Caroline Sutton, trainer from BHCR, with a reporter from People's Voices Media
Caroline, Mark and I have come up to London this morning to attend NDI10: Digital Participation, the 5th National Digital Inclusion Conference. The two-day conference is being held at the cavernous Vinopolis at London Bridge, which disappointingly wasn’t full of wine ( I think that’s for later!).
We’re here to network, report, learn and hopefully be inspired. One of my missions for today is to learn more about this term ‘digital inclusion’. I have to admit, when Mark interviewed me on my thoughts on digital inclusion when we were stopped outside Southwark Cathedral, I wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. I understand social inclusion so surely digital inclusion was about using technology to improve that, right? But it’s not a term I use regularly even though the work we’re doing with BHCR is just this.
Luckily, the opening plenary session tackled this matter of digital inclusion straight on. Martha Lane Fox, who was appointed Digital Inclusion Champion 7 months ago, actually said she’s banned the term in her office. “The term becomes meaningless after a while.”
Martha’s mission is to reach the most deprived communities across the UK – I think it’s something like 10million people who’ve never been online, of which a quarter are the most socially excluded. “I’ll badger anyone who will listen about this issue,” Martha said. “We need to fight for those people right now.”
Rt Hon Jim Knight MP, Minister for Employment and Welfare, DWP
I’m also curious to find out what kind of people are attending today – so far, questions have been from community organisations, but I imagine there’s public sector and private sector representatives here as well.
The final thing we/I will be doing is to make a promise of something I’m going to do when I leave today. That’s what Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive, RSA has asked us all to. The top 20 promises will be incorporated into Martha Lane’s campaign, which is going to be launched at the end of March.
Not sure what I’m going to promise. Maybe it’s going to be following Martha’s advice of keeping it simple. The message that keeps getting repeated this morning, both from speakers and people on the floor, is to keep the focus of work we’re doing in the community on human interaction and networking, not on the technology. It’s about connecting with people and helping them engage with technology in ways they determine, whether this is Facebook, making films about real lives, creating music or in one example showing someone how to do online gambling (?) – I know this is a controversial example, but I’m including it as it makes the point that it helped one individual engage.
The five speakers for the opening plenary session included:
- Helen Milner, Managing Director, UK online centres;
- Gordon Brown (pre-recorded message)
- Stephen Timms MP, Minister for Digital Britain, BIS
- Martha Lane Fox, Digital Inclusion Champion
- Rt Hon Jim Knight MP, Minisiter for Employment and Welfare, DWP
Read Caroline’s account of NDI10 here: http://bhcr.scip.org.uk/uncategorized/digital-inclusion-conference/
