See my previous blogs and remember, you heard it here first. :-)

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Posted in May 2009 | No Comments »