The RSA is breathing fresh life into exploration of the relationship between two issues – digital inclusion and social capital – with a seminar tomorrow launched by a paper from Will Davies on The Social Value of Digital Networks in Deprived Communities. The paper will be available at some point after the seminar, informed by discussions. The opening position is:
Digital inclusion is the use of technology to improve the lives and life chances of disadvantaged people and the places in which they live.
Social capital is a way of understanding the (positive and negative) impact of social networks and norms on people’s lives.
… with evidence showing strong correlation between those who are socially excluded and those who are digitally excluded. The seminar – and the Connected Communites project being developed by the RSA – will explore how far online networking may help develop the socially and economically important weaker links that connect people beyond friends and family. read more »
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Dave Briggs provides a roundup of reactions to the announcement that insider Andrew Scott, Government Deputy Chief Information Officer, is the new Director of Digital Engagement. Dave suggests: “My advice would be to seize the initiative, set out some small but
important things to achieve and make them happen, to get the doubters
back onside as soon as possible.” And engage digitally, of course.
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Next Monday and Tuesday I’m part of the social reporting team at the National Digital Inclusion Conference in London, and thinking I should write a piece on the benefits SR can bring. Fortunately fellow reporter Clare White has done it already, over on the digital engagement network we have linked to the event. Clare highlights – among other things – supporting more networking, connecting different viewpoints, informal learning, ensuring more voices are heard, and moving ideas to action. We have benefitted enormously from having UK online centres as our client and champion, with Helen Milner and Anne Faulkner not just instructing but leading through Twitter, our blog and the network. Just to demonstrate the point, Anne has saved me rounding up our plans by posting them here, including ways you can join in online. If you are in London, but not attending the main event, do come along to the free fringe on Monday evening. That’s organised by Stuart Parker and the team from Birmingham, who will be running a social media surgery at the conference. All of which demonstrates another aspect of social reporting. Instead of looking for the exclusive, you are delighted when fellow reporters get there first. Or indeed anyone else – so do join us on the network, which will continue after the event as a sociable space for exploring digital engagement. There’s some great posts there, and on the blog … making me wonder what role there will be for “reporters” next year, if people are so good at doing it for themselves. Social editors, maybe. read more »
The London G20 Summit earlier this month was an impressive example of Government trying to do digital engagement well and I think succeeding. Now Stephen Hale, Head of Engagement, Digital Diplomacy, at Foreign and Commonwealth Office has produced what seems to me a very honest personal assessment. He wrote about what was planned, asked for ideas, did it, and then told us what happened. This sort of thing could get government a good name …
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After the excellent efforts of Adrian Short to make council web sites more useful by providing news feeds, I found another no-cost digital engagement innovation. Again from an individual.
Corinne Pritchard dropped a comment into a piece a wrote which bemoaned the way that a government department puts up pdfs for a consultation exercise instead of pages you can read on screen. Corinne said: I do that at Simply Understand. I looked – and was hooked.
Simply Understand is a unique translation service. Are you fed up with gobblydegook and jargon? Are you frustrated by endless sentences and hundred-page documents?
Simply Understand aim to cut your policy papers, manuals and programmes down to size! When everything is simply readable, you can simply understand.
Over at digitalengagement.org Adrian Short throws down the gauntlet to 370 councils who still don’t make it easy for citizens to read their websites by providing RSS feeds (what’s RSS? see the Commoncraft video). He wants them to fix it by Christmas. Adrian writes:
Nothing could be more symbolic of large parts of government’s unwillingness to think beyond the confines of their own websites than making it practically impossible to receive basic local council information like news and events except by taking a trip to anytown.gov.uk to do it on the council’s own terms.
Bearing in mind the work I’m doing on digital engagement I asked Katie what she thought it took to get people interested in technology. She was admirable succinct: keep it simple, make it fun … and focus on the benefits the technology offers. read more »
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.
Over on the digitalmentor blog Dave Briggs breaks the news that the contract for the Government’s £900,000 Digital Mentor programme has gone to the Media Trust.
I’m personally disappointed it didn’t go to the Voicebox consortium who – as I wrote here – went to great efforts to run an open process to involve as many people as possible with expertise in the field in developing their bid … but then I don’t know what the Media Trust proposed.
The Trust has a great track record of working with mainstream media to bring professional expertise to nonprofits, and last year had an Improving Reach programme “to provide free communications support for small volunteer organisations working with Black and Minority Ethnic, Migrant and or Refugee, Isolated Rural and Faith groups”.
They have an “Engaging Hard-to-Reach Communities” conference next week, with a panel chaired by Esther Rantzen CBE. read more »
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