Workshop

Thoughts from the Town of Electroville…

Colin Harrison underlined some thought provoking ideas in the course of his presentation….

First of all, he set his audience a challenge: a free antivirus programme for the person who could give a story to camera (which would be immediately be uploaded to the blog) of how ICT has changed their organisation for the better.

Colin Harris emphasised that successful ICT was not just about gadgetry, and described himself as a sceptical and “grumpy old man” with regard to new IT gadgets (especially when it came to his children demanding the latest ones). However, when he witnessed the floods in Sheffield last year, he saw that the members of the public who took video clips of the disaster on their cell phones, had them appear on national news within a very short space of time, thereby seizing the agenda about communities and flood protection, and galvanising the goverment into an appropriate level of response.

Suddenly, the man in the street was able to bypass the traditional media and appear on the national news as a result of empowering technology - an ordinary mobile phone.

Clearly, technology can change the way that we live and the way we work. Currently, 75% of socially excluded people are also digitally excluded. As part of the e-government agenda, local authorities are stating to deliver their services online and directly to the customer (eg, libraries, payment of parking fines). But, in order to be socially inclusive of communities, everybody needs access to these services.

Similarly, the Third Sector can benefit from ICT to communicate, to promote its projects and to improve its business processes in a low cost way. Colin told us that you can buy Microsoft Office for only £11 now if you are a voluntary sector organisation, so software overheads are no longer the barrier that they used to be.

It is a question of using ICT as a tool to shape the society that we want to have.

DC10 is one pioneering group which has become very influential on government with regard to ICT (www.dc10plus.net). We will soon arrive at connectivity speeds of 100 megabits per second. Free access to WiFi internet in Estonia has made it a more attractive place to live and set up business. 30% of Skype users are Estonians. Colin Harris went on to give the workshop audience a live Skype demonstration.

However, these rapid changes of digital technology raise political issues as they undercut traditional providers (such as BT).

Trends for the future:

More independant living - remote access of local services - see Life Events at: www.easyconnects.org.uk

Flexible Working - with higher broadband speeds more people will work from home and reduce carbon footprint.

Digital TV and entertainment - Easy Connect is seeking to link its services in with digital TV.

Charities - improving business processes with ICT and improving skills and technical support.

So now Colin Harris declares himself no longer the “grumpy old man” because he see the opportunities for using ICT to shape society for the good and to give a “leg up” to socially excluded groups. For example, with Skype VOIP you can see and talk to other Skype users but more elegantly and inexpensively than the old video conferencing system. Used imaginatively, it could help to reduce loneliness and isolation for elderly people.

Some members of the audience offered examples of the radical use of ICT changing the lives of ordinary people: the use of telemedicine where a doctor could consult a patient remotely in another country (between  a consultant in New Zealand and a patient in Fiji) and also closer to home, another county (Buxton, Derbyshire).

Simon Berry, the CEO of Ruralnet, has recently been involved in using ICT for social networking and campaigning through the Cola Life Wordpress Blog linking into Facebook. Some 6,000 online advocates all around the world have joined the campaign and the strength of the campaign enabled SImon to force the issue and get an interview with Coca Cola’s global head of marketing to discuss debate the issues of why Coca Cola can’t help to distribute anti-dehydration salts in the third world countries where they operate.

Go to the website at: www.colalife.org and join the campaign! Or, go to the Facebook website and search for Cola-Cola. The Facebook group is here.

Tags: change dynamics, ColaLife, e-government, flexible working, ICT, social networking, telemedicine, teleworking