Category: Reports

Compelling Report supports libraries and other local community organisations as critical social infrastructure

I was delighted to discover a recent report by Koi Tū, the Centre for Informed Futures, Reframing social cohesion and societal resilience in New Zealand. The report makes a compelling case for investing in digital inclusion. What is perhaps even more significant is that this report was commissioned by The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), so maybe policy makers are listening as well.

The report is also a powerful endorsement of your work as Jump Partners by highlighting libraries and local community organisations as critical social infrastructure.

This will not be news to you, as you support people every day in so many ways. But what is new is that independent researchers are now raising a flag about your critical role in achieving social cohesion and societal resilience.

I have worked for 30 years in the community sector pursuing a digital inclusion agenda and despite many reports (some Government, some community, and others Corporate) there has been little Government recognition of the critical importance of having digitally connected and engaged communities.

This report reframes the focus of efforts over many years from simply promoting the benefits of digital inclusion to connecting this with social fragmentation, and even highlighting how this impacts national productivity and our capacity for responding to future crises.

There are six specific digital inclusion insights in the report:

1. Digital exclusion is a risk to national resilience

2. Digital trust needs to become a core digital inclusion competency

3. Libraries and community organisations are critical social infrastructure

4. Digital inclusion contributes to social inclusion

5. Digital inclusion needs a place-based approach

6. Digital inclusion should be measured as a contributor to resilience

Some of these issues are embedded in our existing digital inclusion programmes, such as digital trust, libraries and community organisations as trusted place-based support infrastructure and the need for measurement. But we have consistently failed to get digital inclusion on the mainstream agenda for either central or local government.

The big question now is what does DPMC intend to do with this report? Our colleagues at DECA (Digital Equity Coalition Aotearoa) are equally excited, as they too have been championing a more digitally-inclusive agenda for some years.

So how about sharing this report with the leaders and policy makers in your organisation.

Jump This Week – Going UP!

I suspect many of you a familiar with the Sunday Star*Times regular column about what’s going up and what’s going down.

From time to time we get “Going Up” feedback from Jump partners and I felt that one we received this week was worth sharing.

This came from a community partner in a rural town that prepares a Skinny Jump Accountability Report for their trustees; this summarised barriers they faced and their achievements.

Not surprisingly, amongst the barriers they identified:

  1. limited supplies of modems, delaying the delivery of Jump;
  2. cell tower capacity, limiting the availability of Jump;
  3. customers with old mobile phones that didn’t support the Jump app;
  4. incorrect email addresses and forgotten passwords when registering for Jump.

But despite these barriers they reported a stunning achievement:

Completing 529 Jump registrations since March 2020, reaching over 16% of all households in the district!

Overall they summed up their experience with Jump as:

  1. Skinny Jump has played and will continue to play a vital role in the community.
  2. With the advancement IT and recently AI, by today’s standards, the ability to have connectivity is inevitable.
  3. We continue to get positive feedback from the community for they appreciate the time and effort taken during the registering process.

I know other partners provide regular updates to their managers and governance groups. Please keep doing this. One wise manager that I used to work with decades ago encouraged me to budget for ‘promotion’ as part of the project: “What’s the point of good works if no-one knows about it,” he said.

Good news stories

We are on the lookout for good news stories.  We publish these in our Annual Report and they provide incredibly important feedback to our funders.  So, we are seeking your help in identifying some good news stories – anything from the last 12 months, for any of our programmes – Stepping UP, DORA and Digital Banking, Digital Wellbeing and of course, Jump.  Our particular focus is to profile some individuals who have participated in one of our digital inclusion programmes and who is willing to share their story (and a photograph).

With the extension of the Jump criteria on 25 March 2020 to include more groups of digitally excluded people, we are particularly interested in a diversity of stories from different digitally excluded groups:

  • Māori
  • Pacific Peoples
  • People in social housing
  • families with low incomes
  • People in rural communities
  • Unemployed people
  • People with low literacy skills
  • People with disabilities
  • Migrants and refugees
  • Offenders and ex-offenders
  • Seniors

We have a journalist who is helping us and she is happy to interview people directly, but we need your help with introductions please.  Please email me,  laurence@diaa.nz ,with any suggestions.

Stepping UP Activity Reports

In the transition to DIAA, we have dropped the ball with respect to the Partner Stepping UP Activity Reports.  The reports for Term 2 should have been distributed during the July school holidays.  We are remedying this situation and expect to have Term 2 reports to you shortly with Term 3 reports scheduled for the next school holidays (first two weeks of October).