Towards a Digital Strategy for Aotearoa
The Trustees of the Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa (DIAA) welcome the development of a new Digital Strategy for Aotearoa and call on the Government to now provide an implementation roadmap. There have been numerous digital strategies prepared by governments over that last 25 years. We look forward to this strategy being the one that makes a real difference in people’s lives by progressing into policy, funding and action.
We particularly welcome the recognition of digital inclusion as one of the three pillars of the Strategy, although this is the weakest area of the Discussion Document. Government must engage with the community sector, where leadership has been for most (if not all) digital inclusion initiatives during the last 25 years.
The Digital Strategy for Aotearoa must be just that, a strategy for Aotearoa, not just for government. It must recognise and help expand the many successful programmes funded by corporates and philanthropists and delivered by local community organisations.
We noted the absence of any success measures for digital inclusion; this highlights another omission from the Strategy – a research agenda.
The Strategy recognises three important areas of opportunity – inclusion, trust and growth. We have specific suggestions for strengthening the focus areas for these:
Trust: the goal should be reworded to focus on building New Zealander’s trust in the digital world (not selling products and services). We also suggest that the Strategy support the use of tools and programmes that are already addressing this goal and have been for more than a decade.
Inclusion: ‘confidence and resilience’ should be added to goal description and ‘lead’ dropped. We have some specific suggestions for improving digital inclusion:
- We must build the digital capacity of intermediaries, trusted people working in their local communities to deliver a wide range of social services, e.g. librarians, education providers, health services, housing providers, budget advisors
- Community technology centres must be better supported, providing safe places for communities to get ongoing digital support
- Central and local government must collaborate on a more sustaining basis; short-term project funding helps in changing practices and establishing new programmes, but there must be longer term plan to deal with the constant change that characterises digital technologies
- Government agencies are increasing relying on digitally confident citizens to engage with their websites and Apps; the agencies must be encouraged to budget for community education programmes to support the implementation of new digital engagement
Growth: We support the formulation of the goal but would like to see more focus on the transition to work and practical support for small businesses. Digital skills are a priority in securing a job yet there are few opportunities for people who are unemployed to develop these skills.
A full copy of our submission can be accessed here: Word Version and PDF Version