Cross Party Group on Digital Participation meeting 10.12.13 and a Happy New Year

I attended the Cross Party Group on Digital Participation meeting at Holyrood with Jenny Foreman on Tuesday 10^th December.  Sorry about the delay in posting but I was overcome by festive season sloth and I am only just recovering. The meeting was on the theme of Digital Participation in the workplace with two speakers and there was also a presentation on Digital Inclusion and Disabled consumers.

Digital Participation in the Workplace: the first speaker was Gordon Scobbie, the former Assistant Chief Constable of Tayside who spoke about the use of social media by police officers to support community policing and improve relations with the public. He emphasised that Twitter supports two way communication and that most of the activity and contributions to social media are of a positive nature. Interestingly the most trusted tweeters are celebrities not public servants.

Ian Watson from IRISS (Institute for Research and Innovation in the Social Sciences) spoke about the role of social media in workplace learning and how organisations should encourage the development of digital literacy across the entire workforce but that lack of basic skills is a barrier to progress. Another barrier identified is the suspicion among organisations that staff will misuse electronic media leading to the blocking of websites.

The ensuing discussion certainly got me thinking about the importance of information literacy methods in evaluating the quality of social media communication given the unstructured and positively anarchic nature of some of it. Social media communications should be evaluated just like any other information source using the critical strategies available.

A briefing paper was supplied by Ofcom on disabled consumers’ ownership of communication services. This has been found to be generally lower among people with a disability than among those without, especially for Internet access. Home PC ownership is lower among disabled than non-disabled people. Disabled people are also less likely to access the Internet outside the home or via mobile devices. People with multiple impairments are the most disadvantaged.

The meeting concluded with a discussion about developments in the US which could affect the accessibility of Kindles and other e-readers. Amazon and Sony have asked the US regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, whether they can opt out of new legislation requiring various communication devices to be made accessible. The Group hope to address this issue.

After the meeting Jenny and I had a chat with Ian Watson who has agreed to attend our next meeting on 14^th May.

John Crawford