Helen Milner and the team at UK online centres are disappointed but undismayed at losing the Digital Mentor bid … they have just soft-launched discussion around the idea of a digital engagement manifesto.
The aim is to create a discussion space, and probably an online community, to pull together a set of principles and how-tos that would be helpful across a range of issues from inclusion and adoption of technology, to e-participation and e-democracy.
It should be of interest to anyone looking at how we can use social technology for social benefit.
Together with Dave Briggs, who writes about it here and here, I’ve been working on the idea with Helen and Anne Faulkner. We’ll be developing the digitalengagement.org blog in the run up to the National Digital Inclusion Conference on April 27-28, and at the event reporting on discussion about manifesto themes.
We are also looking at the idea of an online community, using Ning.
Introducing the project on the blog, Helen writes:
Welcome to digitalengagement.org,
I hope you find this site useful as a place to come and discuss and debate everything to do with digital engagement. The aim isn’t that this is owned by any one person or any one voice, but it’s a space for
anyone interested to come and get involved.By digital engagement we mean the use of social technologies for social good. What do you think we should do on digitalengagment.org? In the immediate future, we want to use this site to create a digital manifesto, what more could we all do, and do together to get more people online and engage in the right tools for them to help them in their lives.
Do you want to take part?
The get involved reference links to a range of ways that people can contribute.
In order to start discussion we’ll give some examples of the sort of principles we are thinking about, gather existing resources, do some interviews … and also ask people the most useful directions to take.
Discussion on this blog and the digitalmentors blog, following the digital mentor announcement, showed that people are keen to find a common space for discussion, so it seemed sensible to get the digitalengagement site up as soon as possible.
If you have ideas for the way a manifesto should develop, do join in over on the new site. I’m off holiday for a week, but will be diving in after that.
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