Digital Britain Unconference: Example of Social Media in Action

Broadband will save us from depression and generate an incredible number of jobs. As weird as it may sound, this is what we have been hearing mostly in the western world over the past year. Several governments have included in their stimulus package a plan to increase the access to broadband internet with the hope that it will have a positive impact on the economy. Britain went maybe a bit further by commissioning a report called Digital Britain. Unfortunately, they went about it the wrong way.

The Digital Britain report put the emphasis on the infrastructure (universal access to broadband of 2MB) and then overlooked or partly dealt with other issues, such as digital education or support towards business initiatives. However, one major mistake was that the report was produced in an un-digital way in the sense that the whole process was a Top-Bottom interaction (the government works on a topic, decides what to do and the stakeholders have to deal with the decision) whereas in a digital age it should have been a more Bottom-Up process (thanks to the technology it would have been feasible to collect the views of all the actors and then produce a true overview of the situation). And this mistake gave birth to the Digital Britain Unconference.

When the interim report was published in January 2009 many people from the digital industry felt that the whole project was going in the wrong direction. They started coordinating their efforts, mainly on Twitter, and organized unconferences all around the UK where everyone would be able to express their views on what the report should contain. I attended the one that took place in London at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on May 6th. I was amazed with the creativity and passion of the audience and felt it was a genuine example of what a digital Britain should be like.

Some of the factors that were mentioned suggested that a digital Britain should be a place where everyone has access to a higher quality broadband (8 MB) all around the country, regardless of whether people live in urban or rural areas. People will have the opportunity to enrich their skills with regards to digital activities and business initiatives will also be encouraged and supported.

But more than a report from this group of professionals, what the government received was a manifesto that clearly showed the direction of politics in a digital age: more transparency, more accountability, but above all, the capacity for a small group of well-organized citizens to throw light on a public issue.

A kind of Digital Britain will emerge from all of this, but probably not the one imagined at Westminster.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply