London Regional ICT Champion

Last week we were at Dormers Wells, West London to help showcase a number of innovative ICT projects working towards e-inclusion to local BMER community groups and activists.

Local statutory services – health, welfare, education, training, public information – are increasingly being delivered over the Internet, and exclusion from this can be damaging to communities and individuals participation in local services.  E-inclusion is about bringing the benefit the Internet and related technology people who are disadvantaged due to education, age, gender, disabilities, ethnicity, and/or those living in remote regions.

Here’s a quick summary of the e-inclusion projects and initiatives showcased at Dormers Wells.

Virtual Ruksak:
Homeless people face many barriers to accessing online services, particularly the facility to safely and securely store personal documents and information – such as Passport, NI and NHS numbers needed to access welfare and employment services.

Virtual Ruksak - a project of St. Basil’s of Birmingham - won a competition sponsored by Microsoft to come up with innovative community IT projects. It builds on a number of Microsoft technologies – Windows Live ID for secure login to email and Skydrive for secure online document storage and sharing.  Virtual Ruksak is being developed by AWS and should go live within the next few months.

Ealing LINk:
Ealing LINk provides a web based channel for local residents and local community organisations with an interest in health and care services to interact with the local council and other statutory care services, such as the primary care trust.  Over 100 community languages are spoken in Ealing borough – many more more if tribal dialects are taken into account – and the site also comes with a handy translation tool based on Google Translate.   Google’s Translate tool currently supports around 34 languages, such as Chinese, Hindi, spanish and Russian, but there is currently no support for African languages.

Local Involvement Networks (LINk) were set up under the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 “to give communities a stronger voice in how their health and social care services are delivered.”  

Ealing Racial Equality Council:
Ricky Singh from EREC talked about local projects that are working to increase local access to ICT for ethnic minority communities – United Anglo Caribbean Society, EASE, and Barwaqa.

ECRC recognises need to support online services, research, trainers and expert know how.

Ricky also flagged up a recent  a recent study commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills which suggests “black people living in deprived areas have less access to home computers than their white neighbours”.

• However, ethnic minority families with a PC were more likely to use it for work and education, according to research carried out at the universities of Warwick and Leeds.
• White households, though, were more likely than others to surf the internet.
• Ethnic minorities, as a result, had less access to government online services and home shopping, the survey found.

The survey, of 1,585 households in deprived areas, found that 37% of white families owned computers, compared with 31% of black families.

• The figure among Asian families was 42%, but this group was less likely than others to use the internet.
• The survey also found that black families who owned computers often had older, cheaper models because of their lower income.
• Ethnic minority groups were much less likely than white people to use them to buy goods or services – 25% compared with 42%.
• Meanwhile, only 20% of Asian people and 26% black people questioned had used computers to access government services on line. The figure for white respondents was 34%.