The government has chosen one of the country's least-excluded individuals to lead its drive to get all Britons online. Dotcom pioneer Martha Lane Fox will next week take up a two-year assignment as \"champion for digital inclusion\".
The 36-year-old Oxford graduate, businesswoman and philanthropist cheerfully admits to being a newcomer to the debate on inclusion. However her first instinct is to focus on the \"very poor\" rather than tackle the whole range of exclusion. Strategies for tackling the problem are probably already out there, she says: \"We need real action as opposed to more research.\"
The idea of appointing a champion emerged last year in the first national strategy for ending the digital divide. The idea was to appoint someone who could be identified with one of the three main excluded groups: elderly people, those with disabilities, and the poor. However the search was bedevilled by a lack of candidates and later by political upheavals.
Lane Fox will be backed by a taskforce of experts, including disability campaigner Kevin Carey, Tom Wright of Help the Aged and Helen Milner, head of UK Online Centres. Best known as one of the founders of Lastminute.com, Lane Fox says a car accident five years ago helped her \"see technology from a different perspective\". She has also become aware of the \"flipside\" through her Antigone Foundation, which funds charities working in healthcare and education.
As the government's digital champion, she says her main strength will be an ability to \"give digital inclusion projects a voice in places where they might not otherwise be heard\". Those places include the top of the government: a consultation on the strategy published earlier this year found that the champion \"must have the power and authority to enforce any changes that are necessary to ensure digital inclusion of the most vulnerable groups is delivered\".
Lane Fox says she is ready to start banging on ministers' desks - although one problem may be identifying which minister's to tackle. Britain's first and so far only cabinet minister for digital inclusion, Paul Murphy, left government in this month's reshuffle. The portfolio seems to have passed to Lord (Stephen) Carter of Barnes, but he is due to leave the government later this summer. Meanwhile, a list of 13 objectives for the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, makes no explicit mention of digital inclusion.
From
www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/1...ox-digital-inclusion
<br><br>Post edited by: Able_Here_Team, at: 2009/06/22 20:25
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