Digital Divide
Obscured by all the general politicing at last month’s Labour Party annual conference was a commitment by Blair - in his set piece speech - to end the digital divide. Outlining ten key policies for a third term in power, the seventh of these future goals was to see:
Our country and its people prospering in the knowledge economy. Increasing by £1 billion the investment in science, boosting support to small businesses and ending the digital divide by bringing broadband technology to every home in Britain that wants it by 2008
Of course, the government has already pledged to end the divide in terms of internet access per se, committing to the delivery of universal access by the end of next year. On this subject, an important new report, enabling a Digitally United Kingdom, was published by the the Digital Inclusion Panel - an umbrella group of public, private and voluntary sector groups established by the Cabinet Office earlier this year - last week. It examined progress in tackling this dimension of the digital divide and made recommendations for future action too.
Amongst the items of interest in it was the announcement of a new body for taking the issue forward:
In order to generate scale and to focus effort, major industry players, in conjunction with the charity Citizens Online, have established the Alliance for Digital Inclusion (ADI) – the founder members are AOL, BT, Intel and Microsoft [...]
The ADI will promote the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for social benefit. It is independent, but is supported by and seeks to work in partnership with government, as well as
industry and the voluntary sector.[...]
The role of the ADI is to:
• create an industry-led umbrella initiative that will encourage collaboration;
• provide targeted, scalable and sustainable solutions;
• encourage new players to become involved; and
• engage with and influence government on key policy issues.
In addition, it very strongly came out in support of the UK Online centres:
The national network of 6,000 UK online centres is an important resource that has the potential to encourage digital take-up across a wide range of government services. It is also recognised that trusted intermediaries that have a deep understanding of their client group are often better equipped than government to deliver services for hard-to-reach groups. UK online centres are also an important community resource, providing the necessary lift to enable often hard-to-reach groups of people to become digitally engaged. Innovation in these areas should continue.
However, as Michael Cross notes in the Guardian this week:
These are often run by community groups, which are better equipped than government to communicate with hard-to-reach groups. Central government, however, footed most of the cost, and that money is now running out.
No one seems keen to pick up the bill, which may explain why the whole digital inclusion agenda is a bit of a policy orphan. This is reflected in the strategy document, which is introduced not by a minister or even the Cabinet Office head of e-government, but by Andrew Pinder, the last e-envoy.
He supposedly left public life in August (four years after being hired as a temporary stand-in). While it is nice to see Pinder’s picture again, using yesterday’s man doesn’t send the right signals about tomorrow’s agenda. Where is the e-minister?
One of our graduate students has been doing some interesting work on the UK Online centres that very much echoes this point about the insecurity of funding hampering their work. Interestingly, she also found there was, at times, perhaps something of a disconnection between what the centres might be doing and the government’s broader e-agenda. This was particularly so with respect to promoting e-government services and there was a strong feeling that staff at some centres knew very little at all about e-government services that might be of benefit to centre users. This links back to another of the themes in the Digitial Inclusion Panel’s report because they were keen to plug e-government as potential driver of ICT uptake. One of the problems with using community groups rather than public sector agencies to tackle the digital divide is that they are much less likely to be ‘on message’ with regard to issues such as this. Indeed, one feels that there is a lot of ‘joining up’ that needs to be done with respect to the e-inclusion agenda.
