> While the core - founding I suppose - members of One Digital are we six, our vision is that our model establishes a framework and a way of working and sharing and collaborating that organisations big and small, national and local, charitable, voluntary, public and private can join down the line. Our common focus is the capacity building of people to support other people where the end result is not just the accrual of better digital skills for individuals, but a myriad of benefits associated with the act of skilling and supporting someone else too; that capital of exchange, and across its social, emotional and economic guises. The landscape is teeming with people doing things that play into or contribute to this already, and as you point out David the ‘good connecting’ between and amongst them is I think an everyday imperative. We will be working very very hard to make One Digital a ‘good vessel’ or conduit, conductor, exchange, recycler of this expertise, energy and capacity.
> For the moment, at the end of week 2 (our official launch date was 1st September) it’s good to be official, to have had our first ‘in action’ rather than ‘in proposal building mode’ meeting, which was on Tuesday in London. We will keep progress updates coming including real, tangible linkages with others outside the current core One Digital membership. Looking forward to working with you and yours down the line. And thank you for your support and interest as ever – next round of tea and cake on me.
Update 3 and reflection. Recently I've been in discussion with BIG, together with Drew Mackie, Paul Webster and Miles Maier, about the Maps, Apps and Storytelling model we developed from our exploration into Living Well in the Digital Age, supported by Age Action Alliance.
Our aim is to develop a set of practical processes that will put digital technology at the heart of community-based initiatives to support living well, at whatever age. We will do that by developing a model and open source package of methods that builds on investment in digital inclusion and skills training programmes.
> These inclusion programmes are creating widespread capacity to access and use the Internet. What's now needed is further action on three fronts: firstly ways to tailor personal digital offerings to meet individual needs - because everyone's situation and requirements are different; secondly ways to build the capacity of organisations in the community that can provide new opportunities to digitally-capable older people; thirdly ensure the personal and organisational capacity-building is designed to make the best of local whole-system approaches to wellbeing driven by digital by default policies.
BIG staff on the Accelerating Ideas programme have been really helpful in shaping our proposal … and recently pointed us to the One Digital Consortium because that potentially provides first stage development of personal capacity that's needed for the wider community vision. I hope Emma and others will be interested in extending their collaborative framework to us and others. Maybe BIG will convene a get-together to take this forward, and the objective of integrating technology into projects that support older people, mentioned above.
This post has turned into a bit of a ramble, but I'm pleased that sharing a draft produced a better story, and wanted to show how that emerged. Tidier versions of what might be possible will follow.