Rural Community Broadband Fund

Over the past year, or so, I have been working with James Saunby of Grey Sky Consulting on a number of bids to the Government’s Rural Community Broadband Fund. We’ve been working with communities, local authorities, and other partners in areas which are defined as in the “last 10%” in terms of broadband connectivity. In this context, the last 10% means those areas which are unlikely to be served by the upgrades which are being rolled out via the main BDUK programme, wherein Government, local authorities and the European Union are investing in extending Next Generation Access (connectivity upwards of 24Mbps) beyond the areas deemed commercially viable by the main players. The BDUK programme will bring better connections to those who are located between the 66% of properties judged commercially viable and 90% (on average) of the population.

James and I have been working with communities and partners in Cheshire, Durham, Tees Valley, Kirklees and Cumbria. To date, we’ve had 100% success rate in getting bids through the Expression of Interest Stage, and the only project to have reached contract stage under the Rural Community Broadband Fund is led by Grey Sky in Rothbury, Northumberland (read more about this here). It has been great to work with some of the communities which had been in danger of left behind by the 21st Century, and set them on the road to benefitting from the same new technologies which urban residents now take for granted. It’s not a straightforward task. The technical challenges are one thing; the mindset of people who have never had the internet and don’t necessarily see a reason for having it, is perhaps an even tougher obstacle.

The current round of the Rural Community Broadband fund is scheduled to be the last. And, on Friday last week, we heard that the deadline (originally intended to be 24th May) has been extended to 17th June (although, at the time of writing the website has not been updated to reflect this). This could be the last chance for communities in the last 10% to have a crack at getting greatly enhanced broadband.

So, if you would like to work with James and myself to get better broadband please get in touch. But, do it quickly, there is not much time left.

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Our Digital Planet is back on the road

I am very pleased to report that Our Digital Planet will be back on the road shortly. Thanks to the support of Nominet Trust and Wigan Council, we will be in Wigan Town Centre from 24th to 29th May, and then in Leigh Town Centre from 30th May to 2nd June.

When I locked up the Internet Station for the last time in Glasgow last November, a profound sense of loss suddenly hit me. This was a bit of a surprise, but, when I analysed it, I realised it was the constant interaction with people that I was missing; the immersion in their daily lives; the feeling that I was being trusted to listen to their stories, and, above all, the deep feeling of satisfaction at being able to do something which I believed would improve their lives.

This is what gave me a determination and a drive to make sure that we could do more of this. So, almost exactly six months after Our Digital Planet left Glasgow, it will be back on the streets again in Wigan and Leigh. I am so looking forward to getting some of those feelings again and being let in to people’s lives. And I hope we can uncover some more gems, like the gentleman who found a video online of his wife as a babe-in-arms being presented to the young Princess Elizabeth in a Maltese maternity hospital; like the lady who was able to connect with her children in the USA; and, of course like Ron. I make no excuse for re-posting the video of Ron below.

And I want as many people as possible to get involved. If you are within striking distance of Wigan, please come down and visit. If you are able to volunteer some time to help people get online, then that would be fabulous. During the week I hope to be doing some live linkups and letting the outside world in on what we are doing, probably using Google+ Hangout, so, please get involved in that. Oh, and we still desperately need 5 laptops / tablets, if you can help with that.

I am very hopeful that Wigan will be the first stop on a national tour for 2013. For that to happen, we need partners to come forward with funding as well as locations.

UPDATE

Here’s James Winterbottom of Wigan Council talking about Our Digital Planet coming to Wigan and Leigh

Here’s Ron, people like him make all this worthwhile

Social Technology in Later Life – Let’s Have Some Collaboration

This is another post in the series on Social Technology in Later Life on which I am collaborating with David Wilcox, among others, in an exploration initially stimulated by Nominet Trust. David has set out here some issues for the way forward, and I am particularly keen to see how we can promote more collaboration between people and organisations working in this field.

As David has rightly highlighted, during the exploration, there is an inordinate amount of competition between people working in this sector. I have found out through working on Our Digital Planet that older people are still often bewildered by new technologies, and that they are, in many cases, ill-served in this respect, by organisations and agencies that work with them. And there are lots of people beavering away to help them, but they are mainly in isolated pockets, their practice is not well-known, and it certainly isn’t being scaled up in the way it needs to be.

As in several other areas of life, it is the people who most need the benefits new technologies can bring that are least likely to be able to access them. Acute lack of understanding of possibilities among older people and those who work with them is holding back their adoption.

To those of us comfortable with new technologies, it can seem obvious that they can address the loneliness and isolation that afflicts so many older people. But fear and ignorance are big barriers. I have witnessed older people refusing to use free video conferencing with relatives on the other side of the world, and preferring to rely on expensive telephone calls, because they found the video conference experience to be alien to them. This and other experiences suggest two things to me.

• Firstly, we need to make new technology much more like the items that people are already familiar with. I think this is what Apple are so good at. There are a lot of areas where Apple has seen the opportunity to take concepts invented elsewhere and take them to the next level. They are brilliant at making the user experience of something so straightforward that their product quickly becomes the market-leader (I’m thinking of the iPod and the iPad here). But, of course, Apple stuff tends to be expensive, certainly too expensive for people who are on limited budgets, and for those yet to be convinced that the benefits will be worth the investment. But the way they do video calling is illustrative of my point. They were far from the first on the video calling scene, but the way FaceTime is integrated into the normal telephone call process on the iPhone makes it a much more straightforward experience. Even though using such systems as Skype works pretty well on the iPhone, it entails downloading and running an app which is completely separate from the normal call process, and this is a barrier to many people. If someone has an Apple device (and FaceTime now works on Mac computers as well as mobile devices) they just need to answer a FaceTime call to them to be video chatting instantly. Making a Facetime call is marginally more complex than making a telephone call, but only marginally. I think all tech should be as simple as this, and, it should be cross-platform, so that you could make and receive FaceTime calls to Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, and other devices. This might be a forlorn hope.
• Secondly, We need to make new technology use a visible part of everyday life so that it doesn’t look like something scary to older people. During the Celebration 2.0 project, I took new technologies into places they might not usually be seen, and I have written before about how I use tech in places like supermarket cafes, parks and certain pubs, where my use has attracted attention and curiosity. An important aim of Our Digital Planet is to make new technologies visible. If people live their daily lives isolated from such uses it will never seem natural to them.

Lots of factors contribute to older people being shielded from new technology uses. Two which I think are particular obstacles are:

• The professionals and institutions which work with some older people are not comfortable with new technologies themselves. Issues here range from organisations which continue to block use of social media and will not or cannot provide their staff with smartphones, to technophobic frontline staff who pass their fears on to people they work with
  
• Younger people who are unwilling or unable to help their older relatives and connections learn from their use. We all know the adage about never trying to teach your partner to drive, at least not if you want to stay together. While working on Our Digital Planet I came across several examples where younger people brought their older relatives in asking us to help them because they hadn’t the patience or had tried and failed. This reinforces the divide and cements the notion that new technologies are a young person’s thing. Younger people quite like the notion that they are part of a cool club which their older relatives can’t join, and older relatives assume none of it is relevant to them.

Resistance to new technologies in this field also means that there is far too little sharing and collaboration, as sharing and collaboration are characteristics of organisations that have embraced social media and new technologies.

Someone needs to take some risks, and pull people together. We need to find and support the digital champions both among older people and among those who work with them. I’m hoping to work with David Wilcox, Steve Dale and others to set the ball rolling. We’re planning a Google Hangout shortly, and maybe a workshop. Let us know in the comments below if you want to be part of this.

The Internet is not always the answer

As you may have guessed, I love the internet, but, I’ve been thinking recently how it is not always the answer. I love radio too, and that has a role to play.

Some time ago, I was kicking around an idea about how schools could use FM radio to communicate with parents. My idea was for students and teachers to make radio programmes which could be broadcast to parents’ car radios when they arrived to drop off and pick up their kids..

And last weekend I was at BlueLightCamp when the conversation turned to communicating with people during emergency situations. I suggested it ought to be possible to set up a temporary local FM transmitter to speak to people via their radios.

Now, I must admit, I haven’t delved too far into the Ofcom regulations on local broadcasting, and, what I have seen would suggest that either of these ideas might be illegal under current legislation. But I think they are worth investigating, and, if legislation needs to be changed…..

Video Streaming via 4G

Because of the work I do live video streaming, I’ve just become a field tester for EE’s 4G mobile broadband. I only took delivery of my 4G device yesterday, but already I am impressed. I’ve only been moving around a relatively small area in Manchester, but the speeds I have been getting have been very encouraging, and, for the most part, I’ve been testing it in-doors in large buildings.

This is all particularly pleasing for me because it is another string to my bow in the live streaming work I do. Providing the venue is in a 4G coverage area, I reckon there are very few occasions when in-house wifi will beat the upload speeds I am getting with 4G, which are more than enough for a high quality video stream.

I am appealing, therefore, for more organisations to come forward and let me live stream their events and activities. It doesn’t cost a lot the  way I do it, and, now, if you’ve got 4G coverage, I can more or less guarantee the video will be of a very high quality.

Please contact me if you want to talk to me about live video streaming.

Death to the “out of office” message

Is it just me, or does anyone else find “Out of Office” email messages intensely annoying? I would argue that they are anachronistic and send out a message about the kind of people who use them.

OK, I recognise that not everybody is as comfortable with the blurring of work and private lives as I am. There are still plenty of people who like to draw clear lines between the two, and, in their cases, I suppose Out of Office messages when they are on holiday are acceptable.

But it’s not those kinds of messages I am talking about. It’s those that say someone is temporarily out of the office and unable to respond to emails. In the connected world we now live in, I think this says something about them as individuals, or perhaps their organisations, or both. I think we work better if we’re connected, if we’re in touch with our networks, and if we have information and the ability to crowdsource information and advice at our finger tips. The Out of Office message says “I am out of range, and not keeping up with what is going on”. I don’t like it, it irritates me. Let’s phase it out.

I’m being deliberately provocative here, but this is a real irritant to me. What do you think?

Let’s use audio to spread best practice

My thoughts on using audio to spread best practice from conferences and events

Free wifi a tool for Emergencies?

This is a very quick post, because it feels far too much like intruding in private grief to pump out “lessons of the Boston bombings” posts.

However…….

I’ve been banging on for years now about the need for free wifi in public spaces, especially in hospitals (see http://freehospitalwifi.wordpress.com/). Time and again I have had to deal with criticisms from people who think I am arguing for rich people to have carte blanche to play with their expensive toys at the public’s expense.

But…. have you ever noticed how the mobile phone networks fall over when there are big crowds gathered in one place? I certainly have. And, as the Boston tragedy unfolded yesterday, there were lots of tweets about how people were struggling to get communications through on the local networks. This was then followed by “official” announcements that the networks were being closed down to prevent remote triggering of further bombs.

And then I saw tweets appealing for local businesses with wifi networks to unlock them to allow people in the area to use them to communicate with relatives to let them know they were safe.  I hope this happened.

So public wifi could be a key tool in allowing communications to continue during emergencies. This is another compelling reason why we need it in more locations.

Perhaps we can discuss this at BlueLightCamp 2013

Social Housing – Sleepwalking into the digital nightmare?

Another post inspired by a conversation on Twitter, which followed on from my previous post about disruption from the bottom up. The conversation turned to the UK Government’s Department for Work and Pensions having a target of 80% of Universal Credit applications being made online. This was deemed to be a much too ambitious target by a couple of people working in social housing. My response was that social landlords cannot afford to see it as too ambitious. It has to be met or they risk losing £millions in rent payments.

The other day I was talking to someone in a local authority about getting Our Digital Planet back on the road. He said to me “we’ve tried everything else, so we need to give this a go”.  And I think that’s a key point. If we accept that we need as many people as possible online (and there’s a debate to be had about that, but, in social housing terms, I think it’s an unavoidable necessity), then I believe some pretty drastic action is needed. The people who remain resistent to joining the online world are those who would be characterised as “hardest to reach”. In this, as in other arenas, I maintain there are no “hard to reach” people, if you are finding anyone hard to reach you are using the wrong tactics.

If social landlords don’t get this right, I seriously contend that they are putting millions of pounds in rents not collected in jeopardy, and that is not to speak of the hardship that many tenants will suffer. And I think it needs a lot of painstaking, patient, non-directive, work of the kind we have been undertaking in Our Digital Planet and that done by the Digital Lounge at LS14 Trust. It entails working individually with each person to find the touchpoint in their lives where they can see that digital technologies can make a difference; and it involves working with them over a sustained period to support them in their use of new technologies, not believing that a one-0ff intervention will solve everything.

I go back as well, to my oft-cited contention that people need to enjoy what they are doing if it is to become integrated with their everyday lives. And it is important to think outside the box when seeking to convince people technology has a role to play. That is why I ran the Twicket initiative. A lot more people were interested in watching a village cricket match online than might have been interested in a blogpost on why technology is good for them.

These are the things I think social housing providers need to do, urgently, in order to make sure those of their tenants still not online can make the leap:

• provide somewhere they can go to for patient, sustained support to get online and carry on using new technologies. LS14 Trust (see video below) is a fantastic model for this kind of operation;
• Encourage tenants to become digital champions (example project here);
• Offer free wifi for tenants - here’s an example of a social landlord doing just that;
• Work with other public organisations and local charities to source and refurbish computers and make them available at low cost to tenants - here’s an example of service like this;
• Use social media to communicate with tenants;
• Assist tenants and community organisations to use new technologies and social media to gain wider audiences for their work (like this);
• Do interesting, innovative things with new technologies that attract attention (like Twicket);
• Invite Our Digital Planet to your neighbourhood to launch your strategy.

I recently met Nic and Jo from LS14 Trust who are doing just the kind of patient digital inclusion work necessary. And yet they are struggling for funding. Someone needs to step in and address this.

Disruption from the bottom up

We hear a lot about the internet causing “disruption”, i.e. radically shaking up and undermining established ways of doing things. I’ve been thinking about some real disruption being led from sources which might seem unlikely.

Now, I’m a great believer in being ambitious in the technological sphere. I think we have to think radically and be prepared to push at boundaries if we are going to achieve real change and demonstrable benefits. And I believe broadband is one of these spheres. In my opinion the economic development of the UK is being held up by a lack of ambition in how we take broadband forward. Yes, the Government, European Union and local authorities are investing in getting “superfast” broadband ever further into the countryside, but what they are investing in is constrained by the “art of the possible”; by which I mean it is being put into delivering more of the same, within the parameters of what certain big players are prepared to deliver, and what the market demand is perceived to be.

Broadband is one of those areas where I believe the Henry Ford doctrine of “don’t invest in faster horses” applies. The market demand for faster broadband speeds is limited by what people believe is possible and what they think they need now. It fails to take into account the pace of technological change, and the fact that more bandwidth hungry uses, applications and appliances are coming into use every day. I fear that the investment which is now being made in today’s broadband technology will have to be done all over again in a few years time when demand once again exceeds the available bandwidth of the solutions currently being installed. That is why I advocate that means should be found, wherever possible, to ensure that broadband installation is future-proofed; and that means installing fibre-to-the-premises, not halfway houses which introduce bottle necks into the system.

All this is vey frustrating. And yet, there are heroic souls out there who have bitten the bullet and are installing their own future-proof connections. Prime among these, in my opinion, are the farmers and villagers of the north Lancashire B4RN project, who are raising money from their own resources and digging hundreds of miles of trenches, to install fibre to the premises connections to properties in some of the north of England’s most remote areas. B4RN is already delivering 1Gbps (1000Mbps) symmetrical connections to its first customers, and those connections are capable of being turned up to even greater speeds should future needs demand.

The irony in this, for me, is that we now have people living in one of the country’s most remote areas who are experiencing the fastest internet speeds available. It will be some time before B4RN has a critical mass of customers connected to the network, but, I ask myself, how disruptive will 1Gbps rural communities be? We will shortly have digital farmers and digital villagers shrinking distances and finding new ways of operating that most of us have never thought about before. And what about the potential for geek vacations to the B&Bs and holiday cottages with the hyperfast connections? This is turning on its head the traditional notions of silicon valleys and technology roundabouts, where we think of the cities as the engines of technological innovation.

And so, the other day, I spotted this story about Hyperoptic offering Gigabit broadband to tower blocks in London. And this made me think. Social landlords are struggling at the moment to get more of their tenants online before the move to online management of benefits payments and the Government’s “Digital by Default” agenda further disadvantages them. What if we used approaches like that of Hyperoptic (allied with a bit of B4RN grit) to create Gigabit social housing tenants. OK, many tenants might be reluctant to go online; but what if they were offered the opportunity to become the fastest tenants in the world? Would they take that opportunity? And would it be truly transformational? I think its an experiment worth trying.

If B4RN can place the remotest villagers at the forefront of the technological revolution, why can’t social landlords do the same with some of their tenants? Lets have true disruption led from the bottom up.