Anne-Rivers Forcke Digital Inclusion

Digital Inclusion and Education: A (Continuously) Learning Community

Whew. It's been nearly 5 weeks since I last wrote. Not because there's nothing new to say or nothing interesting happening in our little corner of the world, but because it's taken me about 4 weeks to dig out from underneath a single Google search on "Digital Inclusion." Who knew we know so much?

It seems that Digital Inclusion is happening everywhere; programs and initiatives are being run by national, regional and local governments; studies and policy analyses are being conducted by these same governments, along with universities and non-profit organization; heck, there are even for-profit companies that are conducting research and handing out grants to support DI initiatives. Apparently there's a whole lot of Digital Inclusion being proposed and/or practiced in the world and a sizeable chunk of information being produced as a result. But what's being done to turn all this information into usable knowledge and proven tools? More importantly, what CAN we do?

After several cups of coffee and few dozen smoothies with various pals - most of whom live lives outside the DI arena - a single term began to emerge at first as a "theme" then as an "idea." The term is "BOK." Yep - "BOK." We need a BOK. A collectively-assembled, reviewed and refined Body of Knowledge for the practice of Digital Inclusion. We could call it the W2i DI-BOK. Sound like another Wikipedia? Well, not really. And while I think our W2i BOK could and should contribute to Wikipedia's entry on Digital Inclusion/eInclusion, a BOK usually has a "toolkit" or "toolset" that can be used/customized by other practitioners. But BOKs don't happen overnight. They evolve based on the quantity and the quality of both contributed content as well as peer review and refinement of that content.

So, here's the call-to-action: Check out the blog entry that follows this one listing just a small selection of DI resources. If you find any of them useful and want to contribute to the resource list, just send me a note and I'll add your your suggested resources. Anytime you come across reports, reference materials, project descriptions, etc., that you think would help us build a richer, more meaningful resource databse, then please post them to the comments section below, and share it with our community. If there's enough interest in evolving this database of DI information into a real DI-BOK, then we'll figure a way to take it to the next level - maybe include it in our DI Roundtable activities.

No... it's not the kind of education and learning you usually associate with DI projects. But - in fact - this is exactly the kind of learning that lies at the heart of all of our DI projects: enabling communities to empower themselves and improve their outcomes. As DI practitioners and leaders of many of these community education projects, maybe it's a good idea to make sure that we're educating ourselves as well.

Keep smiling.

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