Digital Britain Unconferences Report released: Please sign up!
The Digital Britain Unconferences Report is now available. There’s an Executive Summary and the full Report itself, and you can read them both below. Most important of all, assuming that you agree with the content, I would encourage you to put your name to the document by adding a comment on the web site with your full name.
The whole process by which this Report came together is almost as amazing as the final document itself. February saw the release of the official interim Digital Britain report and the Digital Britain Summit, both of which seemed to many to leave a great deal of questions unanswered and not go nearly far enough. Comments were sought in advance of the release of the final official report later in the year.
Given virtually no time, a groundswell of popular activism around the country led groups and “Unconferences” to be set up to explore and collect comments to submit for consideration, using all the latest internet technologies and social media systems to organise, publicise, and allow live participation in meetings all over the country. From rooms full of people in some locations to a handful of participants in another, we all came together and thrashed out our ideas for how Britain should move forward into a digital future of universal high-speed symmetrical Internet access in which we can all participate. We all added our contributions to what we felt “Digital Britain” should really mean.
Then came the remarkable efforts of a small team of editors to collate the reports from the individual meetings and bring them together to create the final Report and Summary. Everyone involved is to be heartily congratulated for a tremendous job.
I was mildly (though happily) surprised that my personal account of the Cambridge meeting ended up as the Cambridge group’s submission to the report. Inevitably I didn’t cover every nuance of the discussion, but I hope other attendees feel that I presented it fairly and effectively. My personal thanks to Bill Thompson for conceiving the Cambridge meeting and helping to bring the entire effort together.
Now the Digital Britain Unconferences Report is out there – and is being considered by those preparing the official Government Digital Britain report for publication in just a short time – and I am very happy to put my name to it. I would like to thank everyone who helped put the Unconferences and the resulting Report together, for all their hard work assembled in a remarkably short time. I am very pleased to have been able to contribute a small part to the process.
I am more than happy to endorse the final Digital Britain Unconferences Report and the recommendations contained therein. I sincerely hope it positively impacts the Government’s plans and decisions in this vitally important aspect of the country’s future.