Posts Tagged ‘Digital Inclusion’

As part of the Martha Lane Fox visit to Birmingham, we ran a workshop to engage people working in digital inclusion with those in economic development and regeneration; staff promoting jobs and skills with those advising businesses and helping communities. The aim of the workshop was to examine the importance of the digital inclusion of citizens and businesses (i.e. their access, confidence and competence in using digital technologies) to enable economic recovery.

Catherine Marshall, Member of the Digital Inclusion Task Force who attended the workshop has kindly provided us with her reflections on the workshop:

As a member of Martha Lane Fox’s Digital Inclusion Task Force, I was delighted to be invited to attend the event hosted by Digital Birmingham Yesterday
Supported by an impressive turn out of delegates from Birmingham City Council and the surrounding Boroughs the event gave an invaluable opportunity to discuss some of the barriers that prevent those who are most socially excluded accessing digital technology, and explore what intervention or strategies need to be applied to overcome these difficulties.

As always, there is no one size fits all, and as Digital Inclusion is inextricably linked to Social Inclusion, understanding the complexities of the task at hand is as intricate as the solutions need to be.

All recognised the solutions needs to be applied at grass route level; and being provided with snap shots of on the ground work that is taking place, is always a constant confirmation of this, proving how being digitally connected dramatically improves peoples life chances and opportunities.

The event was incredibly positive, acknowledging that getting people on line is a matter of urgency, and the need to make an impact, by promoting social responsibility and the common goal, with the need to encourage pledges from all areas including the private sectors, to get on board and work together to close the digital divide.

As Martha concluded, “working together, there is an opportunity to achieve something really special”

It is clear that Digital Birmingham has the determination to make a real difference and achieve the ‘really special’ results it is looking for.
Catherine Marshall
Member of the Digital Inclusion Task Force

We’re pleased to be welcoming Martha Lane Fox, Champion for Digital Inclusion and some of her Digital Inclusion Task Force to Birmingham today. We have a full morning planned with visits to meet families who have benefited from the award-winning Aston Pride Computers in the Home project; and residents of an Erdington tower block (Windsor House) who have been provided with computers and broadband connectivity in a six month trial to promote broadband uptake in social housing.

In addition to meeting the city’s residents, Martha Lane Fox will also be holding talks with community representatives, regional policy makers and business heads to discuss key priorities for the Race Online 2012 strategy and the city’s drive to address digital inclusion in achieving economic recovery. She will be meeting with Deputy Leader, Cllr Paul Tilsley where Martha’s ‘Ask’ to Birmingham will be to look at ways in which we could act more as a corporate citizen by engaging our workforce in helping to reduce the digital divide.

The full day’s programme is here for more information and we’ll let you know more about the day as it unfolds.

Is access to the internet a human right? According to France’s constitutional court, it is. A recent case concerned the creation of a body tasked with enforcing copyright laws by cutting off serial pirates who repeatedly download illegally copied material. Warnings by email and then by letter are not enough: cutting off someone’s internet access requires approval from a judge. More – Digital inclusion and human rights

A few months ago I think my first question might have been, what is a hashtag?  So, for anybody still as unenlightened as I was: hashtags are a way of marking your message on Twitter so that it can then be grouped with other messages using the same tag.

That sounds really boring, doesn’t it?

But there have been a number of events that I’ve either attended, watched on telly or even not watched on telly where I’ve also followed the hashtag and found it really useful.  For instance, at the recent Digital Inclusion Conference there were a significant number of delegates, and importantly, people who hadn’t been able to attend, who were using the hashtag #ndi09 to follow what was going on across the conference.  This form of Live Blogging meant that a lot of interested people who couldn’t take two days away from work to attend the conference, but were very interested in the subject matter, could contribute to the discussions.

More – What’s the Hashtag?

Yesterday Donna and I delivered a session on ‘marketing your organisation’ for third sector groups on behalf of B.Strong, the stronger communities partnership. You may remember that I blogged about it a while ago, desperately asking for sources of support that I could recommend to groups when they are left to their own devices. More – Marketing session at B.Strong

I was writing an email to B.Strong today about how digital media can be used to help voluntary organisations market themselves and generally do whatever they do more effectively.

B.Strong (part of the Council) provides organisational development support and capacity building training to voluntary organisations and community groups and is putting on a series of workshops for voluntary organisations that support excluded communities, especially BME, Migrant, Refugee and New
Communities. Donna, my colleague, and I offered to help them include some training in using online tools for marketing in their programme following a meeting last week.

Now here comes the ‘crowdsourcing’ bit: More – Crowdsourcing: support for voluntary organisations

Michael and Simon with Stephen Dodson, Director of DC10plus.

At last week’s National Digital Inclusion Conference Simon Whitehouse (Digital Birmingham), Michael Lewis (Service Birmingham) and I were some of those representing Birmingham.

We wanted to take in as much of the conference as we could between us; so I represented us at the education workstream, hosted by UK Online Centres. More – Digital Inclusion Conference 2009: Education Workstream

The next generation of superfast broadband was given approval by Ofcom on Tuesday … the new £1.5 billion fibre-optic network will be 25 times faster than today’s speeds. Songs will take just two seconds to download and DVD-quality films less than two minutes in the 100 megabit per second system.

“There are no regulatory barriers in the way of investment in super-fast broadband, we want to promote investment but also ensure that there is fair and effective competition for the future.” stated Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards.
So, here at Digital Birmigham we are making the assumption that BT will no longer be subject to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) as they were under the ADSL roll out, which will no doubt be a huge impetus for its implementation.
BT is investing £1.5bn in a fibre optic network that will deliver download speeds of 100mbps to UK broadband users. The move follows increasing competition, particularly from Virgin Media, which plans to introduce a 50mbps broadband service in September.

BT aims to put 10 million homes on the fibre network by 2012. To control costs, the network will be built in two parts. One million new-build homes will receive the fibre network directly. For the remaining nine million residents BT plans to replace the copper cabling that connects kerbside cabinets in streets to the local BT exchange with fibre optic cabling.