The humanITy Digital Inclusion Manifesto
Summary of Recommendations
The following are the major Recommendations of The humanITy Digital Inclusion Manifesto. Each Recommendation is matched by a proposed strategy or project; these are listed separately under humanITy's Partnership agenda. Numbers in brackets refer to paragraphs in the Manifesto.
- Government needs help to make its services more usable by the vast majority of its service users; this at least means abandoning its underlying bias in favour of the PC platform (2.4).
- Government needs help with channel analysis[1] (2.5) .
- Government needs help in understanding:
- The limited impact of the information revolution on behaviour
- Its potential in the area of collaboration and creativity
- The effect of the skills ratchet and
- The counter movement of falling graduate costs
- The effect of all of these on the education system (2.7).
- Government should institute a bipartisan mechanism to achieve a radical reform of the school curriculum (2.8).
- The current model of intellectual property which rates all products, regardless of their economic value, in the same way, needs radical reform (3.2).
- Government needs help to integrate the most difficult cases (the 'Struggling Seventh' 15% of the population) but this will need:
- A high concentration of per capita effort beyond Government resources or patience; this means, in turn, that:
- There will need to be a different kind of contract; The NGO effort cannot be 'Government policy, NGO resources' (3.4).
- Government needs to consider incentive as a means of reducing socio-economic exclusion and the alienation and social disruption it causes (3.5).
- Government, industry and academia should collaborate to develop simple creativity tools for disabled and elderly people (3.8).
- Government should establish an open forum on citizen protection (3.9).
- Government should understand the impact of digital imagery on education and the economy (3.10).
- Government should establish and co-ordinate a permanent commission to monitor emerging technologies and assess their socio-economic impact (3.10).
- Government should publish an annual "State of Technology" report analysing current behaviour, trends and future challenges and opportunities (3.10).
[1] humanITy has undertaken some of this for parts of the Government but its dissemination has been poor