Broomeshtick

A great post by Chris Thorpe, developer extraordinaire and all-round good egg who was part-responisble for the Guardian’s wonderful Open Platform.

A while ago I had the privilege of being invited by the lovely Tiina Carr and Joanne Mateer of The Workshop to visit Sheffield and their lovely offices for the day and help come up with ideas around Digital Inclusion. It produced some really interesting ideas, some more immediately useful for them and some less so. Of the less so useful ideas is one I decided to pursue at the recent Rewired State Get Online event which was co-produced with UK Online Centres.

That’s us, by the way. I work as a copywriter for The Workshop. Chris also spoke at one of our Design Talks events.

This is the important bit:

So let’s make the journey online for people be about joy and wonder. The internet is huge, so let’s give them a place to start that they’ll enjoy, an experience that is curated by either their friends/family or the special interest groups they’re already a part of. All too often it feels like digital inclusion carries with it the risk that at some point it would be measured in units of “people being able to access government services”. For me that feels like the end goal, and a very far away end goal too. People enjoying all that is for them online and feeling confident and returning regularly feels like the metric. However if we’re going for the transformative effects of being online, personal interests feel like the right sort of gateway drug to doing the hard stuff online like banking, job hunting and engaging with government.

So, so true. My dear late auntie started using a computer and the internet when she was in her 60s. Not because she wanted to do her banking online, but because she wanted to share her photos with her friends and family.

For the digitally excluded, the route to the world wide web is via the heart, not the brainbox. We just need to work out what they love. Then show them how to find it.

I urge you to head over and find out more about what Chris is doing.